38 Facts About Gustave Eiffel

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer.

Gustave Eiffel is best known for the world-famous Eiffel Tower, designed by his company and built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and his contribution to building the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was born in France, in the Cote-d'Or, the first child of Catherine-Melanie and Alexandre Bonickhausen dit Eiffel.

Gustave Eiffel was a descendant of Marguerite Frederique and Jean-Rene Bonickhausen and who had emigrated from the German town of Marmagen and settled in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century.

The business was successful enough for Catherine Gustave Eiffel to sell it in 1843 and retire on the proceeds.

Gustave Eiffel was not a studious child, and thought his classes at the Lycee Royal in Dijon boring and a waste of time, although in his last two years, influenced by his teachers for history and literature, he began to study seriously, and he gained his baccalaureats in humanities and science.

Gustave Eiffel was initially given the responsibility of assembling the metalwork and eventually took over the management of the entire project from Nepveu, who resigned in March 1860.

Gustave Eiffel's work had gained the attention of several people who were later to give him work, including Stanislas de la Roche Toulay, who had prepared the design for the metalwork of the Bordeaux bridge, Jean Baptiste Krantz and Wilhelm Nordling.

Gustave Eiffel was already working independently on the construction of two railway stations, at Toulouse and Agen, and in 1866 he was given a contract to oversee the construction of 33 locomotives for the Egyptian government, a profitable but undemanding job in the course of which he visited Egypt, where he visited the Suez Canal which was being constructed by Ferdinand de Lesseps.

Gustave Eiffel's proposal was for a bridge whose deck was supported by five iron piers, with the abutments of the pair on the river bank bearing a central supporting arch.

In 1881 Gustave Eiffel was contacted by Auguste Bartholdi who was in need of an engineer to help him to realise the Statue of Liberty.

Gustave Eiffel was selected because of his experience with wind stresses.

Gustave Eiffel devised a structure consisting of a four legged pylon to support the copper sheeting which made up the body of the statue.

In 1886 Gustave Eiffel designed the dome for the Astronomical Observatory in Nice.

The design of the Gustave Eiffel Tower was originated by Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, who had discussed ideas for a centrepiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle.

The design was exhibited at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in the autumn of 1884, and on 30 March 1885 Gustave Eiffel read a paper on the project to the Societe des Ingenieurs Civils.

Gustave Eiffel was to receive all income from the commercial exploitation during the exhibition and for the following twenty years.

Gustave Eiffel later established a separate company to manage the tower.

Gustave Eiffel had calculated that this would be satisfactory until they approached halfway to the first level: accordingly work was stopped for the purpose of erecting a wooden supporting scaffold.

The main structural work was completed at the end of March 1889 and, on 31 March, Gustave Eiffel celebrated by leading a group of government officials, accompanied by representatives of the press, to the top of the tower.

Since the lifts were not yet in operation, the ascent was made by foot, and took over an hour, Gustave Eiffel frequently stopping to make explanations of various features.

At 2.35 Gustave Eiffel hoisted a large tricolour, to the accompaniment of a 25-gun salute fired from the lower level.

In 1887, Gustave Eiffel became involved with the French effort to construct a canal across the Panama Isthmus.

The plan was changed to one using locks, which Gustave Eiffel was contracted to design and build.

Gustave Eiffel had been working on the project for little more than a year when the company suspended payments of interest on 14 December 1888, and shortly afterwards was put into liquidation.

Gustave Eiffel's reputation was badly damaged when he was implicated in the financial and political scandal which followed.

On 9 February 1893 Gustave Eiffel was found guilty on the charge of misuse of funds, and was fined 20,000 francs and sentenced to two years in prison, although he was acquitted on appeal.

Gustave Eiffel's interest in these areas was a consequence of the problems he had encountered with the effects of wind forces on the structures he had built.

Gustave Eiffel then built a laboratory on the Champ de Mars at the foot of the tower in 1905, building his first wind tunnel there in 1909.

Gustave Eiffel established that the lift produced by an airfoil was the result of a reduction of air pressure above the wing rather than an increase of pressure acting on the under surface.

In 1913 Eiffel was awarded the Samuel P Langley Medal for Aerodromics by the Smithsonian Institution.

Gustave Eiffel's researches, published in 1907 and 1911, on the resistance of the air in connection with aviation, are especially valuable.

Gustave Eiffel had meteorological measuring equipment placed on the tower in 1889, and built a weather station at his house in Sevres.

Gustave Eiffel died on 27 December 1923, while listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony andante, in his mansion on Rue Rabelais in Paris.

Gustave Eiffel was buried in the family tomb in Levallois-Perret Cemetery.

Gustave Eiffel's career was a result of the Industrial Revolution.

The growth of the railway network had an immense effect on people's lives, but although the enormous number of bridges and other work undertaken by Gustave Eiffel were an important part of this, the two works that did most to make him famous are the Statue of Liberty and the Gustave Eiffel Tower, both projects of immense symbolic importance and today internationally recognized landmarks.

Actions to protect the bridge were taken as early as 2002 by the "Association of the Descendants of Gustave Eiffel", joined from 2005 onwards by the Association "Sauvons la Passerelle Eiffel".