gustave eiffel, BORN 1832
creator of the eiffel tower
Gustave Eiffel was an extraordinarily gifted French structural and civil engineer. He is best known as the designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which stands at 1083 feet in height. A triumph of structural engineering, its meticulous design specified the exact positions of its 2,500,000 rivets, each of which required a team of four workmen to insert. The material economy of the tower is such that if melted down the tower’s metal would fill its base to depth of only two inches. Originally intended to be a temporary feature of the 1889 Paris Exposition, it became, with Notre Dame, one of the two great symbols of Paris. Eiffel’s other engineering accomplishments included several pioneering bridges, the complex internal structure of New York’s Statue of Liberty, and the locks for the Panama Canal. The latter project ended in acrimonious legal disputes over its finances; that distressing experience caused Eiffel to disctontinue his engineering practice. He turned to scientific research on aerodynamics and radio, some of which was conducted from a laboratory high in the Eiffel Tower.