1889

Eiffel Tower

Émile Nouguier (1840–1898), Maurice Koechlin (1856–1946)

If you have ever gotten close to the Eiffel Tower, there is no denying that it is an engineered structure. It is immense, it is made of thousands of pieces of metal, and it is intricate. There are many places in the tower where the complexity is impressive. And it has stood the test of time at well over 100 years old, opening in 1889.

The size is surprising, especially given the age. With a roof height right at 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet), it was the tallest object in the world for four decades until it was surpassed by the Chrysler Building and then the Empire State Building in New York shortly after. The Millau Viaduct is the only thing surpassing it in France today.

The fact that something this intricate could be conceived, designed, engineered, fabricated, and erected in that era is also impressive. You can get a sense of this if you look at high-definition images of the tower or visit it in person. Look at the four columns that stretch from the first floor (187 feet or 57 meters off the ground) to the second floor (377 feet or 115 meters off the ground). This is the conceptually simplest part of the tower, yet the complexity is impressive.

Those four columns are approximately 58 meters (190 feet) tall. Over that distance they gently curve and gently taper. For each column there are four thick steel beams riveted together from plates, and then lattice girders that turn each column into its own lattice girder. All of that iron was prefabricated in a factory, brought to the site on horse-drawn wagons, and then assembled with rivets, and it all needed to fit perfectly. The structural engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, made thousands of precise drawings to tell the factory what to manufacture and the construction workers what to assemble.

It is said that the Eiffel Tower contains 18,035 pieces of metal and 2.5 million rivets. When you consider that an engineer placed each piece of metal and each rivet on a drawing, and those drawings were then manifested in reality with tenth of a millimeter precision, you get a sense of the engineering achievement.

SEE ALSO Washington Monument (1885), Statue of Liberty (1886), Woolworth Building (1913), Empire State Building (1931), Millau Viaduct (2004).

The Eiffel Tower is an example of extremely precise engineering that has resulted in monuments that have stood the test of time.