CHAPTER 3

Mr. Eiffel’s Tower

On May 2, 1886, the French government announced a contest that excited Gustave because of what he might create out of iron.

Contestants were asked to submit a design for a tower that would be the entrance to the 1889 fair. The tower had to be three hundred meters high, which is more than nine hundred feet. That would make it the tallest structure in the world. A structure so high would show what a great country France had become in the last one hundred years. In addition, the tower must be a temporary structure that was easy to put up and take down.

Gustave wanted to enter the contest—and win!

For a long time he had been thinking about an eight-sided wooden tower in New York City. It was called the Latting Observatory. The 315-foot wooden building had been built in 1853 (it burned down three years later). It had three levels and was larger at the bottom, tapering to a point at the top. Iron braces held all the wood in place.

The Latting Observatory

Maurice Koechlin

The wooden Latting Observatory struck Gustave as plain and unexciting. But something similar using iron would be amazing. In fact, even before the fair contest was announced, Gustave had asked Maurice Koechlin, an engineer in his drawing department, and Émile Nouguier, a structural engineer, to draw plans for such a tower.

Émile Nouguier

Because of the contest, Gustave worked with his top employees, redesigning the earlier drawings. The tower would be made of metal. Thousands of pieces of wrought iron would be used to create a perfect design. He would need rivets to hold them together. Building the tower would be like working on a huge, well-planned, perfectly designed LEGO creation.

But Gustave wanted his tower to be more than a perfectly engineered structure. His new tower would be a work of art. A modern masterpiece.

Stephen Sauvestre was Eiffel’s top architect. He was also a brilliant artist. He understood Gustave’s dream. Working together, the two men would create a building to be admired throughout time. Sauvestre imagined a graceful tower filled with beautiful details. His design featured swooping arches. Carved stonework would decorate the tower’s legs. He suggested artistic trimmings and elegant decorations.

Stephen Sauvestre

The judges agreed that the plan was exactly what they were looking for. Eiffel won the contest. On January 8, 1887, they signed a contract. Everyone in Gustave’s company was excited.

Eiffel and his team of engineers had less than two and a half years to build the tower. They weren’t worried. They had built many bridges from wrought iron. They knew how to create structures quickly and safely, ones that could withstand violent storms and allow for huge crowds.

Twenty years earlier, Eiffel had set up workshops in Levallois-Perret, a northwest suburb of Paris. It was in those buildings that most of the work on the Eiffel Tower took place.

Each piece of iron was cut, measured, numbered, and prepared to connect to the next piece. Rivet holes were drilled in each piece and precisely measured so that they would line up perfectly. Temporary pegs were used to connect the pieces. Later, when all the pieces were connected at the fairground by the river, the pegs would be replaced by strong, permanent bolts.

As the iron pieces were being cut and fitted together in the workshop, workmen were digging holes in the soil on the Champ de Mars, a large grassy park near the Seine River.

The tower’s four iron legs had to be planted deep in the ground. They also had to angle inward to the first platform. The sloping legs would hold the tower steady, even in the strongest winds.

However, the workmen soon realized that the clay soil nearest the river created a problem. It was too wet. The two legs by the river might sink. Eiffel needed to find a way to make sure all four legs stood at the same level. He decided to dig the two holes in damp soil sixteen feet deeper than the other two and pour in compressed air and extra concrete. Now the four holes were all equally deep. They were filled with cement, limestone blocks, and gravel. Iron anchors and bolts were inserted, and each iron leg was attached to a concrete column.

When the foundation was complete, horse-drawn carts delivered girders, trusses, and other wrought-iron pieces from the workshops to the building site.

Base of a leg

People in the neighborhood had seen the four holes being dug. Now they could watch the actual tower rise. Small pieces of metal were riveted together into four perfectly placed iron legs. Men worked on wooden scaffolds that were made taller as the building grew.

When the legs were in place, they formed a 410-foot square. After that, it was time to build the first floor. This would be the tower’s base. It would look like a table with four legs. Once the base was in place, workers could build upward from floor to floor.

Small creeper cranes pulled trolleys filled with materials up tracks inside the four slanted legs. The tracks would later be used to move elevators full of visitors upward.

Soon, horizontal wrought-iron trusses were in place on top of the legs, joining them together. Column and platform pieces were hoisted and joined.

Workers spent longer and longer hours on the tower in order to meet the deadline. Canteens were installed on higher floors so they wouldn’t have to waste time climbing up and down the steps to eat their meals.

By April 1, 1888, the first floor was complete. Four and a half months later, the second floor was finished, and seven and a half months after that, on March 31, 1889, the final piece of the tower was riveted into place. Gustave and his workers had used over eighteen thousand pieces of iron and two and a half million rivets to hold everything together.

The tower was in place. It had taken two years, two months, and five days to construct the tallest structure in the world. Newspaper reporters were amazed at how fast it had gone up. They admired Gustave’s precise planning and his new, faster machines, like the hydraulic jacks and creeper cranes that had helped speed up construction.

It was dangerous work to build so high a structure. Yet not a single person died on the job. Sadly one worker climbed the tower at night when it was closed. He was showing off for his girlfriend, and he fell to his death.