2023-12-14 16:08:53
Time.news – If his father Alexandre had not providentially changed his surname, the Tour Bönickhausen would stand tall in Paris today, and for the French it would be a big problem to reconcile grandeur with a distinctly German word coming from the Rhineland; if his son Gustave had persisted in becoming a chemist, the Ville Lumière would be something else in terms of landscape and billions of postcards and photographs would not have reproduced an iron tower with an unmistakable and typical shape.
By luck or foresight, Alexandre Boenickhausen officially adopted the nickname Eiffel with whom he was called into Napoleon’s Armée (even if it was only made official in 1879) and his firstborn Gustave, born in Dijon on 15 December 1832, would become universally known for his “creature” originally destined to be dismantled after the universal exhibition of 1889.
The force of destiny decided otherwise at the crossroads of life. In fact, Eiffel was supposed to work as a chemist in his uncle Jean-Baptiste Mollerat’s paint factory, but a family argument with political tinges (Alexandre was obviously a Bonapartist, the other a republican) closed that path to him. He then came into contact with the engineer Charles Nepveu who built steam engines and railway equipment who appointed him chief designer in 1857, when he signed the first project: the Bordeaux Bridge in iron, 500 meters long. He was only 25 years old.
In 1864 it created its own company and in the “decade of glory” 1870-1880 the Compagnie Eiffel had a solid reputation in terms of quality and innovation, all over the world, also considering that the entire framework of containment of the Statue of Liberty in New Yorkdesigned to support the immense weight of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s otherwise unachievable sculpture, was his work, like bridges, viaducts and even Budapest Central Station.
The project
The Tour project dates back to June 1884, signed by Gustave Eiffel, Maurice Köchlin and Emil Nouguier (chosen from 107 who participated in the competition) and the construction site was opened on 28 January 1887. The beginning of the assembly of the pylons dates back to July, the first floor was completed on 1 April 1888, the second on 14 August, completion taking place on 31 March 1889. The works lasted 2 years, 2 months and 5 days and the inauguration took place on 21 March 1889, with the same Eiffel placing the French tricolor at the summit after having climbed the 1,710 steps that mark the 300 meters of height which until 1929 would make it the tallest building in the world.
Despite the inevitable criticism, success was immediate, with two million visitors during the Expo celebrating the first centenary of the French Revolution. It had already been foreseen that after 20 years at the latest the tower would be dismantled to recover 7,300 tons of iron, but then it proved to be very useful, if not indispensable, for radio transmissions and telecommunications. And it’s still there, and not just because of the advent of TV and the internet.
Among the triumphs, also the misadventure of the political-financial crash of the Panama Canal project, in which he had participated in 1887, which due to the controversies and legal actions, had landed him in the dock for defrauding the impoverished shareholders of their savings, resulting in a sentence in 1893 to two years in prison and a heavy fine. He was completely exonerated from these unfounded accusations in the same year by a ruling from the Supreme Court.
The Tour Eiffel will become an extraordinary and unrepeatable advertising tool thanks to the intuition of a Florentine transplanted to France, Fernando Jacopozzi, considered by all “the magician of lights“. It was he who remembered André Citroën, whom he had met by chance at the War Ministry in 1914, and who in 1922 made him the proposal to carry out a lighting project for the tower with 200,000 light bulbs100 km of electrical cables and a 1200 kw power plant powered by the waters of the Seine, to write the manufacturer’s name on all four sides with 30 meter letters and create the largest advertisement in the world, not just a luminous one.
Citroën, which had converted the war industry into the automotive industry by producing innovative cars, had seen Eiffel’s masterpiece being born day after day and had even thought of using it to launch a Citroën Radio which had been blocked in its infancy by the French Government for monopoly reasons of frequencies. He was a visionary projected towards the future, but he was frightened by the very high costs, only to join when Jacopozzi bluffed by saying that he would then make the same proposal to his competitor Louis Renault who instead, having consulted beforehand, had rejected it.
And so, despite the company’s heavy financial commitment to purchase the monocoque molding machinery from the United States, it secured the Tour’s exclusive contract for ten years. The news tells of an army teeming with people, from circus trapeze artists to the Navy soldiers, to mount the light bulbs. And on July 4, 1925 it was amazement and admiration, every night until 1934.
It will be those lights that indicate to Charles Lindbergh the destination of the first solo Atlantic flight and that will make the wheels of the Spirit of St. Louis rest on the runway of Le Bourget airport on the evening of May 21, 1927, at 10.22 pm, after 5,790 km, 33 hours, 30 minutes and 29 seconds of flight. Gustave Eiffel had died at the age of ninety-one from a stroke four years earlier, on 27 December 1923, in his Parisian house at 1 rue Rabelais, where he had retired, living his last days next to his beloved daughter Claire. His tower was already synonymous with Paris and France for everyone.
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