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Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (15 December 1832-27 December 1923) was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, he made his name with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit Viaduct. He is best known for the 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. After his retirement from engineering, Eiffel focused on research into meteorology and aerodynamics, making significant contributions in both fields.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was born in Dijon, in the Côte-d'Or, the first child of Catherine-Mélanie and Alexandre Bonickhausen dit Eiffel. He was a descendant of Jean-René Bönickhausen, who had emigrated from the German town of Marmagen and settled in Paris at the beginning of the 18th century. The family adopted the name Eiffel as a reference to the Eifel mountains in the region from which they had come. Although the family always used the name Eiffel, Gustave's name was registered at birth as Bonickhausen dit Eiffel, and was not formally changed to Eiffel until 1880.
Eiffel went on to attend the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris, to prepare for the difficult entrance exams set by engineering colleges in France, and qualified for entry to two of the most prestigious schools -École polytechnique and École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures- and ultimately entered the latter. During his second year he chose to specialize in chemistry, and graduated ranking at 13th place out of 80 candidates in 1855. This was the year that Paris hosted a World's Fair, and Eiffel's mother bought him a season ticket.
After graduation, Eiffel had hoped to find work in his uncle's workshop in Dijon, but a family dispute made this impossible. After a few months working as an unpaid assistant to his brother-in-law, who managed a foundry, Eiffel approached the railway engineer Charles Nepveu, who gave Eiffel his first paid job as his private secretary.
At the end of 1866, Eiffel managed to borrow enough cash to set up his own workshops at 48 Rue Fouquet in Levallois-Perret. His first important commission was for two viaducts for the railway line between Lyon and Bordeaux.
The Exposition Universelle in 1878 firmly established his reputation as one of the leading engineers of the time. As well as exhibiting models and drawings of work undertaken by the company, Eiffel was also responsible for the construction of several of the exhibition buildings. One of these, a pavilion for the Paris Gas Company, was Eiffel's first collaboration with Stephen Sauvestre, who was later to become the head of the company's architectural office.
In 1879, the partnership with Seyrig was dissolved, and the company was renamed the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel.
The design of the Eiffel Tower was originated by Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, who had discussed ideas for a centrepiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. In May 1884, Koechlin, working at his home, made an outline drawing of their scheme, described by him as a great pylon, consisting of four lattice girders standing apart at the base and coming together at the top, joined together by metal trusses at regular intervals.
Initially Eiffel showed little enthusiasm, although he did sanction further study of the project, and the two engineers then asked Stephen Sauvestre to add architectural embellishments. Sauvestre added the decorative arches to the base, a glass pavilion to the first level and the cupola at the top. The enhanced idea gained Eiffel's support for the project, and he bought the rights to the patent on the design which Koechlin, Nougier and Sauvestre had taken out. The design was exhibited at the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in the autumn of 1884, and on 30 March 1885, Eiffel read a paper on the project to the Société des Ingénieurs Civils.
In 1887, Eiffel became involved with the French effort to construct a canal across the Panama Isthmus. The French Panama Canal Company, headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, had been attempting to build a sea-level canal, but came to the realization that this was impractical. The plan was changed to one using locks, which Eiffel was contracted to design and build. The locks were on a large scale, most having a change of level of 11 m. 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. Eiffel's reputation was badly damaged when he was implicated in the financial and political scandal which followed.
After his retirement from the Compagnie des Etablissements Eiffel, Eiffel went on to do important work in meteorology and aerodynamics. 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.
His first aerodynamic experiments, investigating the air resistance of surfaces, were carried out by dropping the surface to be investigated together with a measuring apparatus down a vertical cable stretched between the second level of the Eiffel Tower and the ground. Using this Eiffel definitely established that the air resistance of a body was very closely related to the square of the airspeed. He 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.
The wind tunnel was used to investigate the characteristics of the airfoil sections used by the early pioneers of aviation such as the Wright Brothers, Gabriel Voisin and Louis Blériot. 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. Following complaints about noise from people living nearby, he moved his experiments to a new establishment at Auteuil in 1912. Here, it was possible to build a larger wind tunnel, and Eiffel began to make tests using scale models of aircraft designs.
Eiffel died on 27 December 1923, while listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony andante, in his mansion on Rue Rabelais in Paris. He was buried in the family tomb in Levallois-Perret Cemetery.
More information: Gustave Eiffel
des quatre areêtes du monument,
telles que le calcul les a fournies,
donneront une grand impression de force et de beauté.
Well, I think the curves
of the four pillars of the monument,
as the calculations have provided them,
give it a great sense of force and beauty.
Gustave Eiffel
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