Gustave Eiffel

From Dijon to a business in iron

He was born in Dijon in 1832 as Alexandre Gustave Bonickhausen. The family came from the Eifel, a hilly region of western Germany, and had long used 'Eiffel' as an easier working name; he made it official in 1880. He graduated in 1855 from the École centrale des arts et manufactures, the Paris engineering school, in the year of the city's first Exposition Universelle, and after early work on a railway bridge at Bordeaux set up his own metal-construction company in 1864.

What the company sold was arithmetic: wrought-iron structures whose parts were calculated, made in the workshops, and bolted or riveted together on site. The Maria Pia bridge over the river Douro at Porto followed in 1876, the Western Railway Station in Budapest in 1877, the Garabit Viaduct across a gorge in the Cantal, a mountainous area of south-central France, in 1884, and the dome of the Nice Observatory. His firm put up structures in more than forty countries.

The best-known of them is invisible. When the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi's copper figure of Liberty Enlightening the World was being assembled in Paris between 1881 and 1884 as France's gift to the United States, it was Eiffel who designed the iron skeleton inside it, the framework on which the hammered copper skin hangs. The statue was formally presented to the American ambassador in Paris on 4 July 1884, shipped in pieces, and unveiled in New York harbour on 28 October 1886.

1887–1889: the tower, and the letter against it

The tower was not Eiffel's drawing. Two engineers in his company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, worked out the shape of a 300-metre pylon; the architect Stephen Sauvestre gave it the arches and the decorated first platform. Eiffel bought the rights, registered a patent on 18 September 1884 for 'a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres', and won the competition for the 1889 Exposition Universelle against 106 other entries.

Work began on 26 January 1887. Three weeks later, on 14 February, the newspaper Le Temps published a protest signed by some of the best-known artists in France — the composer Charles Gounod, the novelist Guy de Maupassant, the writer Alexandre Dumas the younger, the painters William Bouguereau and Ernest Meissonier, the playwright Victorien Sardou, and Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opéra. They called the half-built tower a 'high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders' and a 'half-built factory pipe', and they lost. The first floor was finished on 1 April 1888, the second on 14 August 1888, and the whole tower on 31 March 1889: two years, two months and five days.

This high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders … a half-built factory pipe.

Two million people went up it during the fair. Eiffel had the names of seventy-two French scientists and engineers engraved around the tower's four sides, and in March 2025 a project began to add seventy-two women scientists, with the list published in January 2026.

Panama

In 1887, the year construction started on the Champ de Mars, Eiffel agreed to build the locks for the Panama Canal. The canal was a French project run by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the promoter who had built the Suez Canal, and it failed: the company was liquidated in 1889, in the same year the tower opened. Eiffel was indicted for fraud alongside de Lesseps and sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 2,000 francs. The Cour de cassation, France's highest court, overturned the verdict on appeal.

The office at the top, and thirty years of experiments

At the very top of the tower, just under the spire, Eiffel kept about a hundred square metres of floor for himself: a sitting room with a table, a sofa, a piano and three small desks, a kitchen, a bathroom with a basin and a separate lavatory. There was no bedroom, and by the tower's own account he presumably never slept there. It was a laboratory and a room for receiving people. On 10 September 1889 the American inventor Thomas Edison came up to meet him and brought a gift — the newest model of the phonograph, the Class M. Eiffel took to recording voices on wax cylinders; several survive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the national library, and are the oldest sound recordings made in France. A reconstruction of the office, with wax figures of Eiffel, his daughter Claire and Edison, can be seen from outside on the top floor today; the room itself is too small to let visitors in.

The science was serious. He installed a meteorological laboratory on the third floor as soon as the tower opened, with barometers, anemometers and lightning conductors, and used the height for observations no ground-level laboratory could make. He ran gravity experiments from the tower between 1903 and 1905, built a wind tunnel at its base, and made some five thousand test runs in it between August 1909 and December 1911, the work that made him a pioneer of aerodynamics. In 1912 he designed a larger wind tunnel at 67 rue Boileau in Auteuil, in the 16th arrondissement, where he studied wing and propeller profiles for the new aircraft industry. It is a listed historic monument and is still in use, now run as a subsidiary of the French building-science centre CSTB.

Radio saved the tower. The French wireless pioneer Eugène Ducretet sent the first wireless telegraph signals from it to the Panthéon — the domed monument where France buries its honoured dead, four kilometres away — on 5 November 1898, and Captain Gustave Ferrié of the French army pushed the range to 400 kilometres. Eiffel's twenty-year concession from the City of Paris was due to expire in 1909, and the tower could have come down; its military value as an aerial is what got the concession renewed on 1 January 1910. Civilian broadcasting began from it in 1921 and television in 1935.

Eiffel married Marguerite Gaudelet in 1862; they had five children between 1863 and 1873, and she died in 1877 at the age of 32. He did not remarry, and was closest to his eldest daughter Claire. He died at his Paris mansion on 27 December 1923, aged 91, and is buried in the cemetery at Levallois-Perret, the town north-west of Paris where his workshops had stood.