The “300 Meter Tower,” as it was originally called, or the “Iron Lady,” as it is also known, was designed by engineers Maurice Koechin and Ëmile Nouguier, and architect Stephen Sauvestre was responsible for its appearance. definitive.
It was built by the French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel and a team of specialists for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.
It all started when the engineer Eiffel took the plans and documentation for his tower to Spain, specifically to the city of Barcelona, where the 1888 Universal Exhibition would be held.
The Catalan authorities listened carefully to the French engineer when he presented the project to them and, after several consultations with their specialists, they rejected it because it was very expensive; Furthermore, it broke the harmony with the other facilities at the fairgrounds.
Eiffel was not discouraged. He returned to Paris and with the architect Sauvestre worked to improve the aesthetics of the tower. The first plan was made in June 1884, which gained the financial support of the Minister of Commerce and Industry.
DETAILS OF THE WORK
On January 8, 1887, the agreement for the construction of the tower was signed and work began on the 28th of the same month. It was built in two years, two months and five days; It cost almost 8 million francs of the time and 250 workers and 50 engineers participated.
The work is a particulate iron structure and was carried out in three phases once the foundations were built: the construction of the first floor was completed on August 14, 1888 and, finally, the final assembly of the upper part on March 31, 1889 .
The structure is made up of 18,038 metal parts and 2,500,000 rivets, which were equivalent to 7,300 tons of iron at that time, covered by 60 tons of paint.
Gustave Eiffel climbed 1,710 steps of the tower to place the French flag at the top. At that time the tower was 312 meters high.
It measures 300 meters but was later extended by a radio antenna to 324 meters. It weighs 10,000 tons. It was the tallest structure in the world for 41 years. In 1930, the Chrysler Building in New York, at 319 meters, took the title from him. It won because of the pyramidal spire that crowns its top, although the tower has 1,665 steps (89 more than the building in New York).
It was conceived as a temporary shell to be dismantled after 20 years, but in 1900 the French Navy added a radio antenna, making it, in effect, an untouchable military installation.
In the midst of the First World War, this military radio station intercepted a coded message from Berlin, addressed to agent H21, who responded to the name of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, (Mata Hari), which allowed her to be arrested and convicted as a spy. She was shot on October 15, 1917.
It is also said that Viktor Lusting, a clever con man posing as a government official, sold the tower twice in 1925 to scrap metal dealers, claiming that the City Council could not maintain the structure.
On June 28, 1940, France was occupied by the Nazis and Hitler was there. He visited Paris and decided to visit the famous tower, the pride of the French people, but he could not see the city from above because the resistance fighters had cut the elevator cables.
In 1944 he remembered the tower and ordered the military governor of Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, to demolish it, but for some unknown reason he did not carry out the order.
CUBA HAD ITS REPLICA OF THE EIFFEL TOWER
More than 17 replicas have been made around the world and more than 30 inspired by it. And we Cubans also had a wooden one in the city of Santa Clara.
According to the review in the Vanguardia newspaper, on February 28, 1895, electric lighting would be inaugurated in the city of Santa Clara, donated by the Cuban patriot Marta Abreu, who on that day would be offered a tribute of gratitude that the Spanish authorities suspended. :
«But, the most transcendental part of the decoration, that February 28, was the construction of a wooden replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, in the middle of the park, on the Obelisk of the priests Juan de Conyedo and Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza.
«According to the researcher Juan Manuel Fernández Triana in the book The lady all heart “The Tower was designed by the Santa Clara engineer Ramón Cornelio Berenguer, who drew the plan with plaster, on a full scale, on the pavement of the atrium of the La Caridad theater on the side of Santa Ana Street (current Lorda).” The colossus It was about 28 meters high and seven meters wide as a base, and was decorated by the ladies with 25,000 paper flowers in the center of which light bulbs shone.
HOW THE TOWER IS MAINTAINED
To prevent corrosion of the French “iron lady”, five tons of paint are used to cover it every five years. Visitors choose the color by voting on the first floor, which is why the tower has changed color several times.
As evening falls, from the bases on the sides of the tower, 5,000 light bulbs begin to light up until completing the 20,000 that illuminate it until one in the morning. An unforgettable and beautiful show.
It is the fourth most visited monument in the world with an average of six million visitors annually.
Long before its construction was completed, comments and criticisms of the enormous steel mass began:
«Published in the newspaper Le Temps, this “Protest against Mr. Eiffel’s Tower” is addressed to Mr. Alphand, construction director of the Exhibition. Signed by some great names in the world of letters and arts: Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Victorien Sardou, Charles Garnier and others whom posterity has favored less.
«Other pamphleteers go further with this violent diatribe and made such insults as: “tragic street lamp” (Léon Bloy); “watchtower skeleton” (Paul Verlaine); “iron mast with hard rigs, unfinished, confused, deformed” (François Coppée); “tall, skinny pyramid of iron ladders, graceless giant skeleton, whose base seems made to carry a formidable monument of Cyclops, abortion of a ridiculous and thin profile of a factory chimney” (Maupassant); “a factory tube under construction, a framework waiting to be covered by stones or bricks, this infundibuli-like wire mesh, this suppository riddled with holes” (Joris-Karl Huysmans).
But nothing could prevent it from becoming the best-known symbol of France and one of the most popular in the world.
Sources:
Very Interesting Magazine, 10 curiosities about the Eiffel Tower
Birth and construction of the Eiffel Tower
https://www.toureiffel.paris/es/the-monument/history
The Eiffel Tower of Santa Clara, Laura Rodriguez Fuentes and Carlos Alejandro Rodríguez Martínez, August 5, 2015
http://www.vanguardia.cu/cultura/4436-la-torre-eiffel-de-santa-clara
-curiosities-and-history-most-famous-monument-paris_10244/4
