Culture Project 5

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel

: Magician of Iron

Gustave was born December 15, 1832, in Dijon, in the Côte-d'Or department of France. He was the first child of Alexandra and Catherine Eiffel. Eiffel was not a studious child, and thought his classes at the Lycée Royal in Dijon boring and a waste of time, although in his last two years, influenced by his teachers for history and literature, he began to study seriously, so that he managed to gain his baccalauréats in humanities and science. An important part in his education was played by his uncle, Jean-Baptiste Mollerat, who had invented a process for distilling vinegar and had a large chemical works near Dijon, and one of his uncle's friends, the chemist Michel Perret. Both men spent a lot of time with the young Eiffel, teaching him about everything from chemistry and mining to theology and philosophy.

Eiffel went on to attend the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris, in order to prepare for the difficult entrance exams set by the most important engineering colleges in France. During his second year he chose to specialise in chemistry, and graduated 13th of the 80 candidates in 1855. This was the year that Paris hosted the first World's Fair, and Eiffel was bought a season ticket by his mother.

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. However, shortly afterwards Nepveu's company went bankrupt, but Nepveu found Eiffel a job with the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l'Ouest, for whom Eiffel produced his first bridge design, a 22 m (72 ft) sheet iron bridge for the Saint Germaine railway. Some of Nepveu's businesses were then acquired by the Compagnie Belge de Matériels de Chemin de Fer: Nepvau was appointed the managing director of the two factories in Paris, and offered Eiffel a job as head of the research department. In 1857 Nepveu negociated a contract to build a railway bridge over the river Garrone at Bordeaux, connecting the Paris-Bordeax line to the lines running to Sète and Bayonne, which involved the construction of a 500 m (1,600 ft) iron girder bridge supported by six pairs of masonry piers on the river bed. These were constructed with the aid of compressed air caissons and hydraulic rams, both innovative techniques in French engineering of the time. Eiffel was initially given the responsibility of assembling the metalwork and eventually took over the management of the entire project from Nepvau, who resigned in March 1860. Following the completion of the project on schedule Eiffel was appointed as the principal engineer of the Compagnie Belge. His work had also gained the attention of several people who were later to give him work, including Stanslas de la Roche Toulay, who had prepared the design for the metalwork of the Bordeax bridge, Jean Baptiste Krantz and Wilhelm Nordling. Further promotion within the company followed, but the business began to decline, and in 1865 Eiffel, seeing no future there, resigned and set up as an independant consulting engineer. He was already working independantly on the construction of two railway stations, at Toulouse and Agen, and in 1866 he was given a contract to oversee the construction of 33 locomotives for the Egypttian government, a profitable but undemanding job in the course of which he visited Egypt, where he visited the Suez Canal which was being constructed by Ferdinand de Lesseps. At the same time he was employed by Jean-Baptiste Kranz to assist him in the design of the exhibition hall for the Exposition Universelle which was to be held in 1867. Eiffel's principal job was to draw up the arch girders of the Galerie des Machines. In order to carry out this work, Eiffel and Henri Treca, the director of the Conservertoire des Arts et Metiers, conducted valuable research on the structural properties of cast iron, definitively establishing the modulus of elasticity applicable to compound castings.

His first important commission was for two viaducts for the railway line between Lyons and Bordeaux, and the company also began to undertake work in other countries, including the church of San Marcos in Arica, Chile, which was an all-metal prefabricated building, manufactured in France and shipped to South America in pieces to be assembled on site. In 1875 Eiffel et Cie were given two important contracts, one for a new terminus for the line from Vienna at Budapest and the other for a bridge over the river Douro in Portugal. The station in Budapest was an innovative design. The usual pattern for building a railway terminus was to conceal the metal structure behind an elaborate façade: Eiffel's design for Budapest used the metal structure as the centrepiece of the building, flanked on either side by conventional stone and brick-clad structures housing administrative offices.

What was it like to live in France when your person did? What was going on socially, culturally, politically, etc.? How was your person affected by their time period and how did they in turn affect everyone else?

Name a Few ways that your person changed history. How did his or her thoughts and actions affect the way other people thought fifty or one hundred years years later?

The structures that Eiffel designed had great social, economical, and political impacts on the world. These structures included bridges, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty.
The Eiffel Tower had a huge impact on France. The tower was the focal point of the International Exposition in 1889 and drew millions of people to Paris. Nearly two million people visited the Eiffel Tower in 1889 alone. The tower quickly became a tourist attraction and brought large amounts of money into France's economy.

 

French Paragraph

Je m'appelle Alexander Gustave Eiffel. Mon anniversaire est Decembre 15, 1832. Je suis francais.  Je suis age de 91 ans. J'ai fait le Eiffel Tower. J'ai aussi fait Statue of Liberty. J'aime engineering et chemistry.