
Origins and Construction of the Eiffel Tower
It was for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the date that marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, that a great competition was launched in 1886.
The first digging work started on the 26th January 1887. On the 31st March 1889, the Tower had been finished in record time – 2 years, 2 months and 5 days – and was established as a veritable technical feat.
Key figures
Design18,038 metallic parts 5,300 workshop designs 50 engineers and designersConstruction150 workers in the Levallois-Perret factory Between 150 and 300 workers on the construction site 2,500,000 rivets 7,300 tonnes of iron 60 tonnes of paint 5 liftsDuration2 years, 2 months and 5 days of construction
The wager was to “study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ-de-Mars with a square base, 125 metres across and 300 metres tall”. Selected from among 107 projects, it was that of Gustave Eiffel, an entrepreneur, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, both engineers, and Stephen Sauvestre, an architect, that was accepted.
Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, the two chief engineers in Eiffel’s company, had the idea for a very tall tower in June 1884. It was to be designed like a large pylon with four columns of lattice work girders, separated at the base and coming together at the top, and joined to each other by more metal girders at regular intervals.
The tower project was a bold extension of this principle up to a height of 300 metres – equivalent to the symbolic figure of 1000 feet. On September 18 1884 Eiffel registered a patent “for a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres”.
In order to make the project more acceptable to public opinion, Nouguier and Koechlin commissioned the architect Stephen Sauvestre to work on the project’s appearance.
source