The Eiffel Tower History

The huge puddle iron construction of exposed fretwork supports - Eiffel Tower was set up for the Paris Exposition in 1889. The King Edward VII of England (The Prince of Wales) officiated at the ceremonial opening.

An immoderate creation was finally selected among over 700 proposals handed in a design contest. It was the achievement of from Alexandre Gustave Eiffel , a French structural designer with the help of two more engineers who are Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, and architect Stephen Sauvestre.

Nevertheless, the greate tower also raised many negative responses, there was a petition of more than 300 names, which consist of renowned names such as: Guy de Maupassant, Charles Garnier who was the Opéra Garnier architect), Émile Zola and Alexandre Dumas. It was submitted to the government of Paris, complaining about this building. They claimed that they presented for beauty-lovers of Paris who did think that the tower would endanger art also history of the French, they against the worthless and ugly Eiffel Tower.

Nature lovers believed that the tower would endanger the flying route of birds across Paris. However, Rousseau, Utrillo, Chagall, and Delaunay loved the Eiffel Tower. In fact, in 1909  it was nearly taken down after 20 years at the expiration, luckily the tower was saved thanks to its antenna, at that time it was used for telegraph. In 1910, it started to become a part of International Time Service. French radio set up in 1918, and French television began in 1957 have exploited its height as well. In 1960s, a semiologist named Roland Barthes took Eiffel Tower as the subject for a fantastic study of him.

This new work became the highest construction all over the world till the Empire State Building was constructed approximately 40 years afterward and had a lot of antecedents. Iron-supported railroad viaducts made by Eiffel or an arc bridge over the Douro River with a 160 m span in Portugal and a circular, iron-frame tower designed by  American architectures Clarke and Reeves for the Centennial Exposition in1876 were among them. Eiffel recognised and acknowledged this impact in public, he was familiar with the America, in 1885, the wrought-iron pylon in Frederic Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty was also designed by him. In the similar year later, he had started to work on the Nice observation tower cupola in 1885.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was the greatest European authority on the aeromechanics of high framings, he also the author of "The Resistance of the Air" published in 1913. With the building time of Eiffel Tower, the base pylons arc was so accurately calculated that the shearing and bending forces of the wind were increasingly changed into contraction forces, which the bents would resist more efficaciously. He was such an Eiffel's engineering genius that even in the heaviest winds the tower never swings over 4.5 inches. The supersky scrapers which were built since 1960, for example the World Trade Center, were also constructed in practically the similar way.

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