CDG

48˚ 51’ 32” N | 2˚ 17’ 40” E
**CDGE13296***
In his eponymous show *Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris*, the composer’s song *Carousel* includes the lyrics, *“We're on a carousel, a crazy carousel, and now we go around, again we go around.”* It’s a metaphor for life, of course, the tempo increasing, notes of the accordion and calliope passing in a swirl, the singers’s voices a blur of energy, chaos, and confusion. And then, like life…it ends. © Vast Compass, 2025.
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Another dream come true

In my first blog post featuring the Eiffel Tower I shared that seeing it from atop Montparnasse Tower in 1995 for the first time was a dream come true. Remarkably, 15 years later another dream came true when Allen and I guided my mom and sister to France for ten days. We began and ended our adventure in Paris, with a few days exploring WWII sites in Normandy and Mont St. Michel in between. We also fit in day trips to historic Chartres, gilt Versailles, and Monet’s exquisite Giverny.

Hidden connections across 100 years

My mom was a child of the Great Depression. Born in 1931, she was four months old when Thomas Edison died (the prolific inventor had submitted his last patent application earlier that year). In a fitting tribute, the nation was asked to turn off its electric lights the evening of Edison’s passing to honor his significant technical contributions to society. Edison appears in a handful of my Eiffel Tower posts on this blog.

From height to flight

A few weeks before Edison’s death in 1931 two pilots made the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean. Their feat was due in no small part to Gustave Eiffel’s study of aerodynamics. In the final years of his life, the Frenchman turned his energies full-time to the study of airflow. By the time he died in 1923, the ‘Eiffel Method’ of wind tunnel research had become the gold standard in understanding and mathematically codifying the phenomena of lift and drag, his body of work essential to rapidly advancing aircraft design. Following a near-disastrous brush with the Panama Affair he successfully navigated a professional re-direct from mastering height in construction to mastering the aerodynamics of flight.

From Edison to early mainframes in the back office

Along with the Eiffel Tower’s debut and nearly 500 innovations displayed by Thomas Edison, the world’s first ‘tabulator’ or computing machine was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. That punched card machine became the foundational technology behind IBM. In 1931 the company produced its first punched card machine capable of multiplication. Combined with wind tunnel mathematics pioneered by Gustave Eiffel, today’s engineers unleash the power of computational fluid dynamics to tune high-performing aircraft and vehicles with precision measured in microns.

By the time my parents retired nearly 100 years after the Exposition Universelle of 1889 they had overseen the installation of the first mainframe computer in the back office of the farmer’s co-operative my dad managed for 45 years.

When it came to computers, my mom always said she was, “born too soon”. Trained in Gregg shorthand and skilled at making entries by fountain pen in ledgers three feet wide, she was fascinated by the potential that computer automation represented. In retirement she came to be quite an ace at swapping out motherboards on the fly, illegally scraping music via Napster and LimeWire, and burning CDs and filling USB drives with thousands of scans of family photos and Kodachrome slides.

What I know now

My mom’s interest in technology is one reason I regret I didn’t know as much about the Eiffel Tower on May 24, 2010, as I do now. I could have pointed out the location of the exposition hall where that first physical computing machine was displayed in 1889, just yards from where we spread our picnic that Monday afternoon.

I could have explained to both my mom and sister that in 1889 the first roll film and Kodak camera for consumers also were displayed in the fair’s Gallery of Machines. (My sister and I both have photographs in the U.S. Library of Congress, and Kodak executives once visited our home in north Idaho when we were still kids. A connection to photography runs deep in our family.)

I could have shared how one of my deepest interests in life is learning the illimitable ways in which this intersects with that, and how so much of life’s bounty of knowledge goes right past us unnoticed, unknown. And yet when we slow down just long enough to pull even a single thread, we discover it’s connected to the entire universe, the very cosmos a cloak woven of hidden connections. Travel confirms these connections in more ways than I can count.

Because seeing the world has taught me that parallel lines which meet are the rule not the exception, and synchronicity is a pole star that rewards a life fueled by avid curiosity. Our journeys unfold across a vast compass. Yet even as echoes from across 100 years swirled around my mom, and sister, and Allen, and me that afternoon in Paris—echoes of Edison and Eiffel and Kodak and computers, each an unseen world among thousands waiting to be discovered—all I could share with certainty were the top notes from a guidebook.

Of course those top notes—the Eiffel Tower’s facts and figures, it’s dates and data—were, and are important to know and understand. But even more important was something I shared with my mom that can’t be found in any book.

Tears.

A moment

Once we’d spread our oh-so-French déjeuner sur l'herbe (luncheon on the grass—provisioned from nearby shops on Rue Cler, following the advice of travel guru, Rick Steves), I noticed my mom’s posture shift as she looked up from our shady spot on the Champ-de-Mars toward the Eiffel Tower, its curves and latticework soaring into the blue above us.

She tilted her head and leaned forward ever so slightly. She was in Paris. She was having lunch beneath the Eiffel Tower. A farm girl from the Depression, born too soon, was in the City of Light, following the paths of kings and Coco Chanel, hearing the peals of Notre Dame’s great bronze bells, and seeing Monet’s water lilies on ponds and walls. It was a moment akin to what I had experienced 15 years earlier with Allen as he choreographed my introduction not just to Paris, but to its star attraction from atop Tour Montparnasse.

Ending where we began

A spry 79, my mom leapt to her feet and turned toward me, bending down, her arms outstretched, then encircling my shoulders. Weeping the sudden tears that children do so well, she said, “I’m here. I’m really here! Thank you!”

I felt her tears on my cheek. My own were not far behind. Her disbelief was doubly touching and recognizable, because I knew exactly how she felt. We were a cliché coming true, in awe of, and changed by a travel experience inspired by the very thing that makes Paris, Paris and France, France.

We lost my mom 12 years later. In the intervening years Allen and I took her to the Big Island for a week at Christmastime, and in 2018 Allen, Linda, and I guided her around Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides from where my dad’s father emigrated a bit more than 100 years ago. Looking back at the journey I shared with too far family members for far too short a time, I see that Jacques Brel’s carousel metaphor is beyond prescient. The blur of time, the whirl of memories, the acceleration of it all until…it ends.

That special place

We expect a lot of our architecture, but I can never make a demand of the Eiffel Tower beyond the bounty of joy she gave my mom and me 15 years ago. It was yet one more travel dream realized, gifted by Allen to all of us, and savored by me in that special place in our hearts that only the best memories call home.

Ineffable. That’s the only word.

It was an era of outsize innovations by outsize personalities. Being one of them himself, photographer Nadar captured many of his audacious contemporaries in his Paris studio. Of particular interest in this biography are the ways in which Nadar helped advance aerial photography. A photo of his, the first aerial photo of the Palace of Versailles, hangs in our entryway which is dedicated only to etchings, prints, and photographs of French chateaux, along with French maps from the past, including a disassembled Baedeker of the Paris Métro in 1891.

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

**From Amazon**
*“A dazzling, stylish biography of a fabled Parisian photographer, adventurer, and pioneer.”*
Purchase *The Great Nadar*

I suppose one of many reasons I adore the Eiffel Tower as I do is that she’s a literal panoply—a true exemplar of a thousand worlds to share. Thank you for taking time to share a few of those worlds and their stories with me.

If you missed our other blog posts related to the Eiffel Tower:

A cliché coming true

So many parts

Quite the future

A second iron age

From Port Said, to Say what?

A raison d’être

Portrait of a Lady, a stylish lady

A visionary and a scam artist

What a piece of work

An age of curiosity

300,000 people can’t be wrong

Enshrined in our collective consciousness

A living light sculpture

From world treasure to flaming meme

What I know now

*This image isn’t currently available in our Etsy shop. Please contact us below for a direct sale of packs of 10 of the image @ $75.

What I know now

CDG

Another dream come true

Hidden connections across 100 years

From height to flight

From Edison to early mainframes in the back office

What I know now

A moment

Ending where we began

That special place

Recommended

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

A cliché coming true

So many parts

Quite the future

A second iron age

From Port Said, to Say what?

A raison d’être

Portrait of a Lady, a stylish lady

A visionary and a scam artist

What a piece of work

An age of curiosity

300,000 people can’t be wrong

Enshrined in our collective consciousness

A living light sculpture

From world treasure to flaming meme

What I know now

From world treasure to flaming meme