So many parts
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48˚ 51’ 32” N | 2˚ 17’ 40” E
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The concrete plinths on which the Eiffel Tower appears to rest are purely ornamental. Its actual foundational piers are more than 20’ underground. © Vast Compass, 2025.
Two years, two months, five days
Was the Eiffel Tower safe, likely to collapse of its own weight, blow over in a storm, or sink, or tilt? Would its shade destroy gardens? Would its presence blight not only the skyline, but also destroy property values? And then there were the aesthetes in high dudgeon. As other posts in this series tell, there was a fair bit of drama swirling around the Eiffel Tower from the very beginning. Nevertheless, setting aside civic trepidation and histrionics about aesthetics, from January 26, 1887 to March 31, 1889, the Tower’s construction commenced and was completed.
A 1,000-foot flagstaff
What little I knew about other countries as a child came from picture books with iconic architecture deftly sketched to suggest such exotic places as Egypt with its pyramids and Australia with its opera house, not mention Pisa’s leaning tower. Always in the lineup was Paris’ Eiffel Tower—just a few swoops and X’s suggested her profile while quick daubs of blue, white, and red at the top had the Triocolore proudly waving in the breeze.
The French flag is the only one
to have a staff a thousand feet tall.
—Gustave Eiffel
Linked in memory
I’ve now visited most of those childhood picture book locations so deftly sketched by illustrators more than 60 years ago. And my photos of those architectural wonders run to literally 100’s of 1,000’s of shots.
Meanwhile, my impressions of France have moved beyond the tired tropes of berets and turtlenecks, mimes and escargot. I can match a few of the kings with their mistresses, I’ve visited the WWII cemeteries in Normandy in bleak rain, wondered at the daring of French New Wave movies, and staggered agog through the Louvre. (Stendahl Syndrome, apparently, isn’t limited just to Florence.)
But it was in 1995 when I visited Paris for the first time that the Eiffel Tower, and France along with it, leapt from the pages of books and truly entered my consciousness. I came to realize that without the Eiffel Tower there is no Paris, and without Paris there is no France. It’s hyperbole, of course, but for me it’s also true. When I try to imagine my passport without the country, the country without the city, and the city without the Tower...the thought experiment breaks down. All are part and parcel of a singular travel experience. And all are indelibly linked in memory.
This singular Tower—how it came to rise, and why it still stands today—is the stuff of a thousand stories with connections to a thousand more, just out of frame. We can’t share all of them here, but we can try!
A race to the finish, one rivet at a time
Braziers used to heat rivets glowed deep red far overhead on sodden, foggy afternoons. Steel clanged in clarion report during clear, cold January mornings while one by one millions of rivets were fitted into pre-formed slots by a team of four men—one to heat the rivet, one to shape its head, one to hold it in place with tongs, and one to bludgeon the metal fully home with a maul. As the rivets cooled, they contracted, ensuring a tight fit. The ever-higher tower seemed to shimmer in August welter as the sledgehammers’ peals echoed ever farther away. Meanwhile, doubts persisted that engineers could solve unyielding challenges with a unique elevator design.
8OCT87 > 10NOV87 > 12DEC87 > 15MAR88 > 14JUN88 > 10JUL88
14OCT88 > 14NOV88 > 26DEC88 > 20JAN89 > 12FEB89 > 12MAR89
“A thick cloud of tar and coal smoke seized the throat, and we were deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer. Over there, they were still working on the bolts: workmen with their iron bludgeons, perched on a ledge just a few centimeters wide, took turns at striking the bolts (these in fact were the rivets). One could have taken them for blacksmiths contentedly beating out a rhythm on an anvil in some village forge, except that these smiths were not striking up and down vertically, but horizontally, and as with each blow came a shower of sparks, these black figures, appearing larger than life against the background of the open sky, looked as if they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds.”
—Emile Goudeau, Journalist
So many parts
Of course, before the world’s fair could open on May 15, 1889, and before the Tower’s 18,038 parts could be assembled in January frost and August swelter, they had to be conceived and designed across a period of 18 months, beginning in 1884, as 50 engineers drafted some 5,300 sheets of workshop drawings and 700 sheets of construction drawings recording each part’s dimensions and sequence of assembly. The delight is in the details. For instance, the parts were formed with 7,000,000 slots which, when aligned, were to be thermally fastened with 2,500,000 rivets (of these, only a third were fitted onsite).
Precise renderings of those 18,000+ puddled iron parts—at scale, and spanning the full width and breadth of museum-quality blueprints—now fill published volumes and websites alike. Given the tower’s height, the physics of wind shear, and differences in ambient temperature from ground level to the aerie also meant each of those 18,000+ designs had to be rigorously validated before being transformed into iron, each part uniquely forged to within a tenth of a millimeter.
Above, reproductions of Eiffel’s original blueprints. Source: Gustave Eiffel’s ‘Three-Hundred-Metre Tower’, published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Lemercier, Paris, in 1900.
Below, photos of the book, The Eiffel Tower, the first complete reprint, including drawings and photographs of the construction period, of Gustave Eiffel’s ‘Three-Hundred-Metre Tower’, referenced above.
DÉTERMINATION DE LA RÉSISTANCE AU VENT DANS LA PARTIE SUPÉRIEURE
ÉLÉVATION Fig. 1 Fig. 3 Parite Inférieure, and Fig. 6 Plan
AMÉNAGEMENT DU REZ-DE-CHAUSSEE
DE PILE 4, Fig. 5
PANNEAUX 16 A 18, Fig. 7, 11, 12, 15
Fig. 2 Coupe suivant and Fig 14, Coupe vertical suivant
PARTIE SUPÉRIEURE DÉTAILS DU MÉCANISME (Suite)
Coupole Fig. 4 Elevation, Fig. 8 Coupe horizontale
PANNEAUX, ARC DÉCORATIF, POUTRE DE L’ARC, POUTRE DU 1ST ETAGE, Fig. 1
Fig. 28-63, ENSEMBLES ET DÉTAILS DES ARCS DÉCORATIFS
OSSATURE DE LA GALERIE DU PREMIER ÉTAGE
PREMIER ÉTAGE. RESTAURANTE FRANÇAIS & RESTAURANT RUSSE.
ASCENSEURS. RÉSERVOIRS. CANALISATION.
ASCENSEUR A PISTONS ARTICULÉS Fig. 2, 5, 6
ASCENSEUR A PISTONS ARTICULÉS Fig. 3 ÉLÉVATION, Fig. 11 PLAN
ASCENSEUR OTIS. MOTEUR. DÉTAILS.
ASCENSEUR OTIS. POUTRE DE L’ASCENSEUR, VOIE, CABINE, APPAREILS DE SURETÉ.
Two ladies, in parts and pieces
As you can read in other posts from this series, the copper plates which form the Statue of Liberty are secured to an iron framework built by Gustave Eiffel’s studio. After being erected piece by piece in Paris, Lady Liberty’s copper cladding and armature were disassembled and shipped to New York.
Similarly, prefabricated parts of the Eiffel Tower were cast at a factory in today’s suburbs of Paris, then temporarily bolted together in 15-foot sections. Once they were thermally fastened with rivets at the factory, the sections were transported to the construction site where they were hoisted on tracks for final assembly. Each subsection weighed no more than three tons. This meant four-man teams could use gantries to safely lift and maneuver each section at either end of the journey, without undue risk of injury to either factory men or assembly men. Steam-powered hydraulic lifts (themselves a miracle of engineering) were a key part of the ‘final mile’ for the Tower’s parts.
With construction at an end, the sloping tracks on which the Tower’s sections were raised became the same paths used by the uniquely designed Otis elevators essential to Eiffel’s vision. (The saga of the elevators, as they say, is a whole other story.)
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Among the Eiffel Tower’s structural and decorative elements are cabling and tracks making up a complex system of elevators that serve the public and monument employees. There are 5 lifts at the esplanade level—3 for general visitors, 1 for customers of the Jules Verne restaurant, and a 4-ton freight elevator for supplies. 2 double-cabin elevators operate between the second and third floors. In the course of a year, the Tower’s elevators traverse 62,000 miles, equal to 2.5 trips around the world.
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Clearing up the puddle muddle
What, exactly, is ‘puddled iron’? Put simply, it’s ‘cast’ iron that is processed—or ‘wrought’—even further, until almost all carbon is removed from the metal, yielding a stronger and lighter material approaching the utility of steel during an age when stone and wood were still prevalent in architecture and infrastructure.
Of note, one of Eiffel’s competitors in the Exposition’s design competition proposed a 1,000-foot stone tower resting on soil alone—that is, on no foundation of any kind. The stone tower would have toppled of course, well before its completion. Meanwhile, concrete was soon to be ascendant in commercial construction but it was not yet advanced enough to be under serious consideration for the Exposition’s design competition in 1886.
As for lumber, the tallest wooden structure in the late 19th-century was China’s Fogong Pagoda at 220 feet, though this number misses the mark by a good bit, given the figure includes a steeple 33 feet high and a stone base of 13 feet. Perhaps 174 feet is a better adjudication of its height. Regardless, concrete and wood were not on the table as materials for the monument meant to symbolically anchor 1889’s Exposition Universelle.
Wrought iron, of which Gustave Eiffel was the world’s documented expert, was the material of choice.
Iron ‘wrought’ during multiple rounds of processing removes nearly all carbon from the metal. The Eiffel Tower is constructed of easily replicable parts made of iron rolled into plates and bars, L-beams, and I-beams. Photo credit: Niteenrk, iStock.
CDGE13305*—The 1,024-foot Tower’s 18,038 parts were formed with 7,000,000 slots which were then thermally fitted with a total of 2,500,000 rivets—either at the factory, in sections, or in situ.
When the Eiffel Tower was built of iron in 1889, the world’s tallest wooden structure was Sakyamuni Pagoda of Fogong Temple in Shanxi, China. Photo credit: Redtea, iStock.
Lighting the way to modernity
The Eiffel Tower rises from a unique intersection in a unique era. Promoters were seeking a man-made structure higher than anything ever constructed. Lightweight iron was the new-fangled material of the day and Gustave Eiffel’s experience in bridge-building at home and abroad gave him the confidence to design and construct large-scale projects using the modern iron with confidence. And crucially, he had credibility with engineers, artists, and politicians alike for his role in helping execute a modern colossus—Liberty Enlightening the World, or as we know her today: The Statue of Liberty.
And so it’s two ladies—one a tower, one a colossus, both monuments of deeply symbolic importance—who usher in a second iron age, and modernity to boot.
Recommendation
The Eiffel Tower is a must if you have any interest in truly understanding the feats of engineering required to bring the Iron Lady to life. An in-depth series of essays in an extended foreword provide rich background to the astonishing set of replica blueprints that follow. It’s an oversize volume, 12”x17”, bringing dramatic scale to the drawings and revealing minutiae a smaller format wouldn’t allow. It’s a Taschen publication—enough said.
The Eiffel Tower (Multilingual Edition)
The Eiffel Tower
“Step by step, one latticework layer after another, Eiffel’s iconic design evolves over double-page plates, meticulous drawings, and on-site photographs, including new images and even more historical context. The result is at once a gem of vintage architecture and a unique insight into the idea behind an icon.”