Eiffel Tower

“ I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast.
Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by the chemin de fer de ceinture, the Auteuil station of which is close by ... all is quiet and bare and dull. ”

“ The Eiffel Tower having proved one of the most striking features of the great Paris Exhibition, and of itself a novelty sufficient to attract visitors to the spot, and having, long before the Exhibition closed, completely defrayed the expense of its construction, with a handsome profit besides, its success has naturally provoked similar enterprises,—as, for instance, at Blackpool, a seaside resort in Lancashire, there has been erected an openwork metal tower, resembling the Paris structure, but of far less altitude. ”

“ But what I love most is the stealing in of night, when the sky takes on that strange elusive purple; when eyes turn to the evening star and marvel at its brightness; when the Eiffel Tower becomes a strange, shadowy stairway yearning in impotent effort to the careless moon. ”

“ The grand-stand evaporates, the railway station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake to their merry life again. ”

“ Except the painter Seurat, most contemporaries disliked it, considering it a monstrous blemish on the Parisian skyline; today of course, it is rightly deemed a nineteenth-century masterpiece, but a masterpiece of engineering rather than of architecture.
As with Eiffel’s pavilion at the Exhibition of 1878, there is considerable ambiguity in the design of the Eiffel Tower. Seen from a distance its four legs have much of the vigorous spring of his bridges and the tapered shaft of criss-crossed metalwork seems—but in fact is not—an almost inevitable expression of large-scale construction in metal. ”

“ From here we follow a busy street as far as the bridge of Jena, and on the opposite bank of the Seine rises the Eiffel Tower, dominating Paris with its immense pillar 1000 feet high. The Eiffel Tower is the highest structure ever reared by human hands, twice as high as the cathedral of Cologne and the tallest of the Egyptian pyramids. At the first platform we are more than 330 feet above the vast city, but the hills outside Paris close in the horizon. ”

“ Eiffel Tower, a structure erected on the banks of the Seine in Paris, the loftiest in the world, being 985 ft. in height, and visible from all parts of the city; it consists of three platforms, of which the first is as high as the towers of Notre Dame; the second as high as Strasburg Cathedral spire, and the third 863 ft; it was designed by Gustave Eiffel, and erected in 1887-1889; there are cafés and restaurants on the first landing, and the ascent is by powerful lifts. ”

“ It was impossible to disengage the remains of the balloon-envelope and suspension apparatus except in strips and pieces.
My escape was narrow; but it was not from the particular danger always present to my mind during this period of my experiments. The position of the Eiffel Tower as a central landmark, visible to everybody from considerable distances, makes it a unique winning-post for an aërial race. Yet this does not alter the other fact that the feat of rounding the Eiffel Tower possesses a unique element of danger. ”

“ Market day in the Rue de Seine
The Parisian who goes to New York marvels at our skyscrapers. He is properly impressed with the hustle and bustle of the New World. But it does not take him long to note the absence of wide boulevards and the lack of ensemble in the cityscape. Then he will invariably make two comments: "There are no trees," and "There is no place to sit down." Except the Eiffel Tower, Paris does not boast of a "biggest in the world." It will take Americans centuries to acquire a sense of harmony and proportion in city building. ”

“ As has been noted, this 984-foot edifice was, down to the erection of the Empire State Building in New York by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon more than forty years later, the tallest structure in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which appropriately carries its designer’s name, is no more a building in the ordinary sense than are his great bridges, 283however. Although scraping so much higher skies than did Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in Chicago, which was erected in precisely the same years, the Paris tower was far less significant either technically or functionally. ”

“ The watchers in the Eiffel Tower, seeing the heavens with their searchlights for German planes and German dirigibles, saw the first core bomb bore through the sky from the direction of Verdun, followed by its seven comrades, and saw each bomb explode in the Bois below. But as the first shell shattered the stillness of the night and spread its sulphureous and death-dealing fumes among the helpless cattle, the watchers on the Tower saw a vast light burst skyward in the far-distant east. ”

“ At night the Eiffel Tower, or Pasadera, as it is called, is illuminated from top to bottom, the whole of the Reál is arched over with garlands of coloured electric bulbs, and every caseta vies with its neighbours in the lighting of the reception-rooms in which the girls, in their third new frocks, are to dance. For the display of youth and beauty is the main object of the social side of the Fair, which is in point of fact the marriage market of Seville. ”

“ While the 200-foot height of the viaduct’s two greatest piers was not startling even at that period, the studies proved that piers of far greater height were entirely feasible in iron construction. This led to the design of a 395-foot pier, which, although never incorporated into a bridge, may be said to have been the direct basis for the Eiffel Tower.
Preliminary studies for a 300-meter tower were made with the 1889 fair immediately in mind. With an assurance born of positive knowledge, Eiffel in June of 1886 approached the Exposition commissioners with the project. ”

“ He gazed with fresh interest and pleasure also on the buildings they were carried past, from the huge pile of the Louvre on the right bank to the great terrace of the Quai d’Orsay on the left, and from the Trocadero and the palaces of the Champs Élysées back to the thin tapering shaft of the Eiffel Tower. ”

“ The Seine boats, the subway, and many tram lines land you at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. An elevator quickly takes you above Paris for a view that was unique before the days of aeroplanes. Near by is the Great Wheel, always revolving from morning to night on Sundays. Parisians do not feel the lack of the roofs of skyscrapers when they want to look down on their city. ”

“ All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures—an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts. ”

“ Such spires and towers have been erected only at the cost of immense labour. But iron, which can be so readily joined by riveting, lends itself invitingly to the skill of the constructor, more particularly by reason of the wonderful tensile strength it possesses. It is scarcely possible to convey any adequate idea of the great complicated network of bracings by which in the Eiffel Tower each standard of the columns is united to the rest to form one rigid pile. The horizontal girders unite the four piers in forming the supports of the first storey some 170 feet above the base. ”

“ I am trying to adjust myself to new conditions, and I need all my energy for the task, without undertaking a strange language at the same time. You can have no idea how one’s first visit to Paris sends preconceived notions tumbling about one’s ears. So far, the Eiffel Tower is the only thing which looked as I expected it would. There’s a surprise at every turn. ”

“ Peter surprised me yesterday by going in to Buckhorn and bringing out a machinist to work on the windmill tower. By mid-afternoon they had it ready for hoisting and rebolting to its new anchor-posts. So just before supper the team and the block-and-tackle were hitched on to that attenuated steel skeleton, Whinnie took one guide rope and I took the other, and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into the sky. ”

“ I do not know as the Eiffel tower was intended to act as a Keeley cure, but of the 50 people who went up with us, half of them were so full their back teeth were floating, including dad and the guide, but when we got to the top and they got a view of the awful height to which we had come, it seemed as though every man got sober at once, and their tongues seemed to cleave to the roof of their mouths. ”

“ Fig. 26c.—The Eiffel Tower.
The buildings of the Paris Exhibition of 1889 are themselves splendid examples, not only of engineering skill, but of good taste and elegant design in iron structures and their decorations. The vast Salle des Machines (machinery hall) exceeds in dimensions anything of the kind in existence, for it is nearly a quarter of a mile long, and its roof covers at one span its width of 380 feet, rising to a height of 150 feet in the centre. This great hall is to remain permanently, as well as the other principal galleries with their graceful domes. ”

“ The important thing is to be moved. No other monument since the cathedrals—perhaps since the pyramids—has so' stirred human sensibility as the Eiffel Tower. Confronted with all that junk reared on high, stupidity itself became lyric, fools meditated, wild asses dreamed. ”

“ The Pyramid of Ghizeh is about 480 feet high. The highest thing put up by man is, of course, the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, but this will have to yield its supremacy to the Great Davey Tower now being built near London. ”

“ Looking down to the streets from the 'deuziemme tage' of the Eiffel Tower, only a hundred feet up, the sheer number of stroll- ers, of pedestrian cruisers, of tourists and of the idly lazy occupies the whole of one's vista. ”

“ Then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through. ”

“ In order to entice health-seekers, all kinds of gratifications await them on the summit, restaurant, dairy, reading room, tennis court, and croquet ground, to say nothing of a panorama almost unrivalled in eastern France. We have, indeed, climbed the Eiffel Tower, in other words, are on a level with that final stage from which floats the Tricolour. Looking east we behold the sombre Morvan and Nevers rising above the Loire, whilst westward, beyond the plain and the Loire, may be descried the cathedral of Bourges. ”

“ Oh, the Paris vistas! No other city in the world has every hill top, every great open space, marked by a building or monument that beckons to you at the end of boulevard or avenue. No other city in the world has familiar dome or tower or steeple popping up over housetops in the distance to reassure you wherever you may have wandered, that you are not far from, and that you can always find your way to, a familiar spot. The Eiffel Tower, the Great Wheel, the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur, the Panthéon, Val-de-Grâce, the Invalides, the Tour St. ”

“ The Eiffel Tower, the most elevated monument of which human industry can boast, is only one hundred and eighty-seven times the average height of the worker. It is three hundred metres high, but to equal the Termites’ audacity, it would have to attain a height of 1,600 metres. ”

“ Well, cross my heart, if that Ferris wheel, that looked so big to us, would make a main spring for the Eiffel tower. The tower is higher than a kite, and when you get near it and try to look up to the top, you think it is a joke, and that really no one actually goes up to the top of it. You see some flies up around the top of it, and when the guide tells you the flies crawling around there are men and women, you think the guide has been drinking.
But dad and I and the guide paid our money, got into an elevator and began to go up. ”

“ Should my capricious motor stop as I approached the Tower—exactly as it stopped after I had passed over the timekeepers' heads at St Cloud, returning from my first trial on 13th July 1903—I should be powerless to hold the air-ship back.
Therefore I always dreaded the turn round the Eiffel Tower, looking on it as my principal danger. While never seeking to go high in my air-ships—on the contrary, I hold the record for the low altitudes in a free balloon—in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above and out of the way of the chimney-pots and steeples. ”

“ THE ELECTRIC ELEVATOR
At the time the Eiffel Tower elevators were under consideration, water under pressure was, from a practical standpoint, the only agent capable of fulfilling the power and control requirements of this particularly severe service. Steam, as previously mentioned, had already been found wanting in several respects. Electricity, on the other hand, seemed to hold promise for almost every field of human endeavor. By 1888 the electric motor had behind it a 10- or 15-year history of active development. ”