Today 130 years ago the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower, the most famous monument of La Ville Lumière : its incredible history between lightning construction, lifts stuck on purpose and millions of bolts.
Two years, two months and five days: many were enough for the construction of what would become one of the most famous and copied monuments in the world. The Eiffel Tower, the most famous building in all of France, was inaugurated in Paris on March 31, 1889 and officially opened on May 6 of the same year, for the start of the Universal Exposition of 1889 (on the centenary of the French Revolution).
Its construction was an extraordinary engineering feat. The Eiffel Tower, high at the time 312 meters (today we measure 324, with the tv antennas) remained until 1930 the tallest building in the world, exceeded only by the construction of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, in his turn beaten, in 1931, the Empire State Building).
June 3, 1902: lightning strikes the top of the Eiffel Tower. On hot summer days the height of the tower is more than several centimeters, due to the expansion of the metal.
MIND. The project of Gustave Eiffel, a French engineer specializing in the construction of metal Bridges, who before that had contributed to the construction of the skeleton of the Statue of Liberty, was chosen among 100 other proposals presented to the French government during the preparations for the Expo.
CRITICAL. The iron structure, twice the height of the Dome of St. Peter in Rome, and more imposing than the Pyramid of Giza, aroused considerable perplexity in the cultural environment of the time.
BAD. Many considered it aesthetically inferior to other Parisian architectures (some still call it "the Iron asparagus"), and in 1909 it risked demolition because it was contested by the intellectual elite of Paris: moreover, it had to be a temporary construction and easily dismantled.
ANTENNA. Fortunately, the ease of radio transmission achieved by its summit-along with the appreciation of tourists and most Parisians - saved it from being demolished. The newspapers of the time wrote:
"The Eiffel Tower looked like a lighthouse abandoned on Earth by a generation gone, by a generation of giants"
STRONG FOUNDATION. Since its opening, there have been 250 million people. And yet, initially, the audience showed resistance to climb, as he considered it unsafe. Despite the precarious safety conditions during the construction phase, only one of the 300 workers employed lost their lives during the installation of the elevators. 18.038 pieces of iron, and 2.5 million bolts (later replaced by rivets, i.e. mechanical joints, incandescent).
The Eiffel Tower elevator, with its maneuverer, in an 1899 print.
STRUCTURE. The base of the tower consists of four arched pillars that merge upwards, interrupted by three platforms with as many belvedere for tourists. The four semicircular arches at the foot of the building serve only as decorative elements and do not have a real structural function.
CLIMB. The two transparent elevators, which rise along a curved trajectory, have become one of the main tourist attractions. They were deactivated when Adolf Hitler visited Paris during World War II.
On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated.
Built for the Universal Exposition and for the commemoration of the centenary of the French Revolution, it was immediately criticized and challenged by Parisians and French intellectuals of the time. For this reason it was decided that it would be destroyed the following year, at the end of the exhibition. It was "saved" because as an antenna for military radio transmission it was very useful to the French army.
A team of Dassault Systèmes, a French company specializing in the production of 3D software, has created an incredibly accurate animation of the building of the tower, based on historical testimonies such as archival documents, drawings and maps of the time available in Paris libraries.
The video is part of a larger project to recreate the history of the city from the Middle Ages to today. The historical reconstruction with this technique, according to experts, offers new perspectives of interpretation of some events: the prison of the Bastille, attacked by the revolutionaries in 1789, was for example smaller than it appears in some artistic representations. Conquering it was probably easier than previously thought.