He couldn’t see the wind nor anticipate its push. He walked confidently at altitude when other men would shiver, but he moved slowly and watched his feet. But neither did he assume the ability to survive them. He loved three things in the right order: his wife’s belly, since there was a child inside then his wife herself and finally his gloves, which kept his fingers warm when he worked high on the tower.ĭussardin never feared heights. The worker’s name was Dussardin, and he was a riveter’s assistant. It wasn’t snowing, but the air was crisp and the wind nibbled. The day the first worker died was a cold one. The people, the papers, the politicians-they all said the same thing: Gustave wasn’t just an engineer, he was an iron magician, and his pride was paid for in rivets. Even if Gustave was building the tower for himself, as the skeptics suggested (probably the writers again, who said it was ego that propelled a crazy man into the clouds), well, no one cared. How strong and tall she’d always be-the tower standing there, never tipping. He said the tower would show the world how strong and tall France was and had always been. It marked the day every Frenchman and every Frenchboy earned the right to love their Frenchladies in the way they were famous for: thoroughly, joyously, and free from constraint. And why not celebrate that upheaval? It marked the beginning of things. Gustave said the tower was for France, and for the Exposition Universelle-the World’s Fair that would celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. That was how one family grew closer through pain, which meant Gustave wasn’t just an architect anymore. She hugged the boy, who was bleeding from the lip, and wrapped him with both arms. His father leaned out the window and said, What lesson have you learned?, while his mother ran into the street, worried that her only son was dying. He broke his arm and wailed like he was just born, afraid of the cold air. The boy jumped, because his body was a leaf or a bird-except thinking that didn’t make it true, and the boy fell. Then he climbed his tower and declared himself an architect beyond measure.Īny man can build. Then he became a kind of dream inside the mind of every child who thought they, too, could stack things high enough to climb into a better life.Ĭhildren playing in the street piled buckets and tin cans, and one reckless child-an Austrian immigrant boy with big ears who lived in a poor quarter-even built a tower out of chairs. It kept growing, and Gustave became more famous. Who cared if it had purpose? And the tower wasn’t even finished yet. Everyone else-all the people who didn’t have enough leisure to waste it debating beauty-cheered Gustave for building the biggest thing they’d ever seen. Gustave said in Le Petit that aesthetes could shut their eyes or lie facedown in the dirt if they were bothered. They argued that no single building should be visible from all points in Paris. Also infamous, since artists and writers reviled him as the man who ruined the Parisian skyline. Construction began, and as the tower got taller, and didn’t fall, Gustave grew famous. In Paris he began his search for puddled iron and three hundred men to carry it, stack it, and drive those rivets in. It was a work of engineering meant only to defy the weather. It wasn’t a work of art meant to espouse beauty or form. Slowly the designs got smarter and a two-dimensional version of the tower took shape. The tower would plunge into the city.Īt night Gustave imagined designs and drew them with those doubts in mind. Or the wind would blow, the metal would bend, and the rivets would snap. They said the tower would topple under its own weight. His name was Gustave Eiffel, and he built his giant French tower because it was impossible-that is what everyone said-to build something so tall.
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