Secrets of the Dead: "Eiffel's Race to the Top" (WNET Group, ZED Productions, ARTE France, FTV Prima, Movistar Plus+, TV5MONDE, RTBF Documentary Unit, TV5 Québec, RSI, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After this show my husband Charles and I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Eiffel’s Race to the Top,” about the competition between two French architects and engineers, Gustave Eiffel and Jules Bourdais, for the commission to design and build a 300-meter tower in Paris for the 1889 International Exposition, essentially a world’s fair. The show was co-directed by Mathieu Schwartz and Savin Yeatman-Eiffel (Gustave Eiffel’s great-great-great-grandson), and it was a fascinating and very au courant depiction of the politics involved in building great public monuments and how factionalism within the French government gave Eiffel the nod to build the famous tower that is still an iconic landmark in Paris. The contest also became a metaphor for the conflicts within French culture between the old and the new: between traditional ways of doing art and architecture and the innovations that were sweeping the artistic world. The age of modern art had begun in Paris in 1863 with the so-called “Salon des Refusées,” when the government had set up an alternative exhibition of all the paintings that had been turned down by the official Salon that year. Among them was Édouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” (“Luncheon on the Grass”), in which the titular lunch was being consumed by two men wearing ordinary clothes – and two nude women. Eleven years later, Claude Monet had shown his painting “Impression: Sunrise,” which gave its name to a whole new movement in painting that rejected realism and sought to reproduce the play of light on various objects. Impressionism would become a war cry among people working in other art forms as well – Claude Debussy’s music, which emerged in the 1890’s, would come to be called “Impressionist,” though he personally hated the term.

In architecture, the revolution was in the use of metal in general, and iron or steel in particular, not only to build frameworks that would allow larger, taller and more elaborate buildings to be constructed but actually to make the metal visible instead of concealing it behind wood, brick or stone façades. Both Eiffel and Bourdais had “made their bones” with previous projects, Eiffel with a railway bridge in Bordeaux that was the largest span ever attempted to that date and Bourdais with the lavish Palais de Trocadero, built for a previous international exposition in Paris in 1878. The idea of a 1,000-foot tower had been kicking around Great Britain and the United States since 1833, when British architect and engineer Richard Trevithick – best known for inventing the railroad locomotive – proposed using the remains of the Crystal Palace, built for yet another world’s fair in London, to build an enormous tower. Alas, Trevithick died before he could actually obtain the funding for his project. The next attempt was made in the U.S. by two engineers named Clarke and Reeves, who wanted to build a tall steel tower for the 1876 exposition to celebrate the American centennial in Philadelphia but couldn’t get financial backing. For the 1889 Paris exposition Jules Bourdais designed a tower built of stone that would have electric lighting mounted at the top. His idea was to give all of Paris electric light whether they wanted it or not, and to do it in a cheaper way than actually wiring every house for electricity. (Like the tower itself, this idea had previously been proposed in Great Britain; the New York Public Library’s Web site contains a postcard, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-92f1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, of what the proposed structure would have looked like and how it would have dispersed electric light throughout London.)

Eiffel proposed a tower that would be built entirely of iron, and whose sole function would be to give Parisians and tourists alike the opportunity to ascend the tower via elevators (themselves a relatively new invention in the 1880’s) and get an aerial view of the city and its surroundings. In fact, Eiffel, whose construction company was already making a lot of money building bridges and factories, offered to pay for the tower himself in exchange for getting all the revenue from ticket sales at the tower for the first 10 years. Eiffel had to lobby the French government, and he was at a disadvantage in that the newly elected French president didn’t like him and was a good friend of Bourdais, but the culture minister, Édouard Lockroy, sided with Eiffel. Lockroy declared a supposedly open competition for designs for the great tower – but he wrote the specifications for the competition so Eiffel’s design would qualify while Bourdais’ wouldn’t. Other competitors emerged, but they just basically copied Eiffel’s design and added a few ornamental flourishes. One of the principal advantages of Eiffel’s design was that it offered better wind resistance because it was really just an open-air iron framework. Eiffel’s one remaining roadblock came from Charles Garnier, who’d been hired as master architect for the 1889 Paris Exposition and who hated Eiffel’s design. In late 1886 Garnier recruited a number of Parisian intellectual and cultural figures, including composer Charles Gounod and writers Alexandre Dumas fils (the one who wrote Camille instead of his father, who wrote The Three Musketeers) and Guy de Maupassant, to sign an open letter protesting the decision by the French government to inflict this monumental iron eyesore on the citizens of Paris.

Eiffel also got thrown a curve ball when the people running the exposition decided to move the tower closer to the Seine River than the site Eiffel had originally intended and designed it for – which meant building it on considerably wetter soil. This complicated the task of building the tower’s foundation, which Eiffel solved by working out a system of compressed air plunging holes in the ground, which he then filled with cement and other materials to create a solid foundation that could support the weight of his tower. Eiffel also had most of the tower’s components made in his factories, then shipped to the site and assembled there – one of the earliest examples of prefabricated construction and something his company had also previously done with the inner framework of the Statue of Liberty, which was fabricated in Eiffel’s factory and then shipped to New York for final assembly. The Eiffel Tower was completed in time for the 1889 exposition and was an instant hit – Eiffel made his money back from ticket sales in just 2 ½ years – and it became an iconic structure that came to symbolize not only Paris but all France. Meanwhile, Bourdais’ architectural masterpiece, the Palais de Trocadero, was torn down in 1935 to make room for an even more spectacular building for yet another international exposition in Paris. One myth about the Eiffel Tower that this show exploded was that the design was entirely Eiffel’s idea; among the people who worked with him on it and talked about their roles later were Maurice Koechlin (the show quoted a 1939 interview with him) and Stephen Sauvestre. Nonetheless, this was a fascinating series episode about a big project and the forces arrayed both for and against it, and it offers valuable object lessons to today’s infrastructure builders.