Too Ugly

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer. He was born in France’s Côte-d’Or, the first child of Catherine-Mélanie (née Moneuse) and Alexandre Bonickhausen dit Eiffel. He descended from Jean-René Bönickhausen, who had left the German town of Marmagen and settled in Paris in the early 18th century. The family adopted the name Eiffel as a nod to the Eifel mountains in their native region. Although they always went by Eiffel, Gustave’s birth was registered as Bonickhausen dit Eiffel, and it wasn’t officially changed to Eiffel until 1880. It’s always sad, in my estimation, when last names are changed for any other reason but marriage. So often the line of ancestors can also be lost in that change.

When Alexandre, who always went by Gustave finished his public schooling, he went on to graduate from École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. After graduation, he began to make a name for himself with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit Viaduct. Gustav had planned to work in his uncle’s workshop in Dijon after graduating, but a family dispute put an end to that idea. After spending a few months as an unpaid assistant to his brother-in-law, who ran a foundry, Gustav reached out to railway engineer Charles Nepveu, who offered him his first paid role as a private secretary. Soon after, Nepveu’s company went bankrupt, but he helped Gustav land a job designing a 72-foot sheet iron bridge for the Saint Germaine railway. When some of Nepveu’s businesses were taken over by the Compagnie Belge de Matériels de Chemin de Fer, Nepveu became managing director of two factories in Paris and brought Gustav on as head of the research department.

In 1857, Nepveu secured a contract to build a railway bridge over the Garonne River in Bordeaux, linking the Paris-Bordeaux line with routes to Sète and Bayonne. The project involved constructing a 1,600-foot iron girder bridge supported by six pairs of masonry piers on the riverbed, built using compressed air caissons and hydraulic rams…cutting-edge methods at the time. Gustav first oversaw the assembly of the metalwork but later took charge of the entire project after Nepveu resigned in March 1860.

While Gustav Eiffel built a number of bridges in his lifetime, he is most famous for the Eiffel Tower, created by his company for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and for helping build the Statue of Liberty in New York. However, a little-known fact is that Paris was not the location Gustav initially had in mind when he designed the tower. Originally, he presented the design to city officials in Barcelona, Spain. The officials who saw the design deemed it too ugly for their city. So, Gustav switched gears and had his tower constructed in Paris as a temporary showpiece for the 1889 International Exposition…and it’s been drawing visitors to the City of Light ever since. I wonder what the officials in Barcelona thought of their comments after the Eiffel Tower became such a showpiece in Paris. After retiring from engineering, Gustav turned his attention to meteorology and aerodynamics, where he also made notable contributions. Gustav Eiffel died peacefully on December 27, 1923, supposedly while listening to Beethoven’s 5th symphony andante, in his mansion on Rue Rabelais in Paris. He was 91. He was buried in the family tomb in Levallois-Perret Cemetery.