Skip to main content

Gustave Eiffel Biography

Gustave Eiffel

(Alexandre Gustave Eiffel; Dijon, 1832-Paris, 1923) French engineer and architect.After graduating from the School of Arts and Crafts in Paris in 1855, he specialized in the construction of metal bridges.His first work of this type was carried out in Bordeaux in 1858; In 1877 he designed the impressive 160-meter metal arch of the bridge over the Douro, near Porto.A little later it surpassed its own mark with the Garabit viaduct, for many years the highest artificial laying in the world (120 meters).

Gustave Eiffel

Pioneer when considering the aerodynamic factor in its constructions, to the point of building the first aerodynamic laboratory in Auteuil, To his credit are works as diverse as the mobile dome of the Nice Observatory or the metal structure of the famous Statue of Liberty in New York.

However, his greatest achievement was the impressive steel tower located in Paris and which was named after him.The Eiffel Tower was built on the Champ de Mars in Paris for the Universal Exhibition of 1889.Today it is one of the best-known buildings in the world and has become the symbol of the French capital.

The organization of the Universal Exhibition, commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution (1789), was used by Gustave Eiffel to demonstrate to the world the technological advances in the architecture of his country through the erection of a tower 300 meters high and an iron structure.After the approval of the project (conceived by his collaborator Maurice Koechlin) by the competent body, it was erected on the left bank of the Seine, in the heart of Paris.The works began in 1887 and two years and 6,900 tons of iron were invested in its construction.

The tower stands on a square base of 125 meters, which has the four starting supports embedded in its corners in which the elegant arches that support the different floors are inscribed.The curves of the four sides provide an impression of strength and beauty and the gaps favor the passage of air, guaranteeing the stability of the building.Its large-capacity elevator system was the first to be installed in the world.Its 300 meters made it the tallest building in the world until the inauguration of the Empire State Building in New York in 1922.

Eiffel Tower

Its Construction aroused a heated controversy, as many considered it a crude structure lacking artistic sensibility.At the beginning of its construction, a group of intellectuals-among which Garnier and Zola stood out-signed a letter of protest addressed to the curator of the Exhibition, in which they complained about that "vertiginous and ridiculous tower that dominates Paris, like a gigantic dark factory chimney ".The composer Charles Gounod and the writer Alexandre Dumas Jr.wrote a letter of protest against the construction of the tower; the writer Guy de Maupassant left Paris to show his disgust.But once finished, many of the initial detractors were seduced "by the fantastic that delights our littleness.Planted on its arched legs, solid, huge, monstrous, brutal, it seems that, disregarding whistles and applause, it tries to seek and defy the sky, regardless of what moves at your feet."

Originally conceived as a temporary attraction, in 1909 it was bought by the French state.Later it was considered to be demolished due to high maintenance costs and the danger of future weakening of the structure by oxidation.However, the strong popular reaction to the idea that the tower, considered a national symbol, would disappear, led to the abandonment of this purpose.Nowadays, in addition to being a tourist attraction, the tower houses the facilities of the French Radio and Television and functions as a beacon for planes heading to Paris Orly airport.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John boorman Biography

John Boorman (London, 1933) British film director.He began his career as a film critic and editor on television.His most representative works are: Duel in the Pacific (1968), Leo, the last (1970), Defense (1972), Excalibur (1981), The emerald jungle (1984), Where the heart is (1990), I dream I woke up (1991) and Beyond Rangoon (production, 1995).
Post a Comment
Read more

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini Biography

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini (Florence, 1876-Havana, 1956) Spanish physician.A scholar of recognized international prestige, he dedicated himself to research on endemic diseases of equatorial Africa and was Professor of Parasitology at the University of Madrid. Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini He studied Medicine at the University of Rome, where he received his doctorate with a thesis on acromegaly.He was for several years Battista Grassi's assistant, with whom he devoted himself to researching malaria-transmitting insects.In 1903 he arrived in Madrid as a speaker at the International Congress of Medicine, to which he presented a communication on the etiology and epidemiology of malaria.From this moment he settled in Spain and, together with a group of doctors who rallied around him, continued his work as a parasitologist here. In collaboration with Francisco Huertas, among others, he published, Investigations and studies on malaria in Spain (1903), an excellent work in which ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jose Marin Cañas Biography

José Marín Cañas (San José, 1904-?, 1980) Costa Rican novelist.Representative of the indigenous current, his work has as a backdrop the response of the indigenous people to a hostile environment and their fight against the social injustice that oppresses them.His most important novels are Green Hell (1935), in which he describes the Chaco War; and Pedro Arnáez (1942), a tragic peasant story.Of the rest of his production, it is worth mentioning the collection of short stories Los bigardos del ron (1929) together with the novels Tears of steel (1929) and Land of rabbits (1971).
Post a Comment
Read more

Francesco Robortello Biography

Francesco Robortello (Udine, 1516-Padua, 1567) Italian philologist.He was a teacher of eloquence at various Italian universities (Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna).His main works are: De historica facultate (1548), De vita et victu populi Romani sub imperatoribus Caesaribus Augustis (1559) and his editions of the Poetics of Aristotle (1548).
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary oldman Biography

Gary Oldman (Leonard Gary Oldman; London, 1958) British actor.Born into a humble family, he studied Drama Art on a scholarship at Rose Brudford Drama College until 1979.He then joined the Greenwich Young People's Theater group and appeared in numerous plays in the early 1980s.He had his greatest success with The pope's wedding , which earned him the Best Actor award from the British Theater Association in 1985. He began working in film in supporting roles.His portrayal of the punk singer Sid Vicious, leader of the legendary rock group Sex Pistols who died of heroin overdose, in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), made him known internationally.In this role some of the constants of his acting career were already present: giving life to a character at the limit for whose characterization he had to physically transform, in this case lose weight. Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy (1986) In Open your ears ( 1987), by Stephen Frears, delighted the viewer in one of his mos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Heinrich Brüning Biography

Heinrich Brüning (Münster, 1885-Norwich, 1970) German politician, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the final phase of the so-called Weimar Republic, presided over by Paul Hindenburg.A conservative in ideology and a practicing Catholic, Brüning also served as Foreign Minister from October 1932, shortly before Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany.As a specialist in financial affairs, his greatest achievement was to reduce to minimal amounts the war reparations that the Allies had imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).Unable to solve the country's serious economic problems, he was driven to practice a clearly right-wing policy that allowed him to govern with more or less dictatorial procedures, bypassing the Reichstag itself, which did not prevent him from being a convinced democrat. Heinrich Brüning Heinrich Brüning studied philosophy, history and political science at three different universities.After having made a series of study trips to Fran...
Post a Comment
Read more

John kerr Biography

John Kerr (Ardrossan, UK, 1824-Glasgow, id., 1907) British physicist.He studied at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lord Kelvin.He investigated the behavior of light rays in a transparent medium (particularly liquids and cubic crystals) to which an intense electric field is applied transversely.Kerr observed that said medium became birefringent, that is, that the light is resolved into two components (one parallel and the other perpendicular to the field), so that the light beam emerges from the circularly polarized medium, since the two components propagate at different speeds and therefore in different phases.This electro-optic effect, called the Kerr effect, has found important applications in the study of lasers and communications.
Post a Comment
Read more

John Millington Synge Biography

John Millington Synge (Rathfarnham, Ireland, 1871-Dublin, 1909) Irish playwright, a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the early 20th century.Born into a Protestant family, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.He studied music in Germany and later went to Paris, where he lived poorly for some years; During this period, he became interested in the novelists of French naturalism, prepared essays on literary criticism, and composed elegantly crafted poems, characterized by accents of deep tenderness. John Millington Synge In Paris he met WB Yeats, his compatriot poet who led him to return to Ireland and be inspired by the lives of the poor peasants and fishermen of his land.In the Aran Islands, the western outpost of Irish territory eternally beaten by rain and wind, a Catholic colony had lived there since Cromwell's time to avoid persecution.The difficulty of relations with civilization, the hard work necessary to obtain the scarce resources from the ocean an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edgar Douglas Adrian Biography

Edgar Douglas Adrian (London, 1889-Cambridge, 1977) British physiologist.Author of important works on the physiology of the nervous system, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1932.Edgar Adrian studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1911 with the highest marks. Edgar Adrian His interest in the mechanisms of nerve transmission led him to accept a medical position at the Connaught Military Hospital during World War I, where he did research the various nerve injuries and neuroses afflicting the Allied soldiers.In 1920 he became Professor of the Department of Physiology at Cambridge, and three years later he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In November 1925 he managed to record the propagation of the impulse in a single afferent nerve fiber with the Lucas capillary electrometer.He was able to explain the transmission mechanism of nerves with the help of Dr.Zotterman, and later developed a method for transforming electrical impuls...
Post a Comment
Read more

Joseph Caillaux Biography

Joseph Caillaux (Joseph Marie Auguste Caillaux; Le Mans, 1863-Mamers, 1944) French politician.He became Prime Minister (between June 1911 and January 1912) and several times Minister of Finance of his country, a position from which he introduced the proportional system of Income Tax.Initially conservative, he gradually evolved towards more leftist and progressive positions, and joined Aristide Briand's Radical Socialist Party, which he came to chair.During the First World War, Joseph Caillaux maintained a series of contacts with high German authorities in order to find a dialogue path that would end the conflict, which served him so that once the war was over, he was accused of high treason for collaborationist. Joseph Caillaux As soon as he finished his law studies, Joseph Caillaux entered the French administration in 1888 as a tax inspector, since he combined with that of professor in the Free School of Political Sciences.After a first failure in his attempt to enter a pol...
Post a Comment
Read more