On December 15, 1853, the famous engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was born in the French city of Dijon. He died on December 28, 1923 in Paris.
Between these two dates, he remained in history with a number of his works. Some of the most significant are the symbols of Paris and New York.
The symbol of America - the Statue of Liberty - partly owes its appearance to Eiffel. In 1881 the engineer developed the framework for it, which supports the work of the sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi.
Alexander Eiffel received his education at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Paris.
In the spirit of his time, the engineer built railways, stations, bridges and viaducts. Eiffel erected the rotating dome of the Observatory in Nice. He is the author of one of the Parisian department stores “Bon Marche”. The building was designed in 1876 and with it a new era in architecture was established, in which buildings began to be decorated with functional metal elements and glass.
A corruption scandal also reached Eiffel. The reason is that he worked as an engineer in the Panama Company. Eiffel was even accused of taking a bribe of 19 million francs from fictitious transactions.
In 1883, he was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine. But the Court of Cassation overturned the sentence due to statute of limitations.
Nevertheless, Eiffel's work for the 1889 World's Fair immortalized him. Construction began in 1887 and lasted more than 2 years. The height of the tower is 317 meters, and for many years it remained the tallest wonder in the world, until the Empire State Building was erected in New York in 1903.
Eiffel is also the author of books on aerodynamics, in which he described the results of his research in this area. In 1920 Alexandre Eiffel even donated his laboratory in Oteuil to the French government.