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Construction of The Eiffel Tower
Construction of The Eiffel Tower completed on March 31, 1889. The Eiffel Tower was the world's tallest man-made structure for 41 years until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930. 2. It is 324 metres tall (including antennas) and weighs 10,100 tonnes. Construction of the Eiffel Tower cost 7,799,401.31 French gold francs in 1889. The Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet tall, including the antenna at the top. Without the antenna, it is 984 feet (300 m).
The tower would have a square base, 125 metres on each side and 300 meters high”. The project proposal by entrepreneur Gustave Eiffel, engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier and architect Stephen Sauvestre was chosen out of a total of 107. The Eiffel Tower, La Tour Eiffel in French, was the main exhibit of the Paris Exposition or World's Fair of 1889. It was constructed to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution and to demonstrate France's industrial prowess to the world.
No drilling or shaping was done on site: if any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory for alteration. In all, 18,038 pieces were joined together using 2.5 million rivets.At first the legs were constructed as cantilevers, but about halfway to the first level, construction was paused in order to create a substantial timber scaffold. This renewed concerns about the structural integrity of the tower, and sensational headlines such as "Eiffel Suicide!" and "Gustave Eiffel Has Gone Mad: He Has Been Confined in an Asylum" appeared in the tabloid press. At this stage, a small "creeper" crane designed to move up the tower was installed in each leg. They made use of the guides for the lifts which were to be fitted in the four legs.
Construction of The Eiffel Tower completed on March 31, 1889. The Eiffel Tower was the world's tallest man-made structure for 41 years until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930. 2. It is 324 metres tall (including antennas) and weighs 10,100 tonnes. Construction of the Eiffel Tower cost 7,799,401.31 French gold francs in 1889. The Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet tall, including the antenna at the top. Without the antenna, it is 984 feet (300 m).
Foundation work of Eiffel Tower started on 28 January 1887
Work on the foundations started on 28 January 1887. Those for the east and south legs were straightforward, with each leg resting on four 2 m (6.6 ft) concrete slabs, one for each of the principal girders of each leg. The west and north legs, being closer to the river Seine, were more complicated: each slab needed two piles installed by using compressed-air caissons 15 m (49 ft) long and 6 m (20 ft) in diameter driven to a depth of 22 m (72 ft) to support the concrete slabs, which were 6 m (20 ft) thick. Each of these slabs supported a block of limestone with an inclined top to bear a supporting shoe for the ironwork.Each shoe was anchored to the stonework by a pair of bolts 10 cm (4 in) in diameter and 7.5 m (25 ft) long.
Foundation work of Eiffel Tower completed on 30 June 1887
The foundations were completed on 30 June, and the erection of the ironwork began. The visible work on-site was complemented by the enormous amount of exacting preparatory work that took place behind the scenes: the drawing office produced 1,700 general drawings and 3,629 detailed drawings of the 18,038 different parts needed. The task of drawing the components was complicated by the complex angles involved in the design and the degree of precision required: the position of rivet holes was specified to within 0.1 mm (0.0039 in) and angles worked out to one second of arc. The finished components, some already riveted together into sub-assemblies, arrived on horse-drawn carts from a factory in the nearby Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret and were first bolted together, with the bolts being replaced with rivets as construction progressed.
Challenges during construction of Eiffel Tower
The critical stage of Construction of Eiffel Tower
The critical stage of joining the legs at the first level was completed by the end of March 1888. Although the metalwork had been prepared with the utmost attention to detail, provision had been made to carry out small adjustments in order to precisely align the legs; hydraulic jacks were fitted to the shoes at the base of each leg, capable of exerting a force of 800 tonnes, and the legs were intentionally constructed at a slightly steeper angle than necessary, being supported by sandboxes on the scaffold. Although construction involved 300 on-site employees, only one person died thanks to Eiffel's stringent safety precautions and the use of movable gangways, guardrails and screens.
