Before his tower, Gustave Eiffel built the skeleton inside the Statue of Liberty
Gustave Eiffel's firm designed the tower that carries his name, but his skill with wind loads first brought him a different commission. In 1881 the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi asked him to engineer the hidden frame for the Statue of Liberty, which was assembled in full at Eiffel's Paris works before being shipped across the Atlantic.
Eiffel was born in 1832 in the Côte-d'Or. His ancestors had come from the German town of Marmagen and took the name Eiffel from the Eifel mountains, though Gustave was officially registered as Bonickhausen dit Eiffel and only made the change legal in 1880. His mother built a thriving coal business, so he grew up with his grandmother. A bored pupil until his final school years, he was tutored informally by an uncle who ran a vinegar works near Dijon, then trained in chemistry at the École Centrale in Paris, graduating in 1855.
A family quarrel shut him out of his uncle's firm, and his first paid job was as private secretary to the railway engineer Charles Nepveu. He soon ended up running a 500-metre iron railway bridge over the Garonne at Bordeaux, built on piers sunk with compressed-air caissons, then a novel technique. In 1866 he borrowed money to open his own workshops near Paris. One early export was an all-metal prefabricated church shipped in pieces to South America and assembled at Arica after an earthquake destroyed the old one.
His reputation rested on daring bridges. For the Douro in Portugal, a fast, deep river with a gravel bed that ruled out piers, he proposed a central arch of 160 metres, longer than any arch then built, at a price far below rivals. It opened in 1877 and was named for Queen Maria Pia. Its success won him the Garabit viaduct in France without a tender, and on that job he hired Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, who would later be central to the tower.
He also designed kit bridges of small, bolted standard parts for regions with bad roads, and in 1886 built a 22.4-metre observatory dome in Nice, then the world's largest. Rather than rolling on wheels, it floated on a ring-shaped girder in a trough of magnesium chloride solution. After retiring from engineering he turned to meteorology and aerodynamics.
Source: Gustave Eiffel
