Skip to main content

Watch the Building of the Eiffel Tower in Timelapse Animation

“They didn’t want it but he built it anyway” — The Pixies, “Alec Eiffel”

When the Eiffel Tower — gateway to the Paris World’s Fair and centennial marker of the Revolution — was first designed and built, it was far from beloved. Its creator, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, an engineer known for building bridges, faced widespread condemnation, both from the city’s creative class and in the popular press. French writer Guy de Maupassant summed up the prevailing sentiment when he called Eiffel “a boilermaker with delusions of grandeur.”

Before construction began, Maupaussant joined a commission of 300 artists, architects, and prominent citizens who opposed in a letter what they imagined as “a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack…. [A]ll of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream.” One critic wrote of it as a “hideous column with railings, this infundibuliform chicken wire, glory to the wire and the slab, arrow of Notre-Dame of bric-a-brac….”

To these objections, Eiffel cooly replied it made no sense to judge a building solely from its plans. He also repeated his promise: the tower, he said, would symbolize “not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of industry and science in which we are living.” His “unapologetically industrial language,” writes Architizer, “did not please all.” But Eiffel did not boast in vain. When completed, the tower stood almost twice as high as the Washington Monument, then the tallest building in the world at 555 feet.

Not only extremely tall for its time, the Eiffel Tower was also very intricate. It would be made of 18,000 wrought iron pieces held together with 2.5 million rivets, with four curved iron piers connected by a lattice of girders. After careful calculations, the tower’s curves were designed to offer the maximum amount of efficient wind resistance. 

In the video just above, you can see the tower’s incredible construction from August 1887 to March 1889, modeled in an animated timelapse animation. Its design has far outlasted its originally short lifespan. Slated to be torn down after 20 years, the tower stands as tall as ever, though it’s been dwarfed several times over by structures that would appall the signatories against Gustave Eiffel in 1887.

Indeed, it is impossible now to imagine Paris without Eiffel’s creation. Maupassant, however, spent his life trying to do just that. He reportedly had his lunch in the tower’s restaurant every day, since it was the only place in Paris one could not see it.

Related Content: 

Paris in Beautiful Color Images from 1890: The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, The Panthéon, and More (1890)

Building The Eiffel Tower: Three Google Exhibitions Revisit the Birth of the Great Parisian Monument

Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Watch the Building of the Eiffel Tower in Timelapse Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3f5PiWs
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...
Post a Comment
Read more