Eiffel by David I Harvie

Author:David I Harvie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752495057
Publisher: The History Press

NINE

The Panama Plunder

The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 was planned to finish at the end of October, with the formal closing ceremony on Sunday 29 September, but popular demand kept everything open for an extra week before the demolishers moved in to dismantle and dispose of all the temporary grandeur. The fair had remained open until late each evening, thanks largely to the widespread use of electricity. Not only was electric lighting clean and efficient, but it enabled lighting to be more than just functional; thousands of multicoloured lamps and spotlights were an attraction in themselves, and gave the exhibition a distinctively different character at night. The exhibition had also stunned everyone by being a financial success; attendance had totalled 32½ million, and there was a profit of eight million francs.1 The Eiffel Tower itself had attracted an average of just under 12,000 visitors per day over the seven-month period. Its income totalled 6½ million francs – one million short of the cost of construction; the difference was quickly made up after the exhibition closed. Contrary to the initial assumptions of administrators and others, Eiffel was in a position to recoup all his costs and repay bondholders within a year of the tower’s opening; it has been in constant profit ever since.

The civil engineer Max Nansouty speculated on the possibility of building a tower higher than the Eiffel Tower. He also indulged in a prescient suggestion:

If ever M. Eiffel was to build us a tower of 500 or 600 metres – not very likely, he informs us – here is probably how he would set about it. He would first of all build, on the ground, four 250 metre towers, in the form of pillars; he would then connect their upper parts, in space, in order to constitute a rigid platform, a new ground, so to speak, and he would set out again from this platform to build a new monument of 250 or 300 metres height; at that stage the structure would be complete.

There is also the question of building, in France, on elevated points at various distances from Paris, a series of cheaply built iron pylons or Eiffel Towers approximately 100 metres high, which would be kept in communication with signals from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This telegraphy would be absolutely ethereal, and after so many centuries it would be curious to see us return by the means of modern Science to a process of Gallic intercom-munication, like that of our fathers, i.e. by fires lit on the hilltops.2

The relationship between the tower and pure science, heavily promoted by Eiffel and hinted at by Nansouty, quickly began to be exploited. In August 1890, the Academician Louis Paul Cailletet (who had begun his research while working as a metallurgist in his father’s ironworks) began working on a long series of experiments into the liquefaction of gases:

Advantage is being taken of the Eiffel Tower to obtain high pressure through a manometric tube (the height of the tower) containing mercury. M.

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