Eiffel's Tower

by Nickolas Means

In his presentation titled 'Eiffel's Tower' at RubyConf 2018, Nickolas Means explores the historical and engineering significance of the Eiffel Tower, highlighting how it was a product of its time and a reflection of ambition and innovation. He connects the story of Gustave Eiffel's monumental achievement with the broader themes of resilience, engineering leadership, and organizational progress.

Key Points Discussed:

- Historical Context: The Eiffel Tower was built amid the recovery of France after the Franco-Prussian War, a time when the nation sought to restore its pride and showcase its resurgence through the 1889 Exposition Universelle.

- Engineering Breakthrough: Gustave Eiffel’s team employed revolutionary construction techniques that allowed them to complete the tower in just 22 months, setting a height record that was unapproachable with the technology of the time.

- Public Reception vs. Criticism: Initially, the tower faced significant opposition from prominent figures in art and politics, who deemed it aesthetically unpleasing and contrary to French artistry. Eiffel's project was seen as a stark contrast to the classical structures of Paris.

- Advocacy and Defense: Eiffel took proactive steps to advocate for his design by engaging with critics and presenting technical justifications to various engineer societies, effectively turning the tide of public opinion.

- The Collaborative Design Process: The involvement of structural engineers Koechlin and Nouguier, along with architect Sauvestre, illustrated a successful collaborative effort in designing a structure that was not only tall but functional and serving scientific purposes.

- Legacy: The Eiffel Tower, once considered an eyesore, has become a beloved icon of Paris and a symbol of architectural innovation and perseverance.

Conclusions: Means underscores the importance of fostering creativity within organizations, demonstrating through Eiffel's journey that ambitious and groundbreaking work requires early vision, resilience in the face of criticism, and effective collaboration. The example of the Eiffel Tower serves as an inspiration for pursuing remarkable achievements, highlighting that initial resistance can often lead to enduring legacies.

00:00:15.500 Well, good afternoon everybody. Here we are at the end of RubyConf. You have made it, congratulations! Thank you so much for choosing to end your conference with me. I am honored that you are here. My name is Nickolas Means, and I am a senior engineering manager who recently joined GitHub.

00:00:28.680 That is my personal octocat. I have stickers if anybody would like one! If you've gotten a vulnerable dependency alert on any of your GitHub repos, that's the work my team does. If you have thoughts on those features and functions, come talk to me; I'd love to hear your thoughts.

00:00:39.780 If you're looking for a job, I've got a spot open for an engineering manager on one of my teams. It would be great for someone who's just getting into engineering management, or someone who wants to move from writing code to working with people. So if that's you, come talk to me; if it's not you, we have a bunch of other stuff open too. I'd be happy to point you in the right direction.

00:01:03.090 I also co-host a bi-weekly podcast on engineering leadership with Brandon Hayes, the guy who talked right before me. We also have another co-host, Travis Weiss. I learn something from every single conversation; it feels more like peer mentoring than recording a podcast. If you listen to it, it's like being a fly on the wall in one of our conversations. It's a lot of fun and you can check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:16.830 And with all that out of the way, if you know me, you know I've always got a story to tell and today is no different. So let's get going. If you've ever been to Paris, you probably remember the moment that you first spotted the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was out the window of your plane, or maybe, like me, it was from there jutting into Tuileries, peeking up over the buildings.

00:01:30.329 Regardless, when you saw it, it probably gave you chills, saying 'I’m really here, I’m really in Paris.' Even if you've never been to Paris, you likely still recognize the Eiffel Tower immediately whenever you see it in print or in film. It’s the emblem of Paris and France and it's almost universally recognized.

00:01:55.920 Well, this summer, I had the amazingly good fortune to find myself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with my family. Now, I'm not normally one to share vacation photos with a room full of strangers, but this picture my wife took of my then seven-year-old son, Holden, is one of my favorite pictures in the whole world.

00:02:06.750 We had just finished a picnic on the Champ de Mars right in front of the Eiffel Tower, and my son pulled out his trip notebook and started to sketch the Eiffel Tower. This is actually the fourth sketch of the Eiffel Tower he did, because he really wanted to get it right. You can see how captivated he is by the tower, how hard he's working to capture it accurately. He’s so focused.

00:02:31.260 What tower does this to you? It pulls you in, it makes you pay attention. Now, I knew a little bit of the history of the Eiffel Tower already, but as I sat there watching my son draw, I found my mind wandering to the circumstances that brought the Eiffel Tower into existence.

00:02:43.470 When it was completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower, at just over a thousand feet tall, became the tallest structure in the world, almost doubling the height of the Washington Monument, which had just been completed. How did Gustave Eiffel build something so tall using late 1800s technology? Why build such an ostentatious statement piece in the first place?

00:03:00.120 Well, to understand that, we have to know a little bit about French history—just a little bit, I promise. This is Napoleon III, not the famous Napoleon, but his nephew. He was elected as the president of France in 1848, and at the end of his four-year term, like his uncle before him, he decided that he wasn’t ready to go, and so he staged a coup for himself and declared himself the Emperor.

00:03:22.730 The French people weren’t thrilled about being under an emperor again; they really wanted to be part of a republic. But he led France into such a period of prosperity that they just couldn’t be bothered to revolt and overthrow him.

00:03:35.160 That prosperity ended with the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Napoleon III picked a fight with Prussia—now part of modern-day Germany—over the growing power and influence they were gathering in the region. But he bit off more than he could chew, and he was captured in a massive defeat at the Battle of Sedan on September 4, 1870.

00:03:47.900 You can see our friend Napoleon III here handing over his sword after losing the battle. It was an embarrassment for him and an embarrassment for France. After the capture of Napoleon, the French set up a new republican government, and this new government’s first job was to get the Prussians to go home, rather than annexing all of northern France. To do that, they had to pay huge reparations that plunged France deep into debt.

00:04:11.880 Prosperity was gone, and now not only were they broke, but their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was a huge blow to the collective French ego. Fast forward ten years to the early 1880s: France was nearly back on its feet. It had paid its reparations and had largely recovered.

00:04:19.900 The republican government enacted at the end of Napoleon III’s empire had held strong against a variety of challengers and was guiding France back into prosperity. The thirty-year renovation of Paris by Georges-Eugène Haussmann had just been finished, replacing narrow medieval streets with broad tree-lined avenues.

00:04:34.599 Paris was ready to show off, and what better way to do that than to host another World's Fair? Prince Albert, the husband of Britain's Queen Victoria, had the idea in 1851 to invite all the nations of the world to come to London and show off their industrial progress.

00:04:54.800 The French liked this idea so much they hosted one of their own years later, in 1855, and then again in 1867 and again in 1878, eight years after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Sedan. Now, the 1878 Exposition was really meant to mark the French recovery from the Franco-Prussian War, but the French were so embroiled in political turmoil trying to get their republican government to stabilize that they didn’t begin preparing for this exhibition until about six months before.

00:05:19.610 And so it was a bit of a shambles. You can’t really throw a World's Fair together in six months. So in the early 1880s, a movement to host yet another World's Fair in France was picking up steam. An organizing committee was formed to start preparations. The first thing they did was pick a date, and what better date than the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille?

00:05:37.270 The storming of the Bastille is regarded as the symbolic start of the French Revolution to overthrow the monarchy; it’s celebrated as Bastille Day in France, much like Independence Day in America. Now, each of the exhibitions held in Paris had been more grandiose than the last, so the committee also announced a competition to design and build a spectacular centerpiece for the fair.

00:05:57.580 This competition got the attention of two gentlemen, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, two structural engineers at the company Eiffel et Compagnie. They had just finished working together on the beautiful Garabit Viaduct, which, at four hundred and seven feet above the Truyère River below, was the highest bridge in the world when it opened in 1884.

00:06:19.410 They had the idea of using the same engineering principles to build a giant tower as the centerpiece for the exhibition. So they got to work, and this sketch by Maurice Koechlin is what they came up with. You can see the sketches in the margin of a few famous objects on the right to show the scale here. There's an obelisk at the bottom, the Statue of Liberty above it, and the Arc de Triomphe a bit higher up.

00:06:40.430 They were proposing to build a tower 300 meters tall—1,000 feet—the tallest structure in the world. Koechlin and Nouguier excitedly took their design to their boss to pitch, and as you might guess from the company name, their boss was none other than Gustave Eiffel.

00:06:49.740 Eiffel had been a bit lukewarm on the whole competition; his firm had just completed the Garabit Viaduct and he wasn’t eager to take on another giant project. He wanted a few quiet months to calm down after that effort. What’s more, his city kept spending money on giant exhibitions; they would build a ton of beautiful buildings and as soon as it was over, they would tear them all back down.

00:07:12.470 Eiffel liked to build things of significance, things that would last. The design competition’s requirement that the centerpiece monument be easy to dismantle was a complete non-starter for him; he just wasn’t interested. Koechlin and Nouguier had hoped to change his mind and get him excited about the competition with the grandiosity of their idea, but it wasn't enough.

00:07:27.220 So they got this guy involved: Stephen Sauvestre. Sauvestre was Eiffel's chief architect and he suggested several modifications to the design to make it more useful and aesthetically pleasing. If you look carefully at Koechlin's drawing, you can see the modifications that Sauvestre sketched in pencil. You can see that at the first level there’s a glass observation pavilion.

00:07:49.490 More importantly, at the very top, there’s another observation deck with a French flag. The final design includes three observation decks as well as the slightly decorative arches suggested by Sauvestre. This got Eiffel excited: a tower where people could view all of Paris from heights previously reserved for balloonists.

00:08:04.970 It would be possible to do weather observations and even make radio transmissions from such a high point. So he bought the patent for the design from Koechlin, Nouguier, and Sauvestre and began the hard work of getting the design selected. The idea was immediately popular with the French public; they liked nothing more than the idea of dwarfing the just-completed Washington Monument, in effect, insulting the upstart Americans.

00:08:20.950 However, it was not immediately popular with the architects, artists, and, most importantly, politicians around Paris. So Eiffel went on the offensive. This was his first writing on the subject, and if you speak French, I apologize for the pronunciation. The title was "Un projet d’élévation de trois cents mètres pour l’Exposition Universelle de 1889" (A 300-meter high iron tower for the 1889 exhibition).

00:08:37.850 This particular copy, which sold at auction in 2015 for about ten thousand dollars, is autographed and addressed to General Georges Boulanger, a prominent politician who would go on to be the French war minister. Eiffel was giving copies to anyone who would give him an audience. He also went before the Société des Ingénieurs Civils, the Society of Civil Engineers, to present his idea and stand for questioning, which the engineers present were more than happy to do.

00:08:58.440 One of Eiffel's chief critics, Paul Laffitte, the founder and editor of the architectural journal La Construction Moderne, was not impressed with Eiffel's design. He felt it was counter to the hard work that Haussmann had done to beautify Paris and the great renovation. Specifically, in the May 1st, 1886 issue, he stated, 'Eiffel's design is nothing more than an inartistic scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron. It looks hideously unfinished.'

00:09:19.670 Another powerful politician who would go on to become the French Prime Minister decried it as 'anti-artistic, contrary to French genius. It's a project more in character with America, where taste is not yet very developed, than with Europe, much less France.' Charles Garnier, a prominent French architect, led the most famous protest against the tower, forming the Committee of 300, one member for each meter of height of the proposed tower.

00:09:36.680 It was made up of some of the most prominent figures in the arts and architecture in Paris. Their protest, published in the prominent Parisian paper Le Temps, said, in part, 'Imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower piercing the sky like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of Les Invalides, and the Arc de Triomphe. All of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream.'