How America rose to Gustave Eiffel’s challenge(s)
The great French engineer and architect Alexandre Gustave Eiffel needs no introduction. But his impact on American psyche and engineering achievements does. About 100 years before the Space Race, the world was still in a race — the Industrial Revolution race where every western super power was trying to make the most out of the new age machines and steel. But while European powers inherited the scientific knowledge from Renaissance scholars, the run-aways/missionaries migrants of America barely had an engineering college. MIT was established in 1861.
Most of America’s inventions came out less from the vision and patient research but more out of an urgent need. However it was Gustave Eiffel who challenged America beyond its need. He challenged their pride. Not once but twice. Whether he was aware of this American complex isn’t known but inadvertently, the challenges he posed became the symbols of this great nation.
Challenge 1: The symbol of the American dream
Eiffel’s first challenge came to America as a gift in 350 pieces packed in 214 crates — the Statue of Liberty. Sent by French Government to commemorate the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence, this gift was far from complete when it arrived at the port of New York. Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was commissioned to design the sculpture but he required the assistance of an engineer to address structural issues of designing such a colossal copper sculpture. Entered Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. He designed the massive iron pylon and secondary skeletal framework which allows the Statue’s copper skin to move independently yet stand upright. It became the earliest of the curtain wall construction where the interior framework provided all the support. Two spiral staircases inside were to provide access to the crown. This massive statue was built in France and then disassembled and transported to the United States for reassembly in 1885.
But it was New York of the 1880s and bureaucracy still had its hold on the funding. Joseph Pulitzer rose to the occasion and began one of the first crowdsourcing campaigns in the history of America using his newspaper The World. Americans all across the country, from office boys to young girls to small children, donated whatever little amount they could. Of the 100,000$ raised, 80% was received in the sums of less than one dollar, thus making this statue not only a symbol of liberty but also America’s solidarity.
Finally in April of 1886, Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of American Institute of Architects was chosen to design the American part of the statue, the pedestal. Faced with financial constraints, the pedestal was made out of 20 feet thick walls of poured concrete faced with granite blocks. To withstand the winds across New York Harbor and the Atlantic, four reinforcing girders, formed into a square, were set into the concrete 29 feet up the pedestal. A second square girder was placed 55 feet higher close to the top of this 89 feet high pedestal The two girder sets and Eiffel’s iron framework was then connected by steel I-beams. Next came the section of the skin that was to be carefully attached. Due to the width of the pedestal, it was not possible to erect scaffolding and workers dangled from the ropes while installing the skin sections.
Twenty years after it was first imagined, the 305 feet Statue of Liberty was finally unveiled on October 28, 1886 on the site that struck Architect Bartholdi on his first visit to America. The site that every vessel coming to America had to sail past, the Bedloe’s Island, now called the Liberty Island, associating the statue with the American Dream forever.
Challenge 2: Besting Eiffel’s own “Tower”
The decision to celebrate 400 years of discovery of America by holding the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, came with a list of engineering challenges. The exposition was supposed to be a blatant display of America’s industrial prowess but the host city of Chicago was weakened by its soil. Bedrock was 125 feet below grade (impossible to reach using construction methods in the 1880s) topped by a mixture of sand and clay, so saturated with water, the workers called it gumbo. Architect John Root solved this problem by coming up with the idea of the Floating Foundation built using concrete, grillage of steel and Portland cement. Frank Olmsted(Central Park fame) from New York also joined the band, to prove that landscape architecture is a lot more than an elaborate form of gardening and requires both engineering and aesthetics. The Exposition also became the first large scale application of Tesla’s cheaper and efficient AC current. But for the Director of Works of the Exposition, Daniel Burnham, the biggest challenge was yet to be tackled.
The Exposition Universelle hosted by France in 1889 unveiled Gustave Eiffel’s superior engineering feat — The Eiffel Tower. Based on his patent “for a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 meter”, the tower is 984 feet tall and consists of an iron framework supported on four masonry piers, from which rise four columns that unite to form a single vertical tower. Each of the 18,000 pieces used to construct the Tower were specifically designed and calculated, traced out to an accuracy of a tenth of a millimeter and assembled using 2,500,000 rivets. Since its inauguration on March 31, 1889, The Eiffel Tower remained the world’s tallest man-made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930.
Proud as Americans are, they had to come up with something that was more magnificent. Announcements were made, rewards promised. But all the submitted ideas focussed on towers and seemed nothing more than ridiculous copies of the original idea(A log tower 500 feet taller than Eiffel with a cabin on the top). But Burnham didn’t want a tower. He wanted something else, something “novel, original, daring and unique”. These words finally inspired an engineer that night who was contracted by the exposition committee to inspect the steel. This 33 year old engineer from Pittsburgh submitted a proposal on December 16, 1892 that said “I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250 feet in diameter”.
The construction of the wheel began in Jackson Park assembling 100,000 parts ranging from small bolts to a giant axle, from steel manufacturers all across the nation. The “wheel” actually consisted of 2 wheels spaced 30 feet apart on an axle. Slender iron rods just 2.5 inches thick and 80 feet long linked the rim of each wheel to the axle. Struts and diagonal rods ran between the two wheels to stiffen the assembly. A chain weighing 2000 pounds connected a sprocket on the axle to the sprockets driven by two 1000 HP steam engines. Eight 140 foot towers were raised to support the wheel’s giant axle. But together with its fitting the axle weighed 142, 031 pounds. Nothing that heavy had been lifted ever before let alone to a height of 140 feet.
When the wheel was unveiled on June 21, 1893, it carried 36 cars of 13 tons each. With approximately 200, 000 pounds of live load, the wheel was supposed to carry about 1 million pounds. The Pittsburgh engineer himself, along with his wife got aboard the first car. The engineer was George Washington Gale Ferris and he was about to experience the world’s first Ferris Wheel ride.
The complete revolution took 20 minutes and when it reached 264 feet high, the magnificent view of Chicago Exposition in the background of crystal blue Lake Michigan completely mesmerized everyone onboard. Even with every car full, the wheel never faltered, its bearings never groaned. Needless to say, the wheel became the most popular attraction of the Exposition.
Due to the high maintenance cost, the original structure was dismantled after the fair and sent to St. Louis for 1904 World fair where later it was destroyed and sold as scrap metal. But the destruction of this original creation did not diminish the achievement of George Ferris who inspired millions of imitations, including The London Eye and one on Chicago’s Navy Pier. Eiffel Tower might have become the symbol of the prosperity of France but Ferris Wheel transcended the boundaries of nations and became a symbol of fairs and celebration across the world.
When I took this last picture on my Chicago trip, I wasn’t aware of these stories. In fact, due to my mother’s acrophobia, my own first Ferris Wheel ride happened as late as 2016, on Chicago Navy Pier itself. Little did I know then that the location of my first Ferris Wheel ride was also the location of World’s first Ferris Wheel ride.
