Gustave Eiffel | The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower was by far the largest structure built for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. Eiffel was an entrepreneur and he had two engineers working with him to plan the iron tower, but not everyone was on board with the design. Audiences today may be surprised to hear that many Parisians thought the design was an eyesore and a blight on their beautiful city. The architect Stephen Sauvestre was commissioned to work on the design to make it less ugly. He drafted arches, glass-walled halls on every level, stonework around the base, and other ornamental details throughout the structure. Ultimately they stripped it down to a more utilitarian structure but they kept his idea of arches at the base. The form of the tower is largely determined by the engineers' calculations to cut down on wind resistance. The primary resistance came from writers and artists who criticized the tower throughout its construction. I think my favorite description came from Francois Coppee who called it “this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed.” Of course, this criticism faded as the world’s fair began and the tower was a huge hit. Over 2 million visitors came to marvel at it. While it did prove successful, the Eiffel tower was not intended to be a permanent fixture in the city. It was built to wow visitors in the fair and then to be torn down later. Eiffel only had a permit to have the structure stand for 20 years. 

The idea that the tower would be temporary provided an interesting opportunity for another sort of creative visionary. A truly remarkable con artist named Victor Lustig sold the tower for scrap… two times. While truly awful, his plan was quite clever. He posed as an official with the French government, but instead of claiming a high-status post, he pretend to be a mid-level, government official. He met with heads of various scrap iron companies telling them that because of the sensitive nature of such a high-profile project he was trying to meet with people discretely to get bids for the roughly 7,300 tons of iron used to build the tower. He then met privately with the least successful of the bidders and tried to appear empathetic. He told the guy, look I know you are up and coming, it’s hard to compete with these bigger companies, I feel for you. I’m just a mid-level government employee, I’m struggling too. Maybe we can help each other out. He actually got the guy to bribe him for the contract for all the scrap iron which did a few things. It made him seem a little more credible to the guy he was conning, but more importantly for Lustig, it made his mark less likely to report the crime as doing so would be not only embarrassing but also implicate him for bribery. Lustig got the money and then fled to Austria where he watched the papers to see if there were any reports of his crime. He was correct that the businessman would be too embarrassed to report the crime. In the ultimate show of hubris, Lustig returned to Paris and attempted to repeat the same scam. The second time around he was not so successful and ended up fleeing the country yet again. He went on to carry out numerous other audacious crimes before he was arrested and sent to the notorious Alcatraz prison in the United States.

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