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in Mayfair that dealt exclusively in his works—and is best remembered now for his dark drawings of London life, particularly for the scenes of squalor along the back streets. It is interesting to reflect that a very large part of our visual impression of nineteenth-century London before photography is based on the drawings of an artist who worked from memory in a studio in Paris, and got much of it wrong. Blanchard Jerrold, the man who supplied the text for the drawings, was driven to despair by many of his inaccuracies. (If that name Jerrold seems vaguely familiar, he is the son of the Punch journalist who first called the Great Exhibition hall the “Crystal Palace.”)

• CHAPTER X •

THE PASSAGE

I

His full name was Alexandre Gustave Boenickhausen-Eiffel, and he was headed for a life of respectable obscurity in his uncle’s vinegar factory in Dijon when the factory failed and he took up engineering.

He was, to put it mildly, very good at it. He built bridges and viaducts across impossible defiles, railway concourses of stunning expansiveness, and other grand and challenging structures that continue to impress and inspire, including, in 1884, one of the trickiest of all, the internal supporting skeleton for the Statue of Liberty. Everybody thinks of the Statue of Liberty as the work of the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, and it is of course his design. But without ingenious interior engineering to hold it up, the Statue of Liberty is merely a hollow structure of beaten copper barely one-tenth of an inch thick. That’s about the thickness of a chocolate Easter bunny—but an Easter bunny 151 feet high, which must stand up to wind, snow, driving rain, and salt spray; the expansion and contraction of metal in sun and cold; and a thousand other rude, daily physical assaults.

None of these challenges had ever been faced by an engineer before, and Eiffel solved them in the neatest possible way: by creating a skeleton of trusses and springs on which the copper skin is worn like a suit of clothes. Although he wasn’t thinking of what this technique could do for more conventional buildings, it marked the invention of curtain-wall construction, the most important building technique of the twentieth century—the form of construction that made skyscrapers possible. (The builders of Chicago’s early skyscrapers also independently invented curtain-wall construction, but Eiffel got there first.) The ability of the metal skin to twist under pressure neatly anticipated the design of airplane wings long before anyone was seriously thinking about airplanes at all. So the Statue of Liberty is quite a piece of work, but because all that ingenuity is underneath Liberty’s gowns, almost no one appreciates it.

Eiffel was not a vain man, but in his next big project he made sure no one would fail to appreciate his role in its construction by creating something that was nothing but skeleton. The event that brought it into being was the Paris Exposition of 1889.

As is usual with these things, the organizers wanted an iconic centerpiece and invited proposals. A hundred or so were submitted, including a design for a nine-hundred-foot-high guillotine, to commemorate France’s unrivaled contribution to decapitation. For many that was scarcely more preposterous than Eiffel’s winning entry. Large numbers of Parisians could not see the point of placing an enormous functionless derrick in the middle of the city.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications—that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches—but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous.

Many people loathed it, especially artists and intellectuals.