The History of World Expositions |
The Paris World Exposition 1889
The engineer who built the 300 meter high tower which was soon to bear his name, came from a family of German migrants called Boenickhausen, who took on the more easily pronounceable name of their home region, the north Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel was born on 15 December 1823 in Dijon. After attending school and taking his baccalaureate, he studied engineering at the Ecole des Arts et Manufactures in Paris. He was uninspired as a student, his degree, majoring in chemistry, was only average. It was only while working as an unsalaried apprentice at an iron works in Dijon that he developed his taste for engineering with iron. Eiffel started climbing the ladder to success in 1856, and ten years later set up his own company in Levallois-Perret near Paris. The Societé Eiffel soon had a reputation as a specialist for large scale iron constructions: bridges with spans previously unheard of, like the Garabit-Viaduct, the station at Pest, and the dome of the observatory in Nice. Eiffel's firm even supplied prefabricated iron bridges - which could be ordered from a catalogue. |
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EXPOSEEUM - The Museum of World Exhibitions, Hanover, Expo Plaza 11 Open every Sunday from 11 to 16 |
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