Gustave's Baby

Last week Parisian notables assembled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, built to attract visitors to the Paris exposition of 1889. Franc,ois Carnot hoisted above it the same gold-fringed tricolor, which, as the son of France's President Sadi Carnot, he had first raised on March 29, 1889.

The original idea for the Eiffel Tower came from America, where a similar structure was proposed for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Parisians jeered at Engineer Gustave Eiffel's "monster of the imagination," predicted that it would fall down. Alexandre Dumas, fils, called it a "horror." Because of "this torturing, inevitable nightmare," Guy de Maupassant fled the capital. M. Eiffel smiled, gave his personal fortune to finish the Tower, after Government funds ran out when it was one-fourth completed. The Tower attracted nearly two million cash customers in its first year, brought its builder wealth and made him an officer in the Legion of Honor.

A brilliant engineer who pioneered the structural use of iron, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, born in Dijon in 1832, had built daring bridges in France, Portugal, Bolivia, Indo-China and Hungary, but the Tower which bears his name was always his favorite baby. In its top he made his home and laboratory for aerodynamic experiments until his retirement in 1921: his longevity (he died at the age of 91) he ascribed to the fine air he breathed in his lofty nest.

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