How to build the Eiffel Tower

Taschen publishes a great (and very large) coffee table book about the Eiffel Tower and its construction with many detailed images, drawings, and more called “La Tour De 300 Metres”: http://www.amazon.com/Tour-Eiffel-Bertrand-Lemoine/dp/382284148X

Here’s another web page:

http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/documentation/dossiers/page/construction.html

It’s built out of puddle iron, not steel, according to Wikipedia.

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To say that the technology used to build the tower is “little better than that of the ancient wonders” is misleading. In the 1880s, despite the fact that electricity wasn’t in widespread use, there *was* widespread use of steam power for heavy industry. For building the tower, steam powered cranes were fitted on the tower during construction to hoist building materials to the top. These were a huge improvement over ancient methods.

Mr. Slesinsky is correct that “La Tour Eiffel” is not built with steel, but with wrought iron, of a variety called puddle iron which was common at that time. Steel has actually been around for thousands of years, but it’s widespread use as a building material did not occur until Bessemer patented a process to produce it cheaply in large quantities in 1855. Even then, wrought iron could be produced at a comparable cost for many years. It may be that this was a blessing in disguise; if steel had been cheaper in Monsieur Eiffel’s time, he might have used it instead of iron. Since wrought iron is much more resistant to corrosion than steel, the tower may not have lasted as well as it has to the current day.