Effile Tower

A man named Edouard Lockroy had an idea. He wanted to a build a thousand-foot tower. People had sixteen days to draw the plans. Still there were more than one hundred entries. Some of the ideas were really funny and some really scary. One person won the contest out of those hundred. His name was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. Mr. Eiffel used wrought iron to build the tower. He had been building bridges and other things out of metal for thirty years. On January 26, 1887 workers started digging the tower. Mr. Eiffel was worried about the wind. He was a careful man and very good at mathematics. None of the bridges he built fell down. Some of them are still used today. There was one problem that did however exist, how was he to take the pieces of iron from the ground to top of the tower. Mr. Eiffel did not have the huge construction cranes we use today to build our skyscrapers. He used creeping cranes. It was the tallest structure in world until 1929 when the Chrysler Building was finished in New York. You can see that the Eiffel tower has three platforms. The second platform is about three hundred and eighty feet above the ground. Eiffel married Marie Gaudelet in 1864. They had five children. Marie died 15 years later and Eiffel never remarried. One Of Eiffel's most famous project was the Statue of Liberty that now stands in the New York harbor. And the end of his life Eiffel was happy. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel died on December 27, 1927. He was ninety-one years old.