One French critic called it “an inartistic … scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” with a “hideously unfinished” appearance. Another denounced it as an “odious column of bolted metal.” Hard as it is to believe, the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower–built as the centerpiece of Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle–was considerably less appreciated at the time of its raising than it is nowadays.
In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower (Viking, $27.95), Jill Jonnes recounts the myriad difficulties that engineer Gustave Eiffel faced in finishing his monumental erection. But she also offers a three-ring circus of contemporaneous characters. Prominent among those is Buffalo Bill Cody, who brought his Wild West Show–complete with stampeding Indians and sharpshooter Annie Oakley–to the Paris world’s fair at the start of what would be a highly profitable European tour. Appearing here, too, is bad-boy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who lorded over what had been his father’s New York Herald, while also establishing a Paris edition of that broadsheet, which promoted the ’89 expo–and eventually became part of today’s International Herald Tribune. Further animating this volume’s narrative are artists (including the tortured Vincent van Gogh and the mercurial James McNeill Whistler), and inventor extraordinaire Thomas Edison, who delighted Parisian dignitaries with his new talking phonographs.
Jonnes notes here, as well, that the Paris fair was important in educating the French about their colonial empire’s foreign acquisitions. Quoting from one newspaper account, she writes that “Fairgoers were lured by the ‘smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite [Vietnamese] gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.’” Amid such exotic enticements, it’s a wonder that anyone found time to scale Eiffel’s tower–then the tallest manmade structure in the world. ~ Jeff Pierce