Resumen de Santos-Dumont's Blimp Passes the Eiffel Tower
The photograph on this issue's cover is drawn from Gustav Eiffel's 1902 book, La Tour Eiffel en 1900. This book documented the tower's continuing development after its 1889 debut, including its importance for scientific experiments in wireless transmission, meteorology, long-range photography, and aviation. Eiffel addressed the book to the tower's critics, who claimed that its relevance and grandeur had faded since 1889.
The tower was the clou ("main attraction," literally nail, pin, or spike) of Paris's 1889 universal exposition, which celebrated a century of republican progress since the French Revolution. On this momentous occasion, the tower celebrated industrialism, the centrality of iron construction, the aesthetic exuberance of engineering, and, not least, French technological prowess. From 1855 to 1900, the universal expositions brought the world to Paris as they promoted Paris to the world. The tower's triumphalism and gigantism, perhaps emphatic to the point of neurosis, suggest a familiar long-term mix of pride and anxiety around the technological "radiance" of France, as analyzed by Gabrielle Hecht, Chandra Mukerji, and Sara Pritchard.
The tower's stark, industrial look was daringly modernist in its time, and conservatives put up a legendary fight before Eiffel won. The tower has been heralded as a bold, futuristic precursor to architectural modernism's functionalist and abstractionist tendencies, and even a pre-skyscraper. As a leader in France's public works industry (bridges, construction, and railways in particular), Eiffel rubbed shoulders with powerful politicians, financiers, experts, and engineers. His international reach touched the Statue of Liberty, the French colonization of Vietnam, and the ill-fated Panama Canal project under Ferdinand de Lesseps. Eiffel is emblematic of the Third Republic's commercial, political, and technological elites and their positivist, Saint-Simonean ideology. Eiffel's hard-won tower symbolized the social victory of these elites under the Third Republic and self-consciously promoted the fusion of science and industry cited by Theresa Levitt in her opening essay. As Levitt recently wrote in the pages of T&C, "France at the time was one of the most vibrant and high-stakes battlegrounds of the forces of modernity, and science was at the center of the fight."
