Paris' most famous landmark is one of the world's great attractions, but the plans to build the Eiffel Tower raised a storm of protest at the time. W ithout doubt, the 19th century was the heyday of great engineering works. It was an age when technical progress at last permitted the realisation of dreams, some of them centuries old: tunnelling beneath rivers and mountains, creating short cuts across the isthmuses between seas and oceans, or raising bridges across rivers and estuaries.
A few undertakings, like the tunnel under the Channel, foundered on deeply ingrained prejudices; others ended in disaster the Tay Bridge or scandal the Panama affair , because of miscalculations and embezzlement.
Yet the achievements far outweighed the failures, as witnessed by Ferdinand de Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel, whose reputations were not lastingly affected by the Panama scandal, in which both of them were involved. The name of the first is indissolubly linked to the Suez Canal, that of the second to the 1,foot tower that was to be his most spectacular achievement.
Another feature of the last century, at least from onwards, was the creation of universal exhibitions that periodically gave the industrial countries an opportunity to show off their products and their technical expertise. At times this was most convincingly demonstrated in the palaces, galleries and halls housing the exhibition, or in the monument that served as its landmark. The use of iron allowed large structures to be speedily erected thanks to prefabrication techniques , then dismantled once the exhibition was over.
Some of the finest examples of this architecture, ephemeral by design, have vanished: the Crystal Palace, transferred to Sydenham, then destroyed by fire; and the Galerie des Machines of , its huge nave demolished after twenty years. But the tower, constructed during the Third Republic as a brilliant commemoration of the centenary of the French Revolution, has just celebrated its own hundredth birthday. So it is no accident that the past year has been a nest of anniversary dates on the other side of the Channel.
