Name: Summit Steel Buildings
Address: 22420 Dewdney Trunk Road, Maple Ridge, BC, CA
Telephone: 877-417-8335

Fun facts about the Eiffel Tower

Back to our article, “Eiffel Tower is a surprising precursor to modern pre-engineering”…

Design:

18,038 metal parts
5,300 workshop designs
50 engineers and designers

Construction:

150 workers in the Levallois-Perret factory
Between 150 and 300 workers on the construction site
2,500,000 rivets
7,300 tonnes of iron
60 tonnes of paint
5 lifts

Duration:

2 years, 2 months and 5 days of construction

More details about the construction

The assembly of the supports began on July 1, 1887, and the entire structure was completed twenty-two months later.

All the elements were prepared in Eiffel’s factory located at Levallois-Perret on the outskirts of Paris. Each of the 18,000 pieces used to construct the Tower were specifically designed and calculated, traced out to an accuracy of a tenth of a millimetre and then put together forming new pieces around five metres each. A team of constructors, who had worked on the great metal viaduct projects, were responsible for the 150 to 300 workers on site assembling this gigantic erector set.

All the metal pieces of the tower are held together by rivets, a well-refined method of construction at the time the Tower was constructed. First the pieces were assembled in the factory using bolts, later to be replaced one by one with thermally assembled rivets, which contracted during cooling thus ensuring a very tight fit. A team of four men was needed for each rivet assembled: one to heat it up, another to hold it in place, a third to shape the head and a fourth to beat it with a sledgehammer. Only a third of the 2,500,000 rivets used in the construction of the Tower were inserted directly on site.

The uprights rest on concrete foundations installed a few metres below ground-level on top of a layer of compacted gravel. Each corner edge rests on its own supporting block, applying to it a pressure of three to four kilograms per square centimetre, and each block is joined to the others by walls.

On the Seine side of the construction, the builders used watertight metal caissons and injected compressed air, so that they were able to work below the level of the water. The caissons were dug down to rest on the bedrock underneath the riverbank's marshy soil.

Is the Eiffel Tower rusting away?

While modern steel is more resistant the effects of rust and corrosion, iron from the 19th Century is much more susceptible to destruction. Use the links below to learn more about how French authorities are preventing the tower from rusting into disrepair.

Read how Summit Steel Buildings is involved with a research project to design more corrosion-resistant steel.

Read about our corrosion research project

Keeping the Eiffel Tower fresh
with a new coat of paint

Over the decades, the “Iron Lady” has changed her looks with the application of a spectrum of paint colors. When it opened in 1889, the Eiffel Tower sported a reddish-brown color. A decade later, it was coated in yellow paint. The tower was also yellow-brown and chestnut brown before the adoption of the current, specially mixed “Eiffel Tower Brown” in 1968. Every seven years, painters apply 60 tons of paint to the tower to keep it looking young. The tower is painted in three shades, progressively lighter with elevation, to augment the structure’s silhouette against the canvas of the Parisian sky. (Source)