The Eiffel Tower employees have chosen the day of the 100th anniversary of the death of its creator, the engineer Gustave Eiffel, to proclaim a day of strike to protest against the company, Sete, which manages it. The news is reported on the monument’s website and is also accompanied by a statement from the CGT, the largest French national trade union. The protest, which falls during a holiday period and obviously of great tourist influx, will last all day.
Today, December 27, 2023, is the centenary of the death of one of the most famous engineers in the world, the Frenchman Gustave Eiffel, died in Paris at the age of 91 on 27 December 1923. Although he went down in history for his iconic Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris and France, he left a legacy in 30 countries of over 500 buildings and infrastructures among the most innovative even if less well-known than the iron lady of the Ville Lumiere. An uncommon engineer, a renowned scientist, Eiffel is still remembered today, not only in France, as the brilliant creator of a vast architectural heritage made up of hundreds of works – towers, bridges, lighthouses, stations – as well as inventions in the fields of meteorology and of aerodynamics. This is why the descendants of the captain of industry, startuppers before his time, have submitted a request for the transfer of his remains to the Pantheon. For its inauguration, on March 31, 1889, the engineer Eiffel climbed all 1,710 steps on foot to hoist the French tricolor to the top of the tower.
The first time as a student at the Universal Exhibition in Paris
His father, Alexandre Gustave Bonickhausen was born in Dijon on 15 December 1832 into a wealthy family. His father Alexandre Bonickhausen – descendant of a German from Marmagen who settled in Paris at the beginning of the century – was an officer, married to Catherine-Melanie Moneuse, a businesswoman, entrepreneur in the wood and coal trade, with a solid personal fortune . The young Gustave received a solid scientific education at the Lycee Royal and the figure of his uncle Jean-Baptiste Mollerat, the well-known inventor of a process for extracting vinegar from wood, who introduced him to the study of chemistry, was very significant for his education. The young man continued his training at the highest levels in the prestigious Polytechnic university and to the academy of‘Ecole Central Arts and Manufacturesgraduating as a chemical engineer in 1855. The same year that Gustave visited the Paris Universal Exhibition, with a season pass given to him by his mother.