Itinerary
- Plugged in cars
- Eiffel's statue and tower
- Light, frogs and Scitechh plooo grond (plus grand)
- Cartwheels
Plugged in cars
I had read about these a while ago. Pretty much the same concept as the hire bikes that now seem to abound in most big cities. The cars are parked in marked bays with a cord leading from the car to a place to plug the cord in on the side of the road (kind of a wild western horse coral for cars).
Cant do any better job at explaining it then what I had already read so click on this link and wonder about how much the world is changing
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| Autolib |
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| The Autolib coral |
The tower
But first the man.
Gustave Eiffel was born in 1822 and died aged 91 in 1923. He was another of those stories of a kid who does just OK at school, kinda scrapes by then finds something he likes to do. He gets a few lucky breaks and then makes it big and plays the system to make sure his legacy is remembered.
By the time he and his team built the Eiffel Tower, Gustave (which I also think is a great name for a Cat or a fish) was a pretty rich guy. He started from pretty humble beginnings but his mum got rich selling her charcoal distribution business! He also had relatives who were big in the chemical business but most of all, grew up in France and had a lot of contacts.
After doing not very well at school, he gets jobs by nepotism and real life education from his uncles re: chemistry, production, business etc.
His tutors dont let him sit the exam for the best engineering school as they think he isnt good enough, so he goes to a second tier school.
He cuts his teeth working on railways (doing well, getting promoted etc) and then starts a business of his own although by then he had been doing a fair bit of external "consultancy".
This is the first railway bridge he was majorly involved in helping with although the design was not his. Maybe he "borrowed" a bit, maybe he didnt, but he did start learning a lot about how iron worked.
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| Budapest train station |
He wins a contract to build the Budapest train station by quoting VERY cheap. Interestingly, the style is different to other buildings of the time in that he places the steel support structures externally and more than that, uses them as an artistic focus.
Soon after that he enters and wins (again by quoting much cheaper than the competitors) a competetion to design and build the Maria Pia bridge for the Portugese Railway company.
Because he wasnt so experience, the Portugese set up a task force to kind of make sure that this Eiffel guy was OK. The committee was composed of a number of Eiffels long time contacts so he got the job. Opportunity and luck mixed with skill.
Leaving out a bunch of stuff that architects know about, skip forward to 1881.
Gustave gets a call from one of his Paris mates - a guy called Bartholdi, to ask for help because of his experience with iron and wind stress.
The project was to design the construction methods of a statue that Bartholdi had sketched and commenced work on. The head I think, had already been on display by this time.
Eiffel designed the internal structure and made some significant changes to the overall design before it was built at.
Later it was then taken apart, put in boxes, shipped to its new location of Bedloe's Island and put together again.
In 1956, Bedloe's Island had its name changed officially to Liberty Island.
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| Finished product |
Pretty cool huh - I had forgotten that he helped design the Statue of Liberty.
What I didnt know was that Gustave Eiffel did not design the Eiffel Tower!
There is a huge amount written about the history and development of the Eiffel Tower but in summary
- The original engineers and an architect who worked with / for Eiffel patented the design.
- Eiffel wasn't a huge fan of the project at the start
- When it was decided to put the Tower up for the worlds fair, Eiffel bought the rights to the patent from the 3 who had designed the tower.
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| Original "Eiffel Tower" design by guy called Koechlin - see Notre Dame in the corner for perspective on size. |
- Eiffel gets about 1 million Franks from the Govt and raises the rest of the cost (about 4 million) himself BUT the contract he signs gives him the rights to ALL income derived from the tower for the term of the worlds fair and the next 20 years.
- The tower goes up and is the worlds tallest building.
- Eiffel (who has an apartment at the top of the tower), contrives to keep it up loner than 20 years by making it a science project. It's all marketed as for the good of France and the good of science but Gustave doesn't do too badly out of it himself.
- He puts in weather measuring equipment, and later antennae which help France militarily and thus, the tower does stay up and years later, we get to climb its stairs.
The Eiffel Tower remains the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler building is competed (ie about 40 years). The battle between the Chrysler and the Empire State buidings is a fascinating read. Read a book about it in 2003 - remember the time because it was during the great New York blizzrd of 03 so couldnt go to work. Jeff was visiting us and we played in the snow, dug out a neighbours car only to see it covered again by a passing snow plough a few minutes later and had breakfasts from Bagel World.
We go up
We waited in line then climbed the stairs to the second level. At this point you can take the crowded, very long wait, elevator up to the top or you can elect to use the take your time, check things out a bit then walk back down approach. Emily and I went for option 2 whilst the other 6 headed to the top.
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| It was the tallest building in the world from its completion to the early 1930s when the Chrysler building got finished |
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| Shouldn't arms, weapons and explosives be higher on the list than cans? |
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| SUPERB mime of being an Eiffel Tower |
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| I'm the greyest but not the oldest! |
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| I imagine the builders plans would have been quite complex. |
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| View from the first floor |
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| Love a good photobomb |
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| Think the jeans have shrunk |
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| THE number of stairs climbed to get to the second floor (no more stairs from here) |
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| Aboriginal art (no really, it is) |
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| Macaroon Eiffel Tower |
other stuff
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| The kid climbs everything. I think its part of a plan to cause Lozza acute pituitary apoplexy |
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| Le Petit Palais |
There was an exhibition of cinema opening at the back of the Grand Palais at the Dynamo museum which had a cool entrance for the day.
After the Zombies had "de-mudded" their lil zombie shoes etc, we went around the corner to the Palais de la découverte aka the Science museum
The Scitech of Paris, this is a damn fine Museum which would have been even damn finer if we spoke or read French. Most of the displays are (not surprisingly), in French and free of any English translations.
The museum is beautiful. The entrance is palatial and with large staircases leading up to two more floors of un-crowded exhibits. There are regular scientific demonstrations - we went to one on electrostati forces but again, as our French sucks, couldn't keep up and eventually gave up. We did get to a fantastic frog / toad talk at which there were only 6 others including a man from Montreal. Between him, us and the speaker, we managed to do a bilingual frog lesson with interactive experimentation - Zoe as usual was a volunteer. Drew saw about half the show as he was lost somewhere in the museum for the first half - sigh.
There is also a Planetarium.
Just like the Dixie Square Mall shopping centre in the Blues Brothers Movie "this place has got everything" see 1:24 As an aside to the aside, my recollection is that the mall was left in a trashed state once the movie team had left. It remained a derelict, trashed and unused space for about 25 years or so before it was demolished. The city tried to sue the John Landis hollywood studio but it came to naught in the end.
We walked back home bck towards the Louvre's backside so to speak. Hung out with some statues, Drew interupted a drug deal (or perhaps two tall thin men meeting in a park), then, as you do, did some cartwheels before heading out to a Jaws like Japanese dinner.
Enough
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