Gustave Eiffel

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer who built his early reputation designing railway bridges before founding his own engineering firm, Eiffel et Cie, in 1866. His company built the Garabit Viaduct in France and the Maria Pia Bridge in Portugal using innovative construction techniques including compressed-air caissons and metal-frame structures, and it also contributed the internal structural framework that supports the Statue of Liberty in New York. His best-known work is the tower built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris that bears his name, the Eiffel Tower, which demonstrated that a structure's appearance could be dictated by practical engineering considerations and still achieve lasting aesthetic acclaim. After a legal scandal over the failed Panama Canal project, for which he was convicted and later acquitted, he resigned from his company in 1893 and devoted his later career to meteorology and aerodynamics research, including early wind-tunnel experiments that assisted the first generation of aviation pioneers.