Mr. Eiffel Built More Than a Tower
Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who designed the Eiffel Tower, reportedly said "I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am."
It's probably true. Eiffel was a world-famous engineer before he made the tower that bears his name, but not for the kind of things that make a man a household name. He built his reputation as a bridge designer, though his company also designed and fabricated metal frameworks for buildings like train stations and exhibitions halls.* By the 1880s, Eiffel was the man you called when you had a technical challenge that needed a metals expert. He designed the railroad station in Budapest, the Bon March department stores in Paris, covered markets, gasworks, iron framing for Notre Dame Cathedral, and prefabricated mobile campaign bridges for the French army. Not to mention bridges and train stations throughout Europe, Asia and South America. His work as a whole was known for its lightness, grace and strength--qualities that would come to define the Eiffel Tower.
His most famous project prior to the tower was designing the internal armature for the Statue of Liberty. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi wasn't sure how to translate his beautiful plaster model of Lady Liberty into a finished statue. Not only was the proposed statue enormous,** but it had to be constructed in such a way that it could be disassembled for transport to New York and reassembled on arrival. Eiffel was the man for the job. He proposed the construction of a weigh-bearing iron frame to which thin sheets of copper could be attached, making a lighter, stronger statue.**** 
Eiffel brought that same sense of innovative technique and creative problem solving to the creation of the Eiffel Tower.
The tower was intended to be a temporary installation, built as part of the Paris World's Fair of 1889, which celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. More than one hundred artists submitted plans to build a monument on the Champs-de-Mars at the entrance to the exhibition. Eiffel won the commission with his design for a soaring wrought iron tower.
The plan called for more than 18,000 wrought iron pieces and 2.5 millions rivets to be assembled in an open-latticework tower on a four-acre base of reinforced concrete. Four piers tapered upward and converged at the top, punctuated by two platforms that provided the tower with structural stability and gave exhibition-goers a spot from which to view the city below them. Despite its lacy appearance, the only elements of the tower that do not contribute to its structural integrity are the grillwork arches that link the bases together, which Eiffel added to reassure visitors that the structure was safe. 
It took two years, two months and five days to build. On March 31, 1889, with the last rivet in place, Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps to the top and unfurled an enormous French flag.***** When complete, Eiffel's tower rose 986 feet into the sky--making it the tallest structure of its time, a distinction it would hold until the completion of the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building in 1930. The tower was the most popular attraction at the exhibition. People waited in line for hours for the opportunity to go up.
The tower earned Eiffel the nickname "magician of iron. It also shaped his future career. As a result of his experience in building the tower, Eiffel became interested in questions of the impact of wind resistance on buildings. He installed thermometers, barometers and anemometers on the third platform of the tower, which allowed him to monitor weather patterns. He mounted a radio antenna on the building, which he later used to develop his own radio network. He built a small wind tunnel on the second platform, which he used to experiment with air resistance, including the creation of an equation for propeller design that helped French engineers make improvements to the new flying machines. When people began to complain about the noise, he built the first aerodynamics lab outside the city, with a bigger wind tunnel, where he worked though the end of the first World War.
Busy guy.
*A new-fangled technique made popular in 1851 by the the "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry if All Nations" in London, AKA the Crystal Palace.
**111 feet six inches tall. Not including the pedestal, which brings the total height to 305 feet (plus that pesky six inches). I was led to check this by one writer's claim that when it was built the Statute of Liberty was the tallest statue ever made. My immediate instinct was to check the size of the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which was famous for being well, colossal. The Colossus of Rhodes reportedly stood 110 feet, not counting its 50 foot pedestal.*** The two statues were related by more than just size. The Colossus of Rhodes was also built as a symbol of liberty at the end of a long painful war between Rhodes and Egypt in 292 BCE. Bartholdi's statue echoes the presumed pose of the Colossus. Since the Statue of Liberty was also known at the time as the "Modern Colossus", I can't help but feel that last eighteen inches was deliberate. But I digress.
***Though I'm not sure how we know this, since the statue was destroyed in an earthquake in 226 BCE.
****The Colossus of Rhodes was built with bronze plates over an iron frame. Just saying.
*****15 feet by 25 feet, since we're measuring things today.
McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part 2: Attacking “Communists”, and Anyone Else Who Got In His Way
If you're coming in late to the party, you may want to read the previous post. Here's the short version: in 1948 Joseph McCarthy won a seat in the US Senate with a dirty campaign and began his senatorial career with a press conference calling for striking miners to be drafted, court-martialed, and then shot. Here's what happened next:
Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel for the US Army, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy
By 1950, McCarthy's Senate career was in trouble. The fact that he had lied about his war record during the election campaign had become public. Moreover, he was under investigation for tax offenses and for accepting bribes from Pepsi-Cola to vote in favor of removing wartime restrictions on sugar.
McCarthy directed public attention from his own problems by going on the attack. On February 9, 1950, while speaking to a group of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were "card-carrying" members of the American Communist Party,* some of whom were busy passing classified information to the Soviet Union.
When the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asked McCarthy to testify, he was unable to provide the name of a single "card-carrying communist" in any government department. Undeterred by the absence of facts, McCarthy began an anti-communist campaign in the national media. He began by claiming communist subversives had infiltrated President Truman's administration. When the Democrats accused McCarthy of using smear tactics, he claimed that their accusations were part of the communist conspiracy.
As a result of McCarthy's tactics, the Republicans swept the 1950 elections. Having watched him use scare tactics to discredit his opponents during the election, the remaining Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. McCarthy, whom the Washington press corps once voted "the worst US senator", was now one of the most powerful men in Congress.
After being re-elected in 1952, McCarthy became the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Government Operations, and more importantly of its permanent investigation subcommittee. In an ironic mirror image of Stalin's trials of alleged counter-revolutionaries,** McCarthy used his position to hold hearings against individuals whom he accused of being communists and government agencies that he claimed harbored them. He attacked journalists who criticized his hearings. He campaigned to have "anti-American" books removed from libraries. He accused newly elected Republican president Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on communism.
McCarthy ran into trouble in April, 1954, when he turned his attention to supposed communist infiltration of the United States Army. The army fought back by providing information to journalists known to oppose McCarthy, including evidence that McCarthy had tried to use his influence to get preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted. The end came with the decision to broadcast the "Army-McCarthy" hearings on national television. For thirty-six days Americans watched from their living rooms as McCarthy bullied witnesses and offered evasive answers to questions. At one point, after McCarthy attacked a young Army lawyer, the Army's chief counsel, Joseph Nye Welch, demanded "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
By the end of the hearings, McCarthy had lost most of his allies and the trust of the American people. Later that year, with a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two,** the Senate officially censured McCarthy for conduct "contrary to Senate traditions." He remained in office, but had no power beyond his senatorial vote. (Which is not nothing.) He died before the end of his second term, leaving as his legacy a cautionary political tale of popular fear, demagoguery, abuse of power, and the value of a democratic system of checks and balances.
*Personally, I doubt that the American Communist Party issued membership cards at the time. It was a disorganized group prone to fracturing along theological lines.
**Ironic from an historical perspective. It is unlikely that McCarthy intended the irony.
***Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. But unless I'm doing the math wrong that still means some senators must have abstained or taken a convenient bathroom break.
McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part I: Dirty Tactics
Senator Joe McCarthy* and the Red Scare of the 1950s have been on my mind a lot lately. McCarthy took the very real fear many Americans felt about the spread of communism** and turned them into an official witch-hunt for his personal political benefit.
Born to a Wisconsin farm family in 1908, McCarthy left school at fourteen. He worked as a chicken farmer and a grocery store manager before he went back to high school at the age of twenty. He went on to get a law degree from Marquette University. Up to this point, McCarthy's career looks like a textbook example of the American dream.
In 1948, McCarthy was elected to the United States Senate in an upset victory over the incumbent senator, Robert LaFollette, Jr. LaFollette was a second generation progressive Republican senator.*** His seat in the senate seemed so secure that people said if "Little Bob" could be unseated anyone could be unseated.
McCarthy fought a dirty campaign. He lied about his war record, claiming to have flown thirty-two missions during World War II when he actually worked a desk job and only flew in training exercises. LaFollette was too old for military service when Pearl Harbor was bombed, but McCarthy attacked him for not enlisting and accused him of war profiteering. Ad hominem attacks make for sexy headlines. Fact checking does not. McCarthy won the election.
On his first day as a senator, McCarthy called a little-noticed press conference that was a dress rehearsal for his later performance as a demagogue. He had a modest proposal for ending a coal strike that was in progress: draft union leader John L. Lewis and the striking miners into the army. If they still continued to strike, he argued that they should be court-martialed for insubordination and then shot.
It was an ugly start to a career that would get even uglier.
*Not to be confused with Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005), who was the opposite of the early Senator McCarthy in pretty much every way possible.
**Whether those fears were legitimate is another question all together.
***Yes, you read that correctly. A progressive Republican. So progressive that he was accused of being a fellow-traveler with communists. The world has changed.