Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. As we have been saying a lot, because we're into it and it's exciting and we want you along with us. We are going to Paris this summer is so exciting. So in early June, we are jaunting off Paris UH to do a fun trip where we're gonna explore a lot of the places that were important during the French Revolution. And you two can come along with us. Uh. If you are interested in checking that out, you can go to our website missed in History dot com. Look at the menu bar at the top of the page. One of your options to click on says Paris trip exclamation point uh. And if you do that, you will be passed through to the website that will handle bookings. You can check it out see where all we're gonna go and the fun things we're gonna do. Uh. And if that is for you, you you can come this and we will all laugh and laugh and laugh. And like I've said before, I will cry at many things because I find things like museums in historical places, very moving. One of my friends has noted that a lot of pictures on the website where the bookings are happening are of food, and yes, we also plan to enjoy a whole lot of French food. Oh yes, I'm already like scouting out restaurants to take my husband on a date while we're there. So this is the second of a two parter about Gustava Fell. So I suggest you listen to the first one first before this, or this might feel abrupt and you may not appreciate the journey he went on to become the the iconic builder that he ended up being. And we talked, as I said in the part one, about Gestava Feld's early years, and that leads straight into today's show, in which we were going to talk about some of his most famous works. So just as a quick link up, as you'll recall if you listen to that first part. When we close that out, the employee that he had trusted to be his representative in Latin America and South America died. NFL had made the decision to completely pull out of his overseas business. As the Fell's work ended in South America, there were larger contracts coming in in Europe. First, in eighteen seventy five, Fel was tasked with creating a new terminus building for the Austrian Railways station at Pest, Hungary that's now Budapest. It was a three million franc project and the new building was constructed around the old one to avoid a service disruption. When the news station was nearing completion, the old one inside of it was demolished and then the last phase of construction was completed. One of the big stands that it Fell took in this design was asserting that the structural elements of the building should not be hidden, but should be incorporated into the design. He felt like his plans for the station quote carefully brought out the role in the nature of the various materials as clearly as possible. Yeah, he had ly championed iron work as an important structural material and he thought like, why are we hiding it? It's making our building stronger, or we could we could make this part of the design. Uh. And just a few months after the project for the station at Pest was contracted, a Fells firm one another large contract, this one in Portugal, and the competition for this bridge project for the Portuguese Railway Company had been fierce. Several other European companies had submitted proposals, and it would be a boon to whoever secured that contract. The design by it Fels partner too Phil Seig, which featured a large trust parabolic arch, was also the lowest bid and it gained the favor of the railroad with only minor modifications. It was built exactly to plan, which was incredibly demanding. Because of the river's conditions and the tight budget that they had proposed it, Fell and his team were able to cut costs, not by cutting corners, but by innovating. I Fel came up with a way to support the arch segments with cables building from each side inward, instead of having to build a scaffolding in the river, which would have driven up the expense. That bridge, the Maria Pia Bridge, was completed in less than two years and it still stands, although it's no longer in use, was made a National Monument of Portugal in Yeah, it's quite lovely. There's some great pictures of it online if you care to go looking. But though the project went well, there was some unease for Gustava fell. For one, he and Seig had started bickering over whether it fl could hire his brother in law again. He had hired his brother in law on a previous job, and he wanted to do so again and say Rigg wasn't into it. Uh. And for another, he seemed to really miss his family, and he actually asked his wife, Marguerite, and their youngest child to move to Portugal for the duration of the project. That was something he had never done before. But Marguerite got sick. She had experienced several bouts with pneumonia, and she became very ill while living in Portugal. She traveled back to Paris for treatment, but died in eighteen seventy seven at the age of thirty two before the bridge was finished. Gustave's sister, Marie and her husband Dr. Albert Hinok, who she married a year after her first husband died, helped him raise his children after Marguerite's death. But that wasn't the only tragedy that came his way in the late eighteen seventies. His mother also died in February of eighteen seventy eight, so in the span of just a few months, he lost two of the most important people in his life. After the bridge was completed, Sarah wrote a paper about its success and presented it at the French Society of Engineers. While a Fell had been open about his part in the project as well as another engineer, once SARAHI seemed to want to take full credit for the successful bridge for himself, I Fell became really irritated. He wrote his own paper about the work, downplaying his partner's contribution. By eighteen seventy nine, the relationship between the two of them had completely so word and their partnership was ended. Yeah, this is a thing that comes up a lot in sort of criticism of Gustava Fell. There are some questions about whether or not he was ever really very magnanimous about letting other people have their time in the spotlight on things they had collaborated on. So in this case it is a little bit like some people will point to this as a moment of like his his pride becoming the problem. But once the dust had settled from this disagreement, a Fell actually changed the name of his firm to company destabisiment if sareg actually attempted to get a portion of the company's assets, which he felt he was entitled to remember, he had put in a greater portion of capital when they first started the company, and he went after what he thought was his fair sharing court and this led to a legal battle that dragged on for twelve long years. Eventually, Sarah was granted a payment worth four times his initial investment with A Fell, but that was it uh in terms of how much the company had grown during that time. That seemed a little insulting and it was considered a loss. In the midst of this strife, it Fell was also involved in another legal matter, although this one was a lot less contentious. He had been going by it Fell, but his family name legally was still hyphenated, so in eighteen eighty Gustav legally had the family names changed from Bonchazen Fell to simply Fell. Yeah, when his great great grandfather had moved from Germany to France, he had done the hyphen nation on the name, and then they had really gone by a Fel for most of the time, so he was like, let's just strike that and this will be our legal name. In eighteen eighty fl began construction on the Viaduct of Garabee, and this was a massive structure. It actually had a similar design to the Maria Pia Bridge with a Trust parabolic arch, but this bridge was much larger, and at this point Gustava Fell had become so well respected that he was really the only engineer that was seriously considered for this channel lenging project. It was not put out to bids the way most projects would be. They literally were like, the only person who can build this is Gustava Fell. It was immediately after this contract was in place that a Fell formally and legally severed all of his ties with his former partners Serig. This was also a project that required pre setting the build site with essentially a many town for the workers because the bridge was in a pretty remote and undeveloped area. Because the build was expected to last for a few years, provisions had to be made for the workers to move with their families if they wanted. Everything from living spaces to retail stores that could provide the necessities to schools all had to be built for the construction on the bridge could even start, and as he had done throughout his career, Gustava Fell rose to meet these challenges. The viaduct, which included more than twenty six tons of iron in its construction and cost roughly three million francs. Was completed at the end of eight four. Accomplishing such a mass of goal made it Fell famous. He was already well known in construction, but this really kind of made him famous throughout the country and even in in throughout Europe. As you recall, this happened in Portugal, and it was sort of part of the reason that he got his nickname, which was the Magician du Feri or the iron Magician. And sometimes you'll also see this translated as the iron Wizard. I like that one better, but it's just me Iron Wizard. It's fun. It makes me picture him in a pointy hat with stars on it. Kind of uh, fantagious sty he's making little iron uh little iron Tory Fell there walking in in a row. Okay, we're about to talk about a famous structure that gestap it Fell contributed to that's here in the US. But first wee will take a quick break to hear about one of those sponsors. He was keeping this show going while Fels Firm continued to work steadily. The next high profile job that he worked on was actually the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World that was the original title for that piece, even though we these days just called the Statue of Liberty. Eduard Rene Le Fabre had initiated the idea of a gift to the United States shortly after the Lincoln assassination in eighteen sixty five, but this project took years to really get momentum uh and get to the point where they could send sculptor Frederic August Berteldi to the US to survey the possibilities and come up with a design. This statue is often cited as a gift of the French government to the United States, but it was actually not from the government. It was funded by private donors, the people of France, who all gave their money so that they could share this moment of of sort of brotherhood and support, the only exception being a fairly sizable donation from the city of Paris. Architect Eugene violet Le Duc initially started work on the engineering of the structure, and with his guidance, the head had been completed in time to be displayed at the eighteen seventy eight Exposition Universe, But Violet l Duke died in the fall of eighteen seventy nine and it was Gustave it Fell that was the replacement. It Fell developed a skeletal support plan for this massive sculpture and designed the stairwells within so the observation area would be easy to reach, and because the statute was going to be so very exposed when it was installed in New York, Fell took great care to plant with an eye towards stability, even inforceful wind gusts. So the copper sheeting that's used on it, each piece is anchored to the interior framework. None of those sheets are simply riveted to an adjacent sheet or sheets uh and none of the sheets are load bearing in any way. As we mentioned in our Emma Lazarous episode, there were some issues with putting together the financial capital on the U S side of things to complete the pedestal where Lady Liberty would eventually stand. As a consequence, the team working on the statue in France slowed down their production rate towards the end of the build, while the United States worked to raise the money to finish their construction. But eventually, everything, of course did come together, and just as he had done with a number of his projects that he had shipped to South America, Fell, along with berthel D and their teams, took the Statue of Liberty, which they had built in its entirety apart, breaking it down into three hundred and fifty component pieces for shipping, and then those pieces were packed into two hundred and fourteen custom crates loaded on a ship which left France on May eighty five. It took a little less than a month to make it to New York. That ship arrived on June seventeenth, and after months of unpacking an assembly, the statue was finally fully assembled in April eighteen eighty six. The dedication ceremony for it was held on October twenty of that same year. As Gstava Fell had been working on the iconic French gift to the United States, another project was starting to take root. In the early eighteen eighties, plans began for another Paris Exposition Universal, this time to align with the hundredth anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. By the time things really started to get organized for the event, it was already eighteen eighty six, so the clock was ticking for an eighteen eighty nine expo to be put together. Yeah, that's a little tight Yeah, people had been working on it up to that point, but they didn't really have all their pieces in place to be like, now we have a full planning committee, let's make this thing happen. And it sounds like ample time for something on a smaller scale, but not something as massive as these expositions were. Yeah, and exactly when the idea of a tower as the centerpiece of this show came into being is a little bit fuzzy. But in May eighty six, an announcement was published in the Government paper asking for submissions of ideas to build an iron tower for the X. There were specific needs included in this announcement. It had to be built on the Chendo Mao, and it had to be three hundred meters tall with a one twenty five square footprint, and all submissions had to be submitted within sixteen days of this announcement, so they only had two weeks in a tiny bit of change to get their designs made, drafted, and submitted. If those requirements seemed very very specific, it's because they were. They perfectly matched a design that it Fell had ready to go. Two of his engineers, Maurice cook Lan and Emil Newgate, had already been working on the tower design along with architects Defend Silvestra. Their earliest sketches of it date back to eighteen eighty four, two years before the Minister of Science and Industry published this call for submissions. It was absolutely no surprise that among the one hundred submissions for the tower contract was a design from a Fell's firm. Were actually more submissions than that. That was like the narrowed down these are the serious ones. After a month of analysis of these various proposals, it was determined that only a Fell's team had a workable design, and initially uh Gustava Fell himself had not been especially wowed with the ideas of Cookland and Neuguie, but he encouraged him to keep going Usially, yeah, sure, keep working on that, and once uh Sylvesta got involved, he kind of liked where it was headed. But as he realized what a feat this tower would be if it came to fruition, he actually bought out the patent rights from the other three men on the design, and in the terms of their deal, their names would always remain connected to the project because there was going to be some prestige if it got accepted and they would each get one percent of the estimated cost to build it. So, ultimately, in a move that could be interpreted as very astute or a very selfish or maybe both, I felt signed the contracts not as his company but on behalf of himself alone. Taking ownership in this way also gave f L rights to income from tower tourism long after the expo was over. He later asserted that he had only wanted to take ownership quotes to assume company responsibility for the enterprise and to devote to its realization efforts, which I certainly didn't believe at the time would be onerous. And it is true that had the men pursued submitting the designs on their own, they wouldn't have had the same means to build it if it had been accepted without the f L name and the associated resources that came with it. Yeah, this is another one of those times I mentioned in the first episode that he sometimes gets criticized as being kind of selfish, not very good about sharing credit, and wanting to kind of be the star of the show in regards to some of these projects. Uh, he claims that it was completely magnanimous. He really thought like, no, let me own it, and that way I will have all of the resources to build it, and I will take all the risk, and you're names will still be attached. But it's legally and financially all on me. But other people are like, no, dude, you wanted all the credit. Also in eight six, Gustav's eldest daughter, Claire, got married. She married a man named Adolph Salle, and this was actually a huge boon to their family because sal became one of a Fell's closest friends and collaborators, so he maintained that close knit family that he had had from the time he was a child. And one of those little tidbits that you hear a lot of times and like, uh fun facts about Paris kinds of articles on the internet. The design style for this tower was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. It was driven entirely by the needs of the structure. There was no attempts to cover up the iron work with masonry, and the lines of it were determined mathematically to be the angles and positions of supports required to sustain the desired height, which was to be the tallest building in the world. Yeah, there were also people like what is this tower for nothing? Just to begin good? And it seemed kind of wasteful and silly to some people to just build a tower for the sake of building a tall thing. But this idea to promote and showcase the materials of industrial modern design at the time deeply offended a lot of Paris's art community. A group called the Committee of three hundred, referencing the three hundreds of height for the proposed tower, actually submitted a petition to the Minister of Works condemning the design and insisting that it was going to mar the beauty of Paris if it were built a Fell's tower would they felt being affront to the very ideals of France, and they called it useless and a monstrosity. For his part, Gustav defended the tower and asserted that there was plenty of art and good design, and that there was no reason the French shouldn't become just as renowned for their engineering prowess as they had for their artistry and other fields. He famously argued that the pyramids at Giza were nothing more than artificial mountains, and yet they became some of the most revered structures on Earth. Yeah, that's another thing that people sometimes point to you and go, ma'am, that's some ego to be like, know, what I'm building is like the pyramids, you guys. Um. But he was right, uh, eventually so despite the detractors. Though construction did begin in January seven, and throughout the next two years of the build Fel and his critics continued to trade barbs even after it was completed. The complaints continued for a bit. Writer Guie de Montisson, who had been one of the men who spearheaded the petition committee, allegedly ate lunch in the restaurant at the base of the structure every day because he claimed that was the only place that he could eat where he would not be seeing a Fel's eyesore. You just have to see it the whole time you're going there. Well, he claimed that there was. He wasn't safe anywhere in Paris, Like everywhere he went he just saw this horrible thing he hated. So at least if he was in the horrible thing he hated, he wasn't looking at it. We will get to some of the specifics of the exposition and Universal Tower in just a minute, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. The effort, manpower and material needed to build the tower was of course startling. Like I said, this could be a whole episode on its own. We're kind of giving you the speedy version. But more than fifty engineers and designers had a hand in creating more than five thousand designed sketches that detailed every single aspect of the tower. A hundred and fifty workers at a Fell's factory at Levare manufactured the needed pieces, which were then carted to the Schende Mar and assembled by work site crews that ranged from a hundred and fifty to three hundred men. Building on the lessons that it Fell learned while working on a statue of Liberty, he made sure that the tower for the Expo and universal could withstand wind. The Tory Fell can sway as much as six inches at the top and as does sind to handle that movement. Yet also you'll see a factoid sometimes that it bends slightly in the sun and it can just rebounds back from that. And one of the interesting aspects of how the tower was assembled, at least to me, was its riveting process. There's a great description of it on the torfl official website that describes it. I'm just going to read what they wrote because they'll do it better than if I try to parse it and rewrite it. And that reads quote 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 force to beat it with a sledge hammer. Only a third of the two point five million rivets used in the construction of the tower were inserted directly on site. When the tower was completed, it was an almost instant popular success. Almost two million people visit did the tower, which served as the gateway to the exposition, and for the first time the Exposition Universal made rather than lost money. Yeah, that was always like not a not a profitable enterprise, Like they were basically putting it on to show off all of the many fabulous things that France could do. This was similarly a problem in other places that have had World's Fairs, but fundamentally they're kind of money pits. But this one so many people showed up just to see the tower that had been so controversial that they ended up making money. And as the public and indeed the world marveled at what Gustavo Fel had pulled off, criticism from the art community kind of died down. But fl found himself, unfortunately, in a whole other sort of trouble, right on the heels of his eighteen eighty nine exposition success. In eight seven, while working at his now famous tower, fl had agreed to build one of the locks in the Panama Canal that put him in business with Ferdinand de Lesseps, who we mentioned on the first part of this two parter. And by the way, for Bravo fans in the crowd, yes that's the same family. Yes, those of you that didn't get that ignored it's not important, but there is a Dela SEPs involved in one of the Bravo shows. Yes, related to Ferdinand. I'm gonna say I said that, and I don't know. Uh So to set the stage on why this was a problem, we actually have to go back a little bit to eighteen seventy nine, when Della SEPs became president of the company Universal du Canal in eighteen eighty shares of that company were offered to the public as a way to drum up funding to build this canal, and delas EPs was hoping to once again find the success that he had achieved with the Suez Canal with this venture, which would excavate a ship canal along the narrow isthmus of Panama. But the whole enterprise was a huge and tragic failure. Dela SEPs had not managed things well. He had really not studied historical exploration of the area, which revealed it to be exceedingly unwelcoming. He also had only made personal visits to the area during the dry season and had no sense of the dangers of the rainy season. Twenty thousand men died while working on the canal, due primarily to malaria and yellow fever. Even as men were dying in large numbers in Panama, Delisps was recruiting new workers in France. Yes, so there was just some one ignorance, kind of willful ignorance in the mix, and to just some kind of gross behavior of like, ah, lots of people are dying, I better go get more guys and not really tell them how dangerous this whole thing is And in addition to that very tragic human cost, there was also a very real financial loss in the venture as well. Approximately two hundred and fifty million dollars it's about a half billion francs at the time were sunk into this ultimately failed project, and when it ran out of money, all of those investors who had contributed to the project were left with no way to get their money back. So there were some people who believed in this, spent their life savings to try to be part of it, and then we're left destitute. The whole enterprise became a huge scandal, and Gustava Fell was in the middle of it. He had initially been against the project, which de la SEPs had conceived without locks. It wasn't until the addition of a lock system that if L had gotten involved. And just like Ferdinand del SEPs and his son Charles, Gustava Fell was charged with fraud for his involvement in the mismanaged canal project, even though he had not been part of that business administration side in he was actually sentenced to two years in prison and he was also fined, but that verdict was overturned by a higher court. But even though at that point he had cleared his record, he just felt as though his name as a builder was tainted forever due to the extensive coverage that this whole scandal had gotten in the press for years. At that point, it Fell withdrew from his firm and it was renamed Lass Society Dick Construction leve Valois Parae. At that point, Maurice Coklan, one of the engineers who had originally conceived of the tower that made a Fel famous, took over as managing director of the company. But Gustava Fell did not retire to an idle life. He merely switched gears and began a second career in science. He started conducting his own research with the intention that he was going to share any of his findings freely, and in eight he started conducting experiments at his famed tower. As part of the construction agreement that it Fell had signed to build the tower, he paid for a significant amount of its cost, and in return he was entitled to money made from the visitors for twenty years. After that, the city government would take full possession of the structure, and the intent was that it would be taken down at that point. But by the late eighteen nineties the engineer turned research scientists had added an antenna to the tower and was running wireless telegraph experiments there. And as a consequence of this work, which was seen for its value immediately, particularly for milly Harry applications, the city extended the concession to a Fell to continue his work. So he basically retained that same agreement on the tower uh for a much longer period of time, and the tower, of course was never disassembled as had originally been planned, since we were talking about it, because we are going to go see it in a couple of months. In addition to the telegraph and radio transmissions, I Fell began investigating aerodynamics, which he had become fascinated by while working on the Statue of Liberty. He built a wind tunnel at the tower in nineteen o nine and an aero dynamics laboratory in nineteen twelve and another part of the city where he could do even larger wind tunnel experiments and in his lab at a toy a. Fel used model aircraft in his larger wind tunnel to study the optimal designs of things like propeller thrust and speed and angle of inclination and air resistance, and his work there also contributed to missile design and how bombs were released. His work directly impacted the aircraft that France used in the First World War and established new levels of knowledge in aircraft science. I have actually seen some people comment that he really should be just as well known for his work in aircraft engineering as he is for having built this iconic tower. But u that doesn't get talked about very often. But for all this work in the Smithsonian Institution awarded him the Langley Gold Medal. Just as he had been in engineering bridges and other structures, Fell was meticulous in his calculations and measurements in aerodynamics, which Alexander Graham Bell said, quote have given engineers the data for designing and constructing flying machines upon sound scientific principles. Fel designed a fighter plane in nineteen seventeen, and his designs, which he distributed without any renumeration, were used to build two prototypes by the company that would eventually evolve into Air France. Those designs were eventually abandoned, though in nineteen twenty Gestava Fell actually retired uh he was in his eighties at that point. And he spent much of his time in the mansion that he had built for his entire family on the Rue Rebelais, and he wrote his memoirs during this time, but he did not have any intention to publish them. He just wanted the family to have a record of his life and work. And he had this very unique experience. We often talk about people not getting to know how important their work was while they were alive, but he had a sense while he was still alive of the impact that his work had had on the world. It Fell died on December nine at his home in his mansion. He was one. Twenty six years later, his bust was installed at the base of his iconic tower, and the Turife remained the tallest building in the world until nineteen thirty, and that was when the Chrysler Building in New York City was constructed. There have of course been other jockeying for positions of who was tallest. At one point there was an addition to the top of a Fell's tower which made it tallest again for a second. But now it's of course far behind many other impressive and slightly frightening things around the world. But I really was a little taken Aback. I didn't realize just how many kind of important structures he had built throughout Europe that have gotten you know, unless you're into engineering history or particularly his biography, people may not realize that a lot of the infrastructure of Europe is particularly you know, post industrial age he was involved in in some way. Yeah, fascinating cool and I kind of love him, even though he maybe had some problems sharing credit. But he clearly was also a genius, and I appreciate that he was very, very very obsessed with um making sure that all the numbers were correct. Like I I feel like at a time when people were just playing guessing games, trying to put things together and see if they worked, he was like, no, let's actually map all this out on paper and make sure the math is right. And he probably saved a lot of time in terms of like the development of architecture and engineering. Yeah, like for the world, not just for him. UM. Anyway, clearly I think he's cool. You have some cool listener mail. I do. Uh. This is from our listener Kaylee, who is writing us from Devon. I like that because I have a Devon rex cat that's maybe super nerdy and not Germane at all, but there it is. She is actually writing about sort of our Scaling Michael podcast. She said, I loved your podcast about Scaling Michaels, so I thought i'd send you a card from my favorite natural landmark in my area, Brent Tour. The pictured tour is not part of the more Land, but is the remnant of a volcano back when much of England was under a shallow sea. It's incredibly steep and offer stunning views all around. It's also incredibly blustery, sometimes so windy it is hard to talk perfect spot for a church. There are many stories about the struggle to build, say Michael's Church, which has a capacity of twenty, some involving the Devil and making the church sometimes be referred to as the Devil's Church. Brides used to have to be carried up the steep hill to their ceremony. But it is a beautiful church in a bizarre natural landmark, and I wanted to share it with you briefly. Thank you so much for the show, and hello from Devon Kaylee. That's a very cool story about a thing I did not really know about at all. So now I want to look that up and maybe will we'll see what happens. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and at the website missed in History dot com. If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, that sounds like a grand idea to me, you can do that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening again. If you're interested and want to get information on our trip to Paris in June, you can do that at our website missed in History dot com. Click on the link in the menu bar that says Paris trip and you'll get all the info. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. As we have been saying a lot, because we're into it and it's exciting and we want you along with us. We are going to Paris this summer is so exciting. So in early June, we are jaunting off Paris UH to do a fun trip where we're gonna explore a lot of the places that were important during the French Revolution. And you two can come along with us. Uh. If you are interested in checking that out, you can go to our website missed in History dot com. Look at the menu bar at the top of the page. One of your options to click on says Paris trip exclamation point uh. And if you do that, you will be passed through to the website that will handle bookings. You can check it out see where all we're gonna go and the fun things we're gonna do. Uh. And if that is for you, you you can come this and we will all laugh and laugh and laugh. And like I've said before, I will cry at many things because I find things like museums in historical places, very moving. One of my friends has noted that a lot of pictures on the website where the bookings are happening are of food, and yes, we also plan to enjoy a whole lot of French food. Oh yes, I'm already like scouting out restaurants to take my husband on a date while we're there. So this is the second of a two parter about Gustava Fell. So I suggest you listen to the first one first before this, or this might feel abrupt and you may not appreciate the journey he went on to become the the iconic builder that he ended up being. And we talked, as I said in the part one, about Gestava Feld's early years, and that leads straight into today's show, in which we were going to talk about some of his most famous works. So just as a quick link up, as you'll recall if you listen to that first part. When we close that out, the employee that he had trusted to be his representative in Latin America and South America died. NFL had made the decision to completely pull out of his overseas business. As the Fell's work ended in South America, there were larger contracts coming in in Europe. First, in eighteen seventy five, Fel was tasked with creating a new terminus building for the Austrian Railways station at Pest, Hungary that's now Budapest. It was a three million franc project and the new building was constructed around the old one to avoid a service disruption. When the news station was nearing completion, the old one inside of it was demolished and then the last phase of construction was completed. One of the big stands that it Fell took in this design was asserting that the structural elements of the building should not be hidden, but should be incorporated into the design. He felt like his plans for the station quote carefully brought out the role in the nature of the various materials as clearly as possible. Yeah, he had ly championed iron work as an important structural material and he thought like, why are we hiding it? It's making our building stronger, or we could we could make this part of the design. Uh. And just a few months after the project for the station at Pest was contracted, a Fells firm one another large contract, this one in Portugal, and the competition for this bridge project for the Portuguese Railway Company had been fierce. Several other European companies had submitted proposals, and it would be a boon to whoever secured that contract. The design by it Fels partner too Phil Seig, which featured a large trust parabolic arch, was also the lowest bid and it gained the favor of the railroad with only minor modifications. It was built exactly to plan, which was incredibly demanding. Because of the river's conditions and the tight budget that they had proposed it, Fell and his team were able to cut costs, not by cutting corners, but by innovating. I Fel came up with a way to support the arch segments with cables building from each side inward, instead of having to build a scaffolding in the river, which would have driven up the expense. That bridge, the Maria Pia Bridge, was completed in less than two years and it still stands, although it's no longer in use, was made a National Monument of Portugal in Yeah, it's quite lovely. There's some great pictures of it online if you care to go looking. But though the project went well, there was some unease for Gustava fell. For one, he and Seig had started bickering over whether it fl could hire his brother in law again. He had hired his brother in law on a previous job, and he wanted to do so again and say Rigg wasn't into it. Uh. And for another, he seemed to really miss his family, and he actually asked his wife, Marguerite, and their youngest child to move to Portugal for the duration of the project. That was something he had never done before. But Marguerite got sick. She had experienced several bouts with pneumonia, and she became very ill while living in Portugal. She traveled back to Paris for treatment, but died in eighteen seventy seven at the age of thirty two before the bridge was finished. Gustave's sister, Marie and her husband Dr. Albert Hinok, who she married a year after her first husband died, helped him raise his children after Marguerite's death. But that wasn't the only tragedy that came his way in the late eighteen seventies. His mother also died in February of eighteen seventy eight, so in the span of just a few months, he lost two of the most important people in his life. After the bridge was completed, Sarah wrote a paper about its success and presented it at the French Society of Engineers. While a Fell had been open about his part in the project as well as another engineer, once SARAHI seemed to want to take full credit for the successful bridge for himself, I Fell became really irritated. He wrote his own paper about the work, downplaying his partner's contribution. By eighteen seventy nine, the relationship between the two of them had completely so word and their partnership was ended. Yeah, this is a thing that comes up a lot in sort of criticism of Gustava Fell. There are some questions about whether or not he was ever really very magnanimous about letting other people have their time in the spotlight on things they had collaborated on. So in this case it is a little bit like some people will point to this as a moment of like his his pride becoming the problem. But once the dust had settled from this disagreement, a Fell actually changed the name of his firm to company destabisiment if sareg actually attempted to get a portion of the company's assets, which he felt he was entitled to remember, he had put in a greater portion of capital when they first started the company, and he went after what he thought was his fair sharing court and this led to a legal battle that dragged on for twelve long years. Eventually, Sarah was granted a payment worth four times his initial investment with A Fell, but that was it uh in terms of how much the company had grown during that time. That seemed a little insulting and it was considered a loss. In the midst of this strife, it Fell was also involved in another legal matter, although this one was a lot less contentious. He had been going by it Fell, but his family name legally was still hyphenated, so in eighteen eighty Gustav legally had the family names changed from Bonchazen Fell to simply Fell. Yeah, when his great great grandfather had moved from Germany to France, he had done the hyphen nation on the name, and then they had really gone by a Fel for most of the time, so he was like, let's just strike that and this will be our legal name. In eighteen eighty fl began construction on the Viaduct of Garabee, and this was a massive structure. It actually had a similar design to the Maria Pia Bridge with a Trust parabolic arch, but this bridge was much larger, and at this point Gustava Fell had become so well respected that he was really the only engineer that was seriously considered for this channel lenging project. It was not put out to bids the way most projects would be. They literally were like, the only person who can build this is Gustava Fell. It was immediately after this contract was in place that a Fell formally and legally severed all of his ties with his former partners Serig. This was also a project that required pre setting the build site with essentially a many town for the workers because the bridge was in a pretty remote and undeveloped area. Because the build was expected to last for a few years, provisions had to be made for the workers to move with their families if they wanted. Everything from living spaces to retail stores that could provide the necessities to schools all had to be built for the construction on the bridge could even start, and as he had done throughout his career, Gustava Fell rose to meet these challenges. The viaduct, which included more than twenty six tons of iron in its construction and cost roughly three million francs. Was completed at the end of eight four. Accomplishing such a mass of goal made it Fell famous. He was already well known in construction, but this really kind of made him famous throughout the country and even in in throughout Europe. As you recall, this happened in Portugal, and it was sort of part of the reason that he got his nickname, which was the Magician du Feri or the iron Magician. And sometimes you'll also see this translated as the iron Wizard. I like that one better, but it's just me Iron Wizard. It's fun. It makes me picture him in a pointy hat with stars on it. Kind of uh, fantagious sty he's making little iron uh little iron Tory Fell there walking in in a row. Okay, we're about to talk about a famous structure that gestap it Fell contributed to that's here in the US. But first wee will take a quick break to hear about one of those sponsors. He was keeping this show going while Fels Firm continued to work steadily. The next high profile job that he worked on was actually the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World that was the original title for that piece, even though we these days just called the Statue of Liberty. Eduard Rene Le Fabre had initiated the idea of a gift to the United States shortly after the Lincoln assassination in eighteen sixty five, but this project took years to really get momentum uh and get to the point where they could send sculptor Frederic August Berteldi to the US to survey the possibilities and come up with a design. This statue is often cited as a gift of the French government to the United States, but it was actually not from the government. It was funded by private donors, the people of France, who all gave their money so that they could share this moment of of sort of brotherhood and support, the only exception being a fairly sizable donation from the city of Paris. Architect Eugene violet Le Duc initially started work on the engineering of the structure, and with his guidance, the head had been completed in time to be displayed at the eighteen seventy eight Exposition Universe, But Violet l Duke died in the fall of eighteen seventy nine and it was Gustave it Fell that was the replacement. It Fell developed a skeletal support plan for this massive sculpture and designed the stairwells within so the observation area would be easy to reach, and because the statute was going to be so very exposed when it was installed in New York, Fell took great care to plant with an eye towards stability, even inforceful wind gusts. So the copper sheeting that's used on it, each piece is anchored to the interior framework. None of those sheets are simply riveted to an adjacent sheet or sheets uh and none of the sheets are load bearing in any way. As we mentioned in our Emma Lazarous episode, there were some issues with putting together the financial capital on the U S side of things to complete the pedestal where Lady Liberty would eventually stand. As a consequence, the team working on the statue in France slowed down their production rate towards the end of the build, while the United States worked to raise the money to finish their construction. But eventually, everything, of course did come together, and just as he had done with a number of his projects that he had shipped to South America, Fell, along with berthel D and their teams, took the Statue of Liberty, which they had built in its entirety apart, breaking it down into three hundred and fifty component pieces for shipping, and then those pieces were packed into two hundred and fourteen custom crates loaded on a ship which left France on May eighty five. It took a little less than a month to make it to New York. That ship arrived on June seventeenth, and after months of unpacking an assembly, the statue was finally fully assembled in April eighteen eighty six. The dedication ceremony for it was held on October twenty of that same year. As Gstava Fell had been working on the iconic French gift to the United States, another project was starting to take root. In the early eighteen eighties, plans began for another Paris Exposition Universal, this time to align with the hundredth anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. By the time things really started to get organized for the event, it was already eighteen eighty six, so the clock was ticking for an eighteen eighty nine expo to be put together. Yeah, that's a little tight Yeah, people had been working on it up to that point, but they didn't really have all their pieces in place to be like, now we have a full planning committee, let's make this thing happen. And it sounds like ample time for something on a smaller scale, but not something as massive as these expositions were. Yeah, and exactly when the idea of a tower as the centerpiece of this show came into being is a little bit fuzzy. But in May eighty six, an announcement was published in the Government paper asking for submissions of ideas to build an iron tower for the X. There were specific needs included in this announcement. It had to be built on the Chendo Mao, and it had to be three hundred meters tall with a one twenty five square footprint, and all submissions had to be submitted within sixteen days of this announcement, so they only had two weeks in a tiny bit of change to get their designs made, drafted, and submitted. If those requirements seemed very very specific, it's because they were. They perfectly matched a design that it Fell had ready to go. Two of his engineers, Maurice cook Lan and Emil Newgate, had already been working on the tower design along with architects Defend Silvestra. Their earliest sketches of it date back to eighteen eighty four, two years before the Minister of Science and Industry published this call for submissions. It was absolutely no surprise that among the one hundred submissions for the tower contract was a design from a Fell's firm. Were actually more submissions than that. That was like the narrowed down these are the serious ones. After a month of analysis of these various proposals, it was determined that only a Fell's team had a workable design, and initially uh Gustava Fell himself had not been especially wowed with the ideas of Cookland and Neuguie, but he encouraged him to keep going Usially, yeah, sure, keep working on that, and once uh Sylvesta got involved, he kind of liked where it was headed. But as he realized what a feat this tower would be if it came to fruition, he actually bought out the patent rights from the other three men on the design, and in the terms of their deal, their names would always remain connected to the project because there was going to be some prestige if it got accepted and they would each get one percent of the estimated cost to build it. So, ultimately, in a move that could be interpreted as very astute or a very selfish or maybe both, I felt signed the contracts not as his company but on behalf of himself alone. Taking ownership in this way also gave f L rights to income from tower tourism long after the expo was over. He later asserted that he had only wanted to take ownership quotes to assume company responsibility for the enterprise and to devote to its realization efforts, which I certainly didn't believe at the time would be onerous. And it is true that had the men pursued submitting the designs on their own, they wouldn't have had the same means to build it if it had been accepted without the f L name and the associated resources that came with it. Yeah, this is another one of those times I mentioned in the first episode that he sometimes gets criticized as being kind of selfish, not very good about sharing credit, and wanting to kind of be the star of the show in regards to some of these projects. Uh, he claims that it was completely magnanimous. He really thought like, no, let me own it, and that way I will have all of the resources to build it, and I will take all the risk, and you're names will still be attached. But it's legally and financially all on me. But other people are like, no, dude, you wanted all the credit. Also in eight six, Gustav's eldest daughter, Claire, got married. She married a man named Adolph Salle, and this was actually a huge boon to their family because sal became one of a Fell's closest friends and collaborators, so he maintained that close knit family that he had had from the time he was a child. And one of those little tidbits that you hear a lot of times and like, uh fun facts about Paris kinds of articles on the internet. The design style for this tower was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. It was driven entirely by the needs of the structure. There was no attempts to cover up the iron work with masonry, and the lines of it were determined mathematically to be the angles and positions of supports required to sustain the desired height, which was to be the tallest building in the world. Yeah, there were also people like what is this tower for nothing? Just to begin good? And it seemed kind of wasteful and silly to some people to just build a tower for the sake of building a tall thing. But this idea to promote and showcase the materials of industrial modern design at the time deeply offended a lot of Paris's art community. A group called the Committee of three hundred, referencing the three hundreds of height for the proposed tower, actually submitted a petition to the Minister of Works condemning the design and insisting that it was going to mar the beauty of Paris if it were built a Fell's tower would they felt being affront to the very ideals of France, and they called it useless and a monstrosity. For his part, Gustav defended the tower and asserted that there was plenty of art and good design, and that there was no reason the French shouldn't become just as renowned for their engineering prowess as they had for their artistry and other fields. He famously argued that the pyramids at Giza were nothing more than artificial mountains, and yet they became some of the most revered structures on Earth. Yeah, that's another thing that people sometimes point to you and go, ma'am, that's some ego to be like, know, what I'm building is like the pyramids, you guys. Um. But he was right, uh, eventually so despite the detractors. Though construction did begin in January seven, and throughout the next two years of the build Fel and his critics continued to trade barbs even after it was completed. The complaints continued for a bit. Writer Guie de Montisson, who had been one of the men who spearheaded the petition committee, allegedly ate lunch in the restaurant at the base of the structure every day because he claimed that was the only place that he could eat where he would not be seeing a Fel's eyesore. You just have to see it the whole time you're going there. Well, he claimed that there was. He wasn't safe anywhere in Paris, Like everywhere he went he just saw this horrible thing he hated. So at least if he was in the horrible thing he hated, he wasn't looking at it. We will get to some of the specifics of the exposition and Universal Tower in just a minute, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. The effort, manpower and material needed to build the tower was of course startling. Like I said, this could be a whole episode on its own. We're kind of giving you the speedy version. But more than fifty engineers and designers had a hand in creating more than five thousand designed sketches that detailed every single aspect of the tower. A hundred and fifty workers at a Fell's factory at Levare manufactured the needed pieces, which were then carted to the Schende Mar and assembled by work site crews that ranged from a hundred and fifty to three hundred men. Building on the lessons that it Fell learned while working on a statue of Liberty, he made sure that the tower for the Expo and universal could withstand wind. The Tory Fell can sway as much as six inches at the top and as does sind to handle that movement. Yet also you'll see a factoid sometimes that it bends slightly in the sun and it can just rebounds back from that. And one of the interesting aspects of how the tower was assembled, at least to me, was its riveting process. There's a great description of it on the torfl official website that describes it. I'm just going to read what they wrote because they'll do it better than if I try to parse it and rewrite it. And that reads quote 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 force to beat it with a sledge hammer. Only a third of the two point five million rivets used in the construction of the tower were inserted directly on site. When the tower was completed, it was an almost instant popular success. Almost two million people visit did the tower, which served as the gateway to the exposition, and for the first time the Exposition Universal made rather than lost money. Yeah, that was always like not a not a profitable enterprise, Like they were basically putting it on to show off all of the many fabulous things that France could do. This was similarly a problem in other places that have had World's Fairs, but fundamentally they're kind of money pits. But this one so many people showed up just to see the tower that had been so controversial that they ended up making money. And as the public and indeed the world marveled at what Gustavo Fel had pulled off, criticism from the art community kind of died down. But fl found himself, unfortunately, in a whole other sort of trouble, right on the heels of his eighteen eighty nine exposition success. In eight seven, while working at his now famous tower, fl had agreed to build one of the locks in the Panama Canal that put him in business with Ferdinand de Lesseps, who we mentioned on the first part of this two parter. And by the way, for Bravo fans in the crowd, yes that's the same family. Yes, those of you that didn't get that ignored it's not important, but there is a Dela SEPs involved in one of the Bravo shows. Yes, related to Ferdinand. I'm gonna say I said that, and I don't know. Uh So to set the stage on why this was a problem, we actually have to go back a little bit to eighteen seventy nine, when Della SEPs became president of the company Universal du Canal in eighteen eighty shares of that company were offered to the public as a way to drum up funding to build this canal, and delas EPs was hoping to once again find the success that he had achieved with the Suez Canal with this venture, which would excavate a ship canal along the narrow isthmus of Panama. But the whole enterprise was a huge and tragic failure. Dela SEPs had not managed things well. He had really not studied historical exploration of the area, which revealed it to be exceedingly unwelcoming. He also had only made personal visits to the area during the dry season and had no sense of the dangers of the rainy season. Twenty thousand men died while working on the canal, due primarily to malaria and yellow fever. Even as men were dying in large numbers in Panama, Delisps was recruiting new workers in France. Yes, so there was just some one ignorance, kind of willful ignorance in the mix, and to just some kind of gross behavior of like, ah, lots of people are dying, I better go get more guys and not really tell them how dangerous this whole thing is And in addition to that very tragic human cost, there was also a very real financial loss in the venture as well. Approximately two hundred and fifty million dollars it's about a half billion francs at the time were sunk into this ultimately failed project, and when it ran out of money, all of those investors who had contributed to the project were left with no way to get their money back. So there were some people who believed in this, spent their life savings to try to be part of it, and then we're left destitute. The whole enterprise became a huge scandal, and Gustava Fell was in the middle of it. He had initially been against the project, which de la SEPs had conceived without locks. It wasn't until the addition of a lock system that if L had gotten involved. And just like Ferdinand del SEPs and his son Charles, Gustava Fell was charged with fraud for his involvement in the mismanaged canal project, even though he had not been part of that business administration side in he was actually sentenced to two years in prison and he was also fined, but that verdict was overturned by a higher court. But even though at that point he had cleared his record, he just felt as though his name as a builder was tainted forever due to the extensive coverage that this whole scandal had gotten in the press for years. At that point, it Fell withdrew from his firm and it was renamed Lass Society Dick Construction leve Valois Parae. At that point, Maurice Coklan, one of the engineers who had originally conceived of the tower that made a Fel famous, took over as managing director of the company. But Gustava Fell did not retire to an idle life. He merely switched gears and began a second career in science. He started conducting his own research with the intention that he was going to share any of his findings freely, and in eight he started conducting experiments at his famed tower. As part of the construction agreement that it Fell had signed to build the tower, he paid for a significant amount of its cost, and in return he was entitled to money made from the visitors for twenty years. After that, the city government would take full possession of the structure, and the intent was that it would be taken down at that point. But by the late eighteen nineties the engineer turned research scientists had added an antenna to the tower and was running wireless telegraph experiments there. And as a consequence of this work, which was seen for its value immediately, particularly for milly Harry applications, the city extended the concession to a Fell to continue his work. So he basically retained that same agreement on the tower uh for a much longer period of time, and the tower, of course was never disassembled as had originally been planned, since we were talking about it, because we are going to go see it in a couple of months. In addition to the telegraph and radio transmissions, I Fell began investigating aerodynamics, which he had become fascinated by while working on the Statue of Liberty. He built a wind tunnel at the tower in nineteen o nine and an aero dynamics laboratory in nineteen twelve and another part of the city where he could do even larger wind tunnel experiments and in his lab at a toy a. Fel used model aircraft in his larger wind tunnel to study the optimal designs of things like propeller thrust and speed and angle of inclination and air resistance, and his work there also contributed to missile design and how bombs were released. His work directly impacted the aircraft that France used in the First World War and established new levels of knowledge in aircraft science. I have actually seen some people comment that he really should be just as well known for his work in aircraft engineering as he is for having built this iconic tower. But u that doesn't get talked about very often. But for all this work in the Smithsonian Institution awarded him the Langley Gold Medal. Just as he had been in engineering bridges and other structures, Fell was meticulous in his calculations and measurements in aerodynamics, which Alexander Graham Bell said, quote have given engineers the data for designing and constructing flying machines upon sound scientific principles. Fel designed a fighter plane in nineteen seventeen, and his designs, which he distributed without any renumeration, were used to build two prototypes by the company that would eventually evolve into Air France. Those designs were eventually abandoned, though in nineteen twenty Gestava Fell actually retired uh he was in his eighties at that point. And he spent much of his time in the mansion that he had built for his entire family on the Rue Rebelais, and he wrote his memoirs during this time, but he did not have any intention to publish them. He just wanted the family to have a record of his life and work. And he had this very unique experience. We often talk about people not getting to know how important their work was while they were alive, but he had a sense while he was still alive of the impact that his work had had on the world. It Fell died on December nine at his home in his mansion. He was one. Twenty six years later, his bust was installed at the base of his iconic tower, and the Turife remained the tallest building in the world until nineteen thirty, and that was when the Chrysler Building in New York City was constructed. There have of course been other jockeying for positions of who was tallest. At one point there was an addition to the top of a Fell's tower which made it tallest again for a second. But now it's of course far behind many other impressive and slightly frightening things around the world. But I really was a little taken Aback. I didn't realize just how many kind of important structures he had built throughout Europe that have gotten you know, unless you're into engineering history or particularly his biography, people may not realize that a lot of the infrastructure of Europe is particularly you know, post industrial age he was involved in in some way. Yeah, fascinating cool and I kind of love him, even though he maybe had some problems sharing credit. But he clearly was also a genius, and I appreciate that he was very, very very obsessed with um making sure that all the numbers were correct. Like I I feel like at a time when people were just playing guessing games, trying to put things together and see if they worked, he was like, no, let's actually map all this out on paper and make sure the math is right. And he probably saved a lot of time in terms of like the development of architecture and engineering. Yeah, like for the world, not just for him. UM. Anyway, clearly I think he's cool. You have some cool listener mail. I do. Uh. This is from our listener Kaylee, who is writing us from Devon. I like that because I have a Devon rex cat that's maybe super nerdy and not Germane at all, but there it is. She is actually writing about sort of our Scaling Michael podcast. She said, I loved your podcast about Scaling Michaels, so I thought i'd send you a card from my favorite natural landmark in my area, Brent Tour. The pictured tour is not part of the more Land, but is the remnant of a volcano back when much of England was under a shallow sea. It's incredibly steep and offer stunning views all around. It's also incredibly blustery, sometimes so windy it is hard to talk perfect spot for a church. There are many stories about the struggle to build, say Michael's Church, which has a capacity of twenty, some involving the Devil and making the church sometimes be referred to as the Devil's Church. Brides used to have to be carried up the steep hill to their ceremony. But it is a beautiful church in a bizarre natural landmark, and I wanted to share it with you briefly. Thank you so much for the show, and hello from Devon Kaylee. That's a very cool story about a thing I did not really know about at all. So now I want to look that up and maybe will we'll see what happens. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and at the website missed in History dot com. If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, that sounds like a grand idea to me, you can do that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are listening again. If you're interested and want to get information on our trip to Paris in June, you can do that at our website missed in History dot com. Click on the link in the menu bar that says Paris trip and you'll get all the info. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com