Eiffel Tower Construction: What They Didn't Tell You

The Eiffel Tower was built without a single weld, using 18,038 iron parts and around two and a half million rivets, a large share of them driven by hand hundreds of feet above Paris. This documentary looks at how Gustave Eiffel's engineers and riveters put the tower together between 1887 and 1889, and why every piece had to fit perfectly the first time. Long before computers, Eiffel's workshop in Levallois-Perret produced more than five thousand drawings and machined each part to within a tenth of a millimeter. This video follows those parts from the drafting table to the Champ de Mars. You'll see how four separate iron legs were raised at the same time, and how sandboxes and hydraulic jacks were used to tilt them into perfect alignment at the first platform. You'll also see how four-man riveting teams worked on narrow wooden scaffolds with no harnesses. This is the engineering story behind the world's most famous landmark, told through the methods and the men who built it in just over two years. The Steel Ledger explores the engineering history behind the great cities of the modern world, from New York and Chicago to London, Paris and beyond.