A Mini Biography - Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (just because)

My heart skips a beat every time I see it, as if for the first time. Though way ahead of his time, Gustave Eiffel had quite the vision!
Interested in construction at an early age, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel set out on his career specializing in metal construction, especially bridges. Years later, when the Statue of Liberty's initial internal engineer Eugene Viollet-le-Duc unexpectedly died, Eiffel was hired to replace him on the project. He created a new support system for the statue that would rely on a skeletal structure instead of weight to support the copper skin. Eiffel and his team built the statue from the ground up and then dismantled it for its journey to New York Harbour.
Eiffel is most famous for what would become known as the Eiffel Tower, which was begun in 1887 for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. The tower is composed of 12,000 different components and 2,500,000 rivets, all designed and assembled to handle wind pressure. The structure is a marvel in material economy, which Eiffel perfected in his years of building bridges--if it were melted down, the tower's metal would only fill up its base about two and a half inches deep.
Onlookers were both awed that Eiffel could build the world's tallest structure (at 984 feet) in just two years and torn by the tower's unique design, most deriding it as hideously modern and useless. Despite the tower's immediate draw as a tourist attraction, only years later did critics and Parisians begin to view the structure as a work of art.