La Tour Eiffel en 1900

First edition, illustrated with 4 plates (including the portrait of Gustave Eiffel as frontispiece), 103 text figures and, at the end, 7 plates, including a folding color map showing the points visible from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Publisher's cloth binding, flat spine slightly faded and decorated with compartments adorned with blind-stamped ornamental motifs, blind-ruled frame to covers, slight and inevitable rubbing to joints, blue paper endpapers and pastedowns marginally faded as often, speckled edges.

Exceptional presentation copy, inscribed by Gustave Eiffel to Gabriel Hanotaux on the half-title of his great work on the history of the tower from its origins until after the 1900 Exposition Universelle up to November 1901. Whereas La Tour de 300 mètres describes the improvements of 1900 as a future project, its creator completes in La Tour en 1900 the portrait of his "Iron Lady" and her ambitious transformations.

On the page facing the inscription, a signed manuscript note by Gabriel Hanotaux: "not to be separated to the great manuscipt atlas of the Eiffel tower which belongs to my personal collection".

This inscription is mentioned by Emmanuelle Haim Masson in her study of Hanoteaux: "At the following Exposition, in 1900, Gustave Eiffel's inscription on the first page of his book La Tour Eiffel en 1900 underlines his continuing closeness to the Parisian elite. Inscribed 'à Monsieur Gabriel Hanotaux de l'Académie française, hommage respectueux de G. Eiffel', it lays particular emphasis on the former minister's recent election to the Académie française." (Gabriel Hanotaux et les élites parisiennes: la construction d’un réseau mis au service de la France, in Dasque, Isabelle, et al. (eds.), Deux grandes figures de l’amitié franco-américaine : Gabriel Hanotaux et Jules Jusserand, 2023).

Hanotaux would become the great hagiographer of France with his monumental Histoire de la nation française, followed by his history of the French colonies. Who better to receive this work on the tower readily becoming an essential national symbol? Gabriel Hanotaux also published writings on this period of great architectural and industrial change, including his study entitled Les Hommes de 1889 (the year of the tower's inauguration), which he published under a pseudonym. He also remains famous for having worked, during his tenure as Minister of Foreign Affairs, to strengthen diplomatic ties between the United States of America and France, and was among the first voices to call for the construction of another Parisian masterpiece, the famous Paris Mosque.

These pages recount the incredible saga of the many balloons and other aircraft that danced around the Iron Lady: La Tour en 1900 retraces the feat of Santos-Dumont's flight, rounding the tower in thirty minutes and proving for the first time that an aircraft could be steered autonomously in the Parisian sky. Eiffel adds his views on the role of the Tower for airships: it serves as an "aerial buoy", allows the wind to be measured at 300 m and provides an indispensable antenna for wireless telegraphy. On the occasion of the Exposition, the tower also received prestigious diplomatic visits (Krüger, the King of Luang Prabang, Archduke Charles Ferdinand, Ranavalona in 1901), as well as inaugural receptions, the banquets for foreign engineers scrupulously described with extracts from the toasts (Dutch, Russian, Mexican, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Belgian), the International Congress of Meteorology... To this impressive ensemble are added the many improvements made to the tower since 1889, notably the bringing into service of the elevators and, above all, the complete electrification of the tower, which did away with gas burners for good. The attempts to fit out and improve the tower did not proceed without a few inevitable setbacks, likewise recounted by Eiffel in these pages. The most spectacular, airship crashes aside, was the failure of a project for a giant cinematograph, whose 800 square meter screen attached to the tower did not withstand the assaults of the wind.

An important offering from Eiffel to a towering figure of the Third Republic, architect of the Franco-American friendship to which the engineer also contributed through his work on the Statue of Liberty.