Monday 18 February 2008

La Tour Bonickhausen?


Q's first "research paper" is due tomorrow. He chose Gustave Eiffel as his subject for obvious reasons. Later, after learning about DaVinci's inventions, he wished he had researched DaVinci instead. Eiffel was pretty cool himself, however.

Facts you may not know about Eiffel or his tower:
Eiffel was born in Dijon with the surname Bonickhausen, but his parents later changed it to Eiffel as the French had a hard time pronouncing his name.
He was not always a good student, but did come away with a degree in Chemistry.
Eiffel worked on the structure for the Statue of Libery.
He worked on the Panama Canal, and was purportedly the first to think of putting a tunnel under the Eiffel Tower and a train system under Paris.
The Eiffel Tower is actually painted three different colors, getting darker from bottom to top, so that it looks uniform.
The completion of the Eiffel Tower was a builder's dream: on time, no mistakes and no accidents. Imagine.

Enjoy pictures that we (mostly my son) took.






2 comments:

Starman said...

La Tour Eiffel was supposed to be torn down after 20 years, but they were making so much money they left it to become the worldwide recognized symbol of Paris.
If you get the chance, you should have dinner on la Tour at Altitude 95. Beside good food, the view is spectacular.

Anonymous said...

Hey Sis-in-law. Pictures are great. A&F are so excited about the Eiffel Tower. A has been doing lots of sketches using the light up version (from Christmas) as a model. As A says "It's every girl's dream to visit Paris!"