Today's Birthday
Gustave Eiffel
1832–1923, French engineer.
A noted constructor of bridges and viaducts, he also designed the Eiffel Tower and the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty (see Liberty, Statue of. He was initially charged with corruption in the 1888 scandal of Ferdinand de Lesseps's failed Panama Canal project, but was cleared of all wrongdoing by a French appeals court in 1893. Nonetheless, he withdrew from commercial life and spent the rest of his years studying aerodynamics.
Bibliography:
See his The Resistance of the Air (1913, tr. 1913).
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Also Born on December 15
- George Romney
portrait painter (1734)
- Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
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- J. Paul Getty
business executive (1892)
- Muriel Rukeyser
poet (1913)
- Edna O'Brien
writer (1932)
- Don Johnson
actor (1949)
- Adam Brody
actor (1979)
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