IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 277

In the spring of 1889, visitors to central Paris found an iron tower almost exactly 300 metres high standing beside the River Seine, on ground that had until recently been filled with draughtsmen, carpenters and labourers. It had been built as the centrepiece of the Exposition Universelle, the great international fair held to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, and its builders promised that it would be the tallest structure ever raised by human beings. It was not universally welcomed, and its critics were as passionate as they were public.

The idea came from within the firm of Gustave Eiffel, a civil engineer already famous for railway bridges and for the iron frame he had designed for the Statue of Liberty. In 1884 two of his engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, sketched a tall pylon with four lattice legs curving inwards to meet at the top. Eiffel was at first unenthusiastic, but the design was developed by the firm's architectural adviser, Stephen Sauvestre, who added masonry arches between the legs and glazed pavilions at each level. Eiffel secured the rights from the two engineers, took out a patent on the design and had a revised drawing exhibited in 1885.

Not everyone was convinced. In February 1887, as work began, a protest appeared in the newspaper Le Temps, signed by painters, sculptors, writers and composers, among them the novelist Guy de Maupassant. It described the tower as a useless and monstrous object, a black factory chimney that would disfigure Paris for ever. Other objectors, less concerned with beauty, feared that the structure would collapse onto neighbouring houses.

Construction started on 28 January 1887 and lasted a little over two years, which was remarkably quick for a building of that size. The speed owed much to the way the work was organised. Every piece of the framework was cut and drilled in the firm's factory at Levallois-Perret, on the edge of the city, where the iron sections were fitted together in short trial assemblies before being taken to the site by horse and cart. On the Champ de Mars the tower was simply assembled from these prepared parts. There were 18,038 of them, held together by about two and a half million rivets.

The foundations proved harder than the superstructure. The two legs nearest the Seine stood on soft ground close to the river, which had to be compressed before it could bear any weight. Builders sank airtight metal cylinders, known as caissons, into the soil; men inside them dug out the earth while compressed air kept the water out, and the shafts were then filled with concrete. Hydraulic jacks beneath each leg allowed the four bases to be tilted and aligned, and the feet were brought level by screw jacks and careful measurement.

The tower rose in stages, and the cranes climbed with it, bolted to the girders and moved upward as each section was finished. Riveters worked in small gangs, one man heating the rivet, another holding it in the hole and a third hammering it home. Because the framework was so open, the men could work at the highest levels without scaffolding. The three platforms were finished at heights of about 57, 115 and 276 metres, and well over a thousand steps were built inside the structure.

The tower was completed on 31 March 1889 and opened to the public in mid-May, shortly after the fair began. It weighed some 7,300 tonnes and carried a flagpole to a total height of 312 metres. Visitors could climb, or ride; the lifts to the first two platforms ran up inclined rails following the curve of the legs, while a separate hydraulic lift took passengers to the summit.

Nearly two million people went up during the fair, but numbers fell sharply afterwards, and the tower's future was uncertain. The contract gave Eiffel's company twenty years to make a profit, after which the land and everything on it would revert to the city, which was free to demolish the structure.

Eiffel was determined that it should not come down. He had always presented the tower as a place of scientific value, and he offered the summit for work in meteorology and in the new technology of wireless telegraphy. In 1898 an engineer working with Eiffel sent a radio signal from the top to a receiver several kilometres away across Paris, and before long the army installed transmitters near the summit. The height of the tower made it an excellent aerial, its military importance became obvious, and the authorities eventually extended the concession. The dismantling that many Parisians had confidently expected never happened.

The tower remained the tallest building in the world until 1930. During the First World War its transmitter was used to interfere with German radio signals, and the names of seventy-two French scientists and engineers inscribed beneath the first platform still record the scientific hopes of the 1880s. The iron expands in summer and contracts in winter, so the summit can shift by several centimetres, and painters work their way down from the top every few years to renew the surface.

Until the modern era, the night was genuinely dark. In a town of narrow streets and timber houses, the only light after sunset came from the moon, from the occasional window and from whatever a person carried. Anyone with business out of doors after dark went accompanied, and the wealthy were attended by servants carrying torches. The dangers of the unlit street — holes, carts, animals and thieves — were so obvious that lighting came to be seen as a public responsibility long before any city accepted the cost of providing it.

The first regulations were modest. In 1417 Sir Henry Barton, Lord Mayor of London, ordered that lanterns with candles should be hung outside houses on winter evenings, and similar rules followed in other European cities over the next two centuries. Such orders were hard to enforce, applied only to main streets and to the winter months, and depended on householders with little interest in paying for them. They produced a light that was patchy at best, since each lamp was a small flame behind horn or glass.

Paris took a more systematic approach. In 1667 the city's lieutenant of police, Nicolas de La Reynie, organised a service of street lanterns suspended by ropes and pulleys above the middle of the roadway, where their light reached both sides of the street. Householders paid a levy towards the cost, and a body of men was employed to raise, light, extinguish and lower the lanterns each day. The system impressed visitors, and the number of lanterns grew into the thousands over the following decades. Paris acquired a reputation as a city that was unusually safe after dark, and other capitals tried to imitate it.

The fuel was a problem. Early lamps burned fish oil, whale oil or tallow, all of which gave a smoky, yellowish flame and needed constant trimming. In the 1780s a Swiss inventor, Aimé Argand, patented a burner with a cylindrical wick, so that air could reach both the inside and the outside of the flame, and a glass chimney to increase the draught. The result was several times brighter than an ordinary oil lamp. Colza oil, pressed from a plant grown in northern Europe, later became a common fuel because it was cheaper than whale oil and gave a steadier light.

Gas changed everything. In 1807 an entrepreneur named Frederick Winsor lit a stretch of Pall Mall in London with gas, and in 1812 the Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated to supply the city. Gas was made by heating coal in closed retorts and piped through cast-iron mains to lamps that burned it through a small jet. The new light was bright and cheap to run, but early installations were unpopular: the gas smelled, the pipes leaked, and there was real fear of explosion. Baltimore acquired gas street lighting in 1816, and within twenty years gas lamps were standard in the centres of European and North American cities. Somebody now had to walk the streets at dusk with a ladder and a taper, and the lamplighter became a familiar figure.

Gas lighting was improved in the 1880s by a small mesh hood, the incandescent mantle, invented by Carl Auer von Welsbach. Placed over the jet, it glowed white-hot and gave a much brighter light for the same quantity of gas, which kept gas competitive with electricity for decades. Many gas lamps remained in use in European cities well into the twentieth century, and a few of them are still lit today.

Electric light arrived in the last quarter of the century. The first street lamps used arcs, a brilliant spark jumping between two carbon rods. Arc lamps were demonstrated in Paris in 1878, and in 1880 the town of Wabash, Indiana, claimed to be the first place where an entire town was lit by electricity. Arc light was harsh, noisy and needed constant adjustment as the carbon burned away, so arc lamps were usually mounted high above squares and main roads. The incandescent lamp, with its small sealed bulb, suited ordinary streets much better, but it needed a supply of current, and in the 1880s that meant a generating station and heavy copper cables, an expense few small towns could meet. Each district also needed its own network of mains, and laying them beneath busy streets was slow work. Electric lighting therefore spread through city centres first and reached residential streets only gradually.

Historians have reconstructed all this from council minute books, contracts with lighting companies, records of the local rates, insurance maps, newspaper complaints and the paintings and photographs that show streets at night. The records are uneven: a company's accounts may survive in full while the lamp-posts it installed left no trace at all, so the historian has to match fragments across different archives. The German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued in his study of the industrialisation of light that artificial lighting did more than make streets safer: it changed the rhythm of urban life, extending the working day and creating a public night-time world of shops, cafés and theatres. Whether better lighting reduced crime is much harder to establish. Reported crime fell in some cities after gas was introduced, but policing, reporting habits and the number of people on the streets were changing at the same time, and historians disagree about how much of the fall can be credited to the lamps.

Genealogy is one of the most popular uses of the internet. Record offices that were once the preserve of a few scholars now fill with people looking for a great-grandfather, and television programmes follow celebrities as they trace their families back through the censuses. Professional historians, by contrast, have tended to treat the whole business with mild contempt, regarding it as a hobby for people who already know what they want to find. The question worth asking is whether that contempt is justified.

The case against family history is easily stated. Its critics say that the amateur begins with a conclusion — that the family is interesting, respectable, perhaps grander than it appears — and works backwards until the conclusion is proved. Difficult evidence is quietly set aside; a plausible link becomes a certainty. The result is not an inquiry into the past but a search for a flattering mirror. Academic historians also complain that genealogists are indifferent to context: they will happily name a great-great-grandmother without asking what her village economy was like, why so many of her neighbours emigrated, or what a marriage at the age of nineteen meant in that place and decade.

There is a further problem, and it is one of arithmetic. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, and the number doubles with each generation backwards. Go back twenty generations, to roughly the fifteenth century, and the number of direct ancestors runs to about a million, far more than the population of the country at the time; the lines must therefore converge, and most of the people living then are ancestors of most of the people living now. In that light, a family tree that follows a single line back to a famous name says almost nothing about ancestry. It is a chosen thread through an immense and common web.

Yet the objections are not the whole story. Family historians do work that is recognisably historical: they search census returns, wills, parish registers and tax lists, they learn to read the handwriting of earlier centuries, and they notice inconsistencies that a quicker reader would miss. Their collective labour has also produced tools that professional historians use. The great volunteer projects that index and transcribe census returns and parish records have made research possible at a scale that would have been unimaginable when every search meant a journey to a record office.

Nor is the study of ordinary lives foreign to academic history. The microhistories that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s took a single obscure individual and reconstructed the world around them. Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976) built an account of sixteenth-century religious culture from the trial records of an Italian miller, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975) did something similar for a village in the Pyrenees. Raphael Samuel, a historian who founded the History Workshop movement in Britain, argued in his later work that unofficial kinds of history-making, including family history, deserved to be taken seriously rather than patronised.

Family history also teaches a lesson that academic historians spend a great deal of effort learning: the record is incomplete. The further back a family is traced, the fewer documents survive and the more likely it is that the poor, the illegitimate and the mobile simply disappear from view. A researcher who has searched for a labourer who left no will and no marked grave learns something about the silences of the archive that no lecture can convey. That lesson is a discipline in itself.

The commercial side of genealogy deserves scrutiny. The large subscription sites have made records available to anyone with a computer, which is a genuine gain, but their design encourages a click-and-collect habit: a hint appears, a record is attached to a family tree with a movement of the mouse, and the tree grows without the user ever having read the document. Because trees are copied from one another, a single mistaken identification can spread through thousands of pages in a few years. Critics are right that this is not history, but the complaint is about careless practice rather than about the subject.

What, then, separates serious from unserious work? In family history, as in any other field, the difference lies in method rather than in subject. The serious researcher asks questions that might be answered otherwise, distinguishes between what a document says and what it is thought to imply, and follows the evidence even when it leads somewhere unflattering. A careful amateur who checks a baptism against a burial and a tax list is doing history; a professor who repeats a convenient story without checking is not.

The condescension of professional historians towards amateurs is therefore a mistake. Universities that now run courses for family historians are to be welcomed, though such courses are no substitute for the training in argument and context that a history degree provides. What would help most is not the conversion of genealogists into academics, or the reverse, but a conversation between the two: the amateurs have local knowledge and endless patience, and the professionals have context and method. Neither side has much to gain from continuing to talk past the other.