When you read biographies of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel and his famous tower, which turned 125 yesterday, you're struck at first by a paradox: How did something so daring, so beautiful, so outrageous—in 1889 it outraged many—come to be built by such a colorless little dweeb?

Eiffel himself provided at least part of the answer: His tower, he said, was dictated by the wind.

There was not a drop of romance in the man. Countless newlyweds have made honeymoon memories standing at the top of his 300-meter (1,000-foot) tower, gazing out at the City of Light, and staring into the little office where, in later years, after he'd been forced to stop building things, Eiffel passed the time making meteorological observations.

He himself