Gustave Eiffel the city of Dijon, Côte-d'Or, the first child of Catherine-Mélanie (née Moneuse) and Alexandre Bönickhausen (). He was a descendant of Jean-René Bönickhausen, who had emigrated from the German town of Marmagen and settled in Paris at the beginning of the 18th century. The family adopted the name Eiffel as a reference to the Eifel mountains in the region from which they had come. Although the family always used the name Eiffel, Gustave's name was registered at birth as Bonickhausen dit Eiffel, and was not officially changed to Eiffel until 1880. At the time of Gustave's birth his father, an
Eiffel Tower (Delaunay series) had announced a plan to sell 150 copies of the book, which would equal in height the Tower itself. The Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's appreciation of Delaunay's work informed his Soviet montage theory, as he imagined developing cinematically "a dynamic fusion of a series, moving past the spectator, of those hundred views of the Eiffel Tower" rather than a "summation within a single canvas". Cendrars's 1924 essay on Robert Delaunay describes his feminization of the Tower, and Sonia Delaunay described the Eiffel Tower as her husband's "Eve future" Eiffel Tower (Delaunay series) The Eiffel Tower series of Robert Delaunay