German engineer creates Eiffel Tower model in his Naples garage

When Gustave Eiffel built his iconic tower in Paris in 1889, he was reviled as a madman, and his creation labeled a monstrosity. Emil Mueller’s reproduction of the Eiffel Tower is 1/100th the size of the original, and the level of controversy is similarly reduced, but Mueller’s wife did raise the question of the builder’s sanity.

“Is he crazy or what?” asked Maria Mueller in her German accent, looking over the tower standing on the lanai of the Mueller’s home in the North Naples community of Indigo Lakes. “He has things in his head you wouldn’t believe. Don’t forget, it’s his wife who had to clean up every night.”

From the base, up to but not including the flag on top, Mueller’s tower measures 10 feet tall, about 1 percent of the actual tower’s 324-meter height. Built of 10,000 tonnes of structural iron, the Paris tower is held together by two and a half million rivets. The Mueller tower, made of aluminum, contains 1,800 fasteners, and the Muellers can move it themselves once it is released from its base.

“I had no plans or diagrams, just a brochure with pictures,” said Emil Mueller. “I said if Eiffel was here, he wouldn’t have done it this way. I had put the outside together, but I had to dismantle it again to put details inside. I made a lot of mistakes — that’s why it took over nine months.”

Mueller’s Eiffel Tower replica contains operating elevators, running diagonally up the framework, and scale restaurants on two levels, just like the original. Built in his garage, it now sits on the couple’s lanai, overlooking the lake.

Emil Mueller installed lights to illuminate it at night, and made the large arches at the bottom from bicycle wheel rims. Unlike the Paris tower, which appears to be a brown monotone but is actually painted in three graduated shades to appear uniform from the ground, Mueller made his aluminum structure white, and his diagonal braces from brightly colored plastic.

“My friend Roy Fisher, the preacher, said it’s beautiful, but why those colors?” Emil Mueller remembered. “I can do something extra, I said. I wanted it to be colorful.”

The flag that flies above Mueller’s tower is the stars and stripes, although the original is French and he is from Germany. “We’re in America, I’m an American now, so I used the American flag.”

Born in 1931 in what was then Germany but now part of Ukraine, Emil Mueller, along with his family, lost everything in World War II. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1955, and became an American citizen in 1960.

“I worked for nine years, and then went into business,” he said. He spent decades as a partner in a metal-stamping and manufacturing business in New Jersey, so working with aluminum comes naturally to him.

Emil and Maria Mueller retired to Naples in 1997, and Emil found time hanging heavy on his hands.

“I got sick, from nothing to do,” he said, so he started building things in his well-stocked garage workshop. He built operating windmills, decorative rosettes in the ceilings of his home, and elaborate tile inlays, including one in the foyer that lights up when the front door is opened.

He took up metal sculpting, creating pieces including a hammered copper shield inscribed to Maria she described as “a love note to me.”

The tower came about, said Maria Mueller, when a friend came to their house. “Uwe Steenbeck put this in his head. He said, ‘You build things. Why don’t you build the Eiffel Tower?’ That day, he started building.”

Apart from photographs and movies, Emil Mueller has never seen the actual Eiffel Tower.

“I was never there. Next time, I will,” he said, of the couple’s periodic visits back to Europe. “A friend told me he waited six hours, but never did get up — there were too many people.”

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is the most-visited paid attraction in the world. Although it was the world’s tallest man-made structure when it was built, it lost that designation when New York’s Chrysler Building was completed in 1930.

Two weeks after Mueller’s tower was completed, Karl Raffalski, a friend who helped out with the lighting, stopped by for a visit.

“I admire him — it’s a lot of work,” Raffalski said of Emil Mueller. “For me, it wouldn’t make sense.”

And Maria’s comment? “I’m already afraid he will start a new project.”