In February 1887, as excavation work began on the Champ de Mars, forty-seven of France's most celebrated artists and writers published a furious letter in the newspaper Le Temps. Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod, Alexandre Dumas fils and their co-signatories protested, "in the name of slighted French taste", against the "useless and monstrous" tower of Monsieur Eiffel — a "gigantic black smokestack" that would crush Notre-Dame and the Louvre beneath its barbarous bulk. Gustave Eiffel's reply was serene: the tower would have its own beauty, he said, because it was shaped by the laws of nature. Why should we assume, he asked, that what is built to withstand the wind cannot also be graceful?
The tower was conceived not by Eiffel himself but by two engineers in his firm, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, who in 1884 sketched a 300-metre pylon of four lattice legs. Eiffel was initially unmoved; the architect Stephen Sauvestre dressed the design with decorative arches and a glass pavilion, and Eiffel then bought the rights to the patent and campaigned for it with all his formidable energy. The occasion was the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the world's fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution, and the commission came with a crucial clause: the tower was to stand for twenty years, after which the city of Paris could order it demolished. It was, on paper, a temporary structure.
Engineering against the wind
Eiffel had made his name building railway viaducts across windswept gorges, and wind was his obsession. The tower's famous curve is not aesthetic whimsy: the legs sweep inward along lines calculated so that wind forces are channelled smoothly into the ground. Eiffel claimed the profile was determined by mathematics, and the structure vindicated him — in even the strongest storms the summit sways only a matter of centimetres, while sunshine heating one side makes the iron flex further than any gale, bending the top roughly 18 centimetres away from the sun. The tower is not steel but puddled iron, some 18,000 separate pieces fastened by about 2.5 million rivets, every piece drawn in advance to fractions of a millimetre in Eiffel's Levallois-Perret workshops and assembled like a giant kit. Construction took just over two years, and the workforce on site — never much more than a few hundred men — suffered a single fatality, a worker who fell after hours; the safety record was extraordinary for the age.
When it opened in 1889, at roughly 300 metres, it was by far the tallest structure humanity had ever built — nearly double the Washington Monument, the previous record-holder — and it kept the title for over forty years, until New York's Chrysler Building overtook it in 1930. Two million visitors climbed it during the fair. Some critics recanted; others did not. A famous story holds that Maupassant lunched regularly in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see the thing — a line so perfect it is probably embellished, and versions of it are attached to other tower-haters too. The record shows only that his loathing was real and loudly expressed.
Saved by the airwaves
The clock, meanwhile, was ticking towards 1909 and the scheduled demolition. Eiffel, who kept an office and a small apartment near the summit, understood that the tower had to make itself indispensable. He turned it into a scientific instrument: a laboratory for meteorology, a platform for his pioneering aerodynamics experiments — he later built one of the world's early wind tunnels — and, decisively, a mast for the infant technology of wireless telegraphy. From 1903 onwards, experiments run with the French military proved the tower could send and receive signals over ever greater distances. A radiotelegraph station was installed, and when the concession expired the city renewed it: the antenna had saved the monument. The decision paid off within a decade. During the First World War the tower's station jammed German communications and intercepted enemy messages, including traffic used in the case against the dancer Mata Hari, executed as a spy in 1917.
Eiffel had one more monument to his rigour: the names of 72 French scientists and engineers, gilded in letters around the first level, a riposte in iron to the artists who had scorned him. The tower has demanded devotion ever since — repainted roughly every seven years, a job consuming some 60 tonnes of paint — and it attracted devotion of stranger kinds: in 1925 the con man Victor Lustig posed as a government official and "sold" it for scrap to a gullible dealer, twice. The temporary tower is now among the most visited paid monuments on Earth. The artists promised Paris would be dishonoured; instead, the smokestack became its signature.
Quiz nuggets
- The Eiffel Tower was designed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, marking the centenary of the French Revolution, with a permit to stand only 20 years.
- The initial design came from Eiffel's engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, refined by architect Stephen Sauvestre.
- It is built of puddled iron — not steel — from about 18,000 pieces and roughly 2.5 million rivets.
- Wireless telegraphy saved it from demolition; in WWI its station intercepted messages used against Mata Hari.
- At about 300 metres it was the world's tallest structure until the Chrysler Building surpassed it in 1930.