Once the world s tallest building, a flamboyant fe...

Once the world s tallest building, a flamboyant feat of 19th-century engineering that became a Parisian icon.

The Eiffel Tower was created as a spectacular entrance for the Paris Exhibition of 1889, held to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. The tower was designed by employees of the company run by Gustave Eiffel (1832 1923), an engineer who had made a name for himself as a builder of bridges, viaducts, and railway stations. It was selected out of more than 100 competing designs for the exhibition entrance because it was thought to best symbolize a century of scientific and technological progress.

Factory construction.
Rising to a height of 984 ft (300 m), the Eiffel Tower stood almost twice as tall as any previous human structure. It was constructed of 18,000 factory- made wrought-iron pieces, brought to the site along the River Seine for assembly and joined together with 2.5 million rivets. Its wrought-iron latticework marked a radical departure from traditional monumental buildings in brick or stone. Parisian aesthetes pretended to hate it, protesting against the useless and monstrous tower that would ruin the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris. However, the public loved it from the start, almost 2 million people flocking to buy tickets to mount the tower during the 6 months of the exhibition.

New purposes.
Gustave Eiffel had a 20-year contract to capitalize on the tower commercially, after which it was supposed to be dismantled. However, the placing of a radio transmitter on the top in 1904 gave it a practical use that saved it from destruction. The tower was surpassed as the world s tallest structure by the Chrysler Building (see p.42) in New York in 1930, but its prestige as the symbol of the city of Paris has continued to grow. In the 21st century, it is one of the world s most visited tourist attractions.