Eiffel Tower

The tower's basic shape wasn't originally Gustave Eiffel's idea at all. Two engineers working inside Eiffel's own company, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, sketched the concept for an enormously tall iron tower in June 1884, intended as the centrepiece for the 1889 World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution. Eiffel reportedly found Koechlin's earliest, bare-bones sketch unconvincing.

What made the design work — visually, not structurally — was a third man: architect Stephen Sauvestre, brought in to soften the raw lattice engineering into something the public might actually love. Sauvestre added the sweeping stone-arched base, the glass-enclosed halls on the platforms, and the bulbous cupola at the summit — decorative flourishes with no structural purpose, but exactly what turned an engineer's calculation into an unmistakable monument. Eiffel filed the joint patent with his engineers and architect in September 1884, won the right to build in May 1886, and the whole 18,000-piece iron structure — held together by roughly 2.5 million rivets — went up between January 1887 and March 1889 without a single worker dying, a remarkable safety record for ironwork at that height and era.

The tower was never meant to last: the original permit ran for twenty years, after which it was due to be dismantled and sold for scrap in 1909. Eiffel saved it himself, by turning the tower into something Paris couldn't easily give up — a radio antenna. He lobbied the French military to use the tower's height for long-distance wireless transmission, and once that proved genuinely useful during the First World War, tearing it down stopped being a serious option. The temporary fairground centrepiece became permanent because its own engineer found it a second job.

Getting there

Located in Paris 15 Vaugirard. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 15 km away.