Eiffel Tower: The Iron Lady of Paris

The Eiffel Tower stands 330 m (1,083 ft) to the tip of its antenna, on the Champ de Mars in Paris. It was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch to the World's Fair marking the centenary of the French Revolution, reached 300 m without its later aerials, and held the record as the tallest structure on Earth for 41 years until the Chrysler Building passed it in 1930. It was supposed to be dismantled after twenty years, and the thing that saved it was radio.

The Numbers, and How They Compare

For scale: it is roughly three and a half times the Statue of Liberty measured base to torch, more than three times the height of Big Ben's clock tower, and more than six times the Arc de Triomphe. It is no longer the tallest structure in France — the tallest mast of the Millau Viaduct reaches 343 m — and it has not been the tallest in the Paris region since the Tour First at La Defense, though it remains the tallest structure inside the city proper.

One consequence of building in iron is that the height is not constant. The metal expands in heat, so the tower grows by up to about 15 cm in summer, and it leans very slightly away from the sun as the exposed side warms faster than the shaded one.

Three Hundred Artists Tried to Stop It

The tower was not welcomed. In February 1887, with the foundations barely dug, Le Temps published a letter headed as a protest against the tower of Monsieur Eiffel, signed by some of the most prominent figures in French arts and letters: Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas the younger, the composer Charles Gounod, the poet Leconte de Lisle, and Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera.

They called it a useless and monstrous thing, and warned that it would loom over Notre-Dame and the Louvre like a black factory chimney. The story that Maupassant afterwards ate lunch in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it may be embroidered, but it has survived because it captures the tone of the objection exactly.

Eiffel's answer, published alongside the protest, was that the curves of the four piers would strike the eye as an impression of strength and beauty, and that the true forms of engineering had their own aesthetic. The public settled the argument first: about two million people went up during the fair's six months.

The Shape Is a Wind Calculation

The distinctive flare of the legs is not a stylistic choice. The tower was designed at a time when no structure had ever been built anywhere near 300 m, and wind, not weight, was the governing problem.

Eiffel's engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, worked the profile so that at every height the structure could resist the overturning moment produced by wind pressure on the area above it. That requirement produces a curve steep at the base and tapering upward, and the lattice keeps the wind-facing area small while distributing the load. The result is a structure that weighs less than the column of air enclosing it and moves only a few centimetres at the summit in ordinary conditions. In the strongest storms recorded the top has moved by around 12 to 13 cm.

The foundations posed their own problem. The two piers on the Seine side sit in ground saturated by the river, and the excavations had to be sunk using watertight caissons with compressed air to keep water out while workers dug beneath. Each pier was fitted with hydraulic jacks so the four legs could be adjusted until the first platform sat perfectly level — a tolerance that had to be met before the junction was riveted permanently.

Construction took two years, two months and five days, employed a few hundred workers, and killed one man, in a fall unconnected to the assembly work. For a project of that scale in the 1880s that safety record was extraordinary.

Radio Saved It From the Scrapyard

Eiffel's concession ran for twenty years. In 1909 ownership was due to revert to the City of Paris, which had every intention of taking it down and selling the iron.

Eiffel spent the intervening years making the tower too useful to demolish. He funded meteorological and aerodynamic experiments from it, including a wind tunnel at its base, and — decisively — he backed wireless telegraphy. A permanent military radio station was installed in 1903, and the tower's height made it the best transmitting mast in France. The concession was renewed.

The investment repaid itself within a decade. During the First World War the station jammed German transmissions and intercepted their traffic, including the messages that led to the arrest of the dancer and alleged spy Mata Hari, and it relayed signals during the first Battle of the Marne. From 1925 it carried radio broadcasts, and from 1957 television — the aerials that brought the total to 330 m.

It survived one more threat. In August 1944, with Allied forces closing on Paris, Hitler ordered the city's monuments destroyed. The military governor, Dietrich von Choltitz, did not carry the order out.

Sixty Tonnes of Paint, in Three Shades

Wrought iron rusts, and the only thing preventing that is paint. The tower is repainted roughly every seven years, consuming about 60 tonnes each time and taking a crew months to apply largely by brush, because spraying cannot reach into the lattice properly.

It has worn a series of colours since 1889: a reddish-brown at first, then ochre-yellow, then a chestnut-brown, and since 1968 a custom shade known as Eiffel Tower Brown. The subtlety is that the shade is not uniform. It is applied in three gradations, darkest at the bottom and lightest at the top, so that against the sky the whole structure reads as a single even colour rather than fading out at the summit.

The most recent campaign has been shifting it back towards the golden-yellow it wore in the early 1900s, work timed around the 2024 Olympic Games.

Seventy-Two Names, One Apartment and Two Sales

Around the first level, in letters that were painted over in the early twentieth century and restored in the 1980s, are the names of 72 French scientists, engineers and mathematicians — Lagrange, Fourier, Foucault, Ampere, Daguerre among them. All 72 are men; the mathematician Sophie Germain, whose work on elasticity theory bears directly on structures like this one, is not among them.

At the top Eiffel built himself a small private apartment, furnished simply in wood, where he received guests. Thomas Edison visited in 1889 and left a signed phonograph as a gift. The apartment is preserved and visible to visitors today.

And in 1925 the tower was sold for scrap. Victor Lustig, posing as a government official, convinced a group of Paris scrap-metal dealers that the state had quietly decided the upkeep was unaffordable and the structure would be dismantled. He took payment from the most eager bidder and left for Vienna. The victim was too embarrassed to report it — so Lustig came back and ran the same con a second time.

The Lifts Were the Hardest Part

Getting visitors up turned out to be more difficult than getting the iron up. The legs curve, so the lifts in them could not simply run vertically; they had to climb a path whose angle changes continuously with height, which no existing system could do.

The organisers had ruled that contracts should go to French firms, and no French manufacturer would guarantee a solution. The east and west legs were eventually fitted with hydraulic machines from the American company Otis, which had the experience nobody in France could match, after the rule was quietly set aside. Above the second level the ascent is vertical and was originally served by a system using water as a counterweight, pumped up by day and released to drive the cars.

The lifts have been rebuilt repeatedly since, but the original hydraulic mechanism in the north pillar survives and can still be seen working.

What Visiting It Involves

Close to seven million people go up each year, which makes it the most visited paid monument in the world; more than 300 million have done so since 1889. Lifts serve all three levels, and the stairs are open to the second level, 674 steps up.

One point of law surprises people. The tower's design has been out of copyright since long after Gustave Eiffel's death in 1923, so daytime photographs are unrestricted. The illuminations installed in 1985, however, are treated as a separate copyrighted work, which is why commercial use of night-time images of the lit tower formally requires permission.

The view is the reason to make the climb: from 276 m the whole of the city's plan is legible at once, from the Arc de Triomphe at the head of the Champs-Elysees to the bend of the Seine below. A structure put up to stand for twenty years, condemned in print by the leading artists of its day, has now been the defining image of Paris for more than 130.