The Eiffel Tower: The Monster Paris Learned to Love

Why is it significant?

Walk in under the tower and stand in the middle, between its four enormous legs, and look straight up into the lattice. From here it is not a postcard any more. It is a machine... a forest of iron girders, criss-crossed and riveted, climbing away from you into the light.

Key Facts

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Walk in under the tower and stand in the middle, between its four enormous legs, and look straight up into the lattice. From here it is not a postcard any more. It is a machine... a forest of iron girders, criss-crossed and riveted, climbing away from you into the light.

It was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. The first sketch did not come from Gustave Eiffel at all, but from two engineers in his company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with the architect Stephen Sauvestre softening it with those great arches. Eiffel bought out their rights, put his name and his fortune behind it, and his workers raised it in just over two years: some eighteen thousand iron parts held together by around two and a half million rivets. At three hundred metres it was the tallest structure humans had ever built, and it kept that title for four decades.

And Paris was horrified. In February 1887, before the tower had risen more than a few metres, a newspaper published a protest signed by artists and writers, among them Guy de Maupassant, the composer Charles Gounod and Charles Garnier, architect of the Opera. They called it useless and monstrous, a gigantic black factory chimney. The legend says Maupassant later lunched regularly in the tower's restaurant, because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it.

Now look towards the very top. Up there, above the third platform, Eiffel kept a small private apartment, with patterned wallpaper and wooden furniture. Paris society begged for invitations, and he turned nearly all of them down. One guest he did welcome, in September 1889, was Thomas Edison, who brought him a phonograph as a gift.

The iron breathes, too. In summer heat the top can lean a few centimetres away from the sun, and the whole tower grows a little taller. It is repainted by hand roughly every seven years, in a colour officially called Eiffel Tower brown. Now walk out on the far side, onto the long green lawns, and turn round for the view that saved it.