The tower that outlived every argument

Built for a world's fair and meant to be dismantled after twenty years, the Eiffel Tower has become the silhouette of Paris. Its story is a mix of engineering courage, public outrage, and slow acceptance.

A gamble for the world's fair

In 1886 the French government held a competition for a monument to headline the 1889 Exposition Universelle, staged to mark the centennial of the storming of the Bastille. Of one hundred and seven proposals, the plan by engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier — refined by architect Stephen Sauvestre and submitted through the office of Gustave Eiffel — was chosen.

Eiffel's team had two years, two months and five days to raise the tallest structure in the world on soft ground beside the Seine. They used 18,038 individual iron pieces, held together by 2.5 million rivets, and never lost more than one worker on site — a remarkable record for a project of its scale.

"We protest with all our strength, with all our indignation, in the name of unappreciated French taste, against the erection of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."

So began the famous 1887 letter signed by three hundred Parisian artists, including Charles Gounod, Alexandre Dumas fils and Guy de Maupassant — the last of whom, once the tower was standing, was said to eat lunch inside it every day because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it.

Nearly demolished, twice

The concession for the site was only twenty years. In 1909 the tower was set to be pulled down and sold for scrap, and might have been if Eiffel had not turned it into a radiotelegraph station. Antennae on its top intercepted German messages during the First World War, including the coded telegrams that led to Mata Hari's arrest, and secured the tower's future as a strategic asset.

During the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the elevator cables were mysteriously cut so that invaders would have to climb the stairs to raise their flag. The Germans painted the letters "V" for Viktoria on its beams; the resistance painted them over.

Colour, restorations and light

The tower has been repainted about every seven years since 1889, using a colour called brun tour Eiffel — a warm sepia specifically mixed for it. To account for perspective, the colour is applied in three shades, darker at the base and lighter towards the top, so the whole appears uniform against the sky.

In 1985 the current lighting system was installed. The famous sparkle — 20,000 golden flashbulbs that fire for five minutes on the hour after nightfall — was added in 2000 for the millennium celebrations and stayed by popular demand.

The tower today

• 330 m tall including the broadcasting antenna added in 1957.
• 10,100 tonnes of iron.
• ~7 million visitors per year — the most-visited paid monument in the world.
• Operated by SETE on behalf of the City of Paris.
• UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991 (part of "Banks of the Seine").