Eiffel Tower Rises: Paris Welcomes the World's Tallest Structure

Gustave Eiffel climbed 1,710 steps to plant the French tricolor at the summit of his tower on March 31, 1889, completing a structure that nearly every established architect and artist in Paris had publicly condemned. The Eiffel Tower stood 1,083 feet tall, making it the tallest structure on Earth, a record it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building surpassed it. Built as a temporary entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair commemorating the centennial of the French Revolution, it was scheduled for demolition in 1909. The opposition was fierce and personal. A petition signed by Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, and other prominent cultural figures called the tower a "gigantic black smokestack" and a "hateful column of bolted sheet metal" that would disfigure the Paris skyline. Maupassant reportedly ate lunch at the tower's restaurant regularly because, he said, it was the one place in Paris where he did not have to look at it. Construction took two years, two months, and five days, an extraordinary pace for the era. Eiffel's company employed 300 workers on site, assembling 18,038 pieces of wrought iron connected by 2.5 million rivets. The design was engineered with such precision that the tower's four legs, starting from foundations 50 feet apart, met perfectly at the first platform. Only one worker died during construction, a remarkably low figure attributed to Eiffel's insistence on safety nets and guardrails. The tower's usefulness saved it from demolition. Eiffel installed a radio antenna at the summit, and the tower proved invaluable for military communications during World War I, intercepting German radio transmissions that contributed to the Allied victory at the Marne. Today it draws nearly 7 million visitors annually, making it the most-visited paid monument in the world, a structure that went from national embarrassment to national symbol in a single generation.