Eiffel Tower Opens: Paris Unveils Its Iron Giant

Gustave Eiffel climbed 1,710 steps to plant the French tricolor at the summit of his iron tower on March 31, 1889. The public had to wait until May 6, when the Exposition Universelle officially opened and visitors were first permitted to ascend the structure that half of Paris's cultural establishment had condemned as a monstrosity. Over two million people rode the elevators during the six-month fair, and the tower that artists had called a disgrace became the most visited monument on Earth. The tower was conceived as a temporary entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair, celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel's firm won the design competition against 107 other proposals, and construction began in January 1887. The project required 18,038 individual iron pieces, 2.5 million rivets, and a workforce of 300 laborers on site who assembled the prefabricated components with extraordinary precision. Opposition was fierce and public. A petition signed by Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Garnier, and other prominent figures called the tower "a gigantic black factory smokestack" that would disfigure the Paris skyline. Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it. The engineering was revolutionary. At 984 feet, the tower was nearly double the height of the Washington Monument, then the world's tallest structure. Eiffel's team used wind-tunnel data and mathematical models to design the curved iron lattice that distributed wind loads efficiently across the four legs. The tower's sway in high winds never exceeds 4.75 inches, a remarkable achievement for a structure built without computers or modern materials science. The planned twenty-year permit would have required demolition in 1909, but the tower's value as a radio transmission platform saved it. Military wireless signals broadcast from the summit during World War I proved the structure's strategic worth. The Eiffel Tower has since welcomed over 300 million visitors, undergone multiple renovations and repainting cycles, and remains the most recognizable architectural silhouette in the world.