Eiffel Tower

The design began in May 1884 as a private sketch by Maurice Koechlin, a senior engineer at the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel, envisaging four lattice girders standing apart at the base and meeting at the top. Gustave Eiffel showed little enthusiasm at first but approved further study, and Koechlin and his colleague Émile Nouguier brought in the firm's chief architect, Stephen Sauvestre, who added decorative arches at the base and a glass pavilion to the first level. Eiffel then bought the patent rights the three men had taken out. On 1 May 1886 the minister for trade, Édouard Lockroy, set terms for the 1889 Exposition Universelle's centrepiece requiring a 300-metre four-sided metal tower on the Champ de Mars, effectively guaranteeing Eiffel's design would win; a commission duly found every rival proposal either impractical or lacking in detail. A contract signed on 8 January 1887 granted Eiffel 1.5 million francs toward an estimated 6.5 million-franc build, in exchange for the right to run the tower commercially for twenty years.

As work began at the Champ de Mars, a "Committee of Three Hundred" led by the architect Charles Garnier and including Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod and William-Adolphe Bouguereau sent a petition to the Exposition's commissioner, published by Le Temps on 14 February 1887, denouncing the "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower" as a threat to Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. Eiffel answered by comparing his tower to the Egyptian pyramids, and Lockroy dismissed the protest as coming months too late to change anything. Maupassant reportedly kept eating lunch in the tower's restaurant afterwards, on the grounds that it was the one place in Paris from which the tower itself could not be seen.

Foundation work began on 28 January 1887; the legs nearest the Seine needed compressed-air caissons sunk 22 metres to support their concrete slabs. The 18,038 separate parts were pre-drilled to within a millimetre at a Levallois-Perret factory, then bolted and riveted together on site with no cutting or shaping done in place. Sensational tabloid headlines such as "Eiffel Suicide!" appeared when work paused partway up the legs to build a timber scaffold, and hydraulic jacks were later used to align the four legs precisely where they met at the first level, completed by the end of March 1888. Despite 300 workers on site, only one man died during construction, which Eiffel credited to his safety precautions of movable gangways, guardrails and screens.

With the lifts not yet working, Eiffel led government officials and journalists on foot to the top on 31 March 1889, a climb of over an hour, and at 2:35pm hoisted a Tricolour to a 25-gun salute. The tower opened to the public nine days after the Exposition itself opened on 6 May; still without functioning lifts, nearly 30,000 visitors climbed the 1,710 steps to the top before the lifts entered service on 26 May. By the exhibition's close there had been 1,896,987 visitors. Thomas Edison visited Eiffel's private apartment on the third level that September and left him one of his phonographs, signing the guestbook in praise of "the brave builder of so gigantic and original specimen of modern engineering."

Built as a temporary structure due for demolition in 1909, the tower was spared once its use for radio telegraphy became clear, joining the International Time Service from 1910. A tower transmitter jammed German radio communications during the 1914 Battle of the Marne, and in 1917 the same station intercepted a coded message that helped lead to the arrest and execution of Mata Hari.

Upon the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the French cut the lift cables, which were not repaired until 1946; German soldiers hoisted a Reichskriegsflagge at the top, but it tore away within hours. Hitler, visiting Paris that year, chose not to ascend the tower. As Allied forces neared the city in August 1944, Hitler ordered the military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to demolish the tower with the rest of Paris; von Choltitz disobeyed, and on 25 August 1944, before the Germans had been driven from Paris, two men from the French Naval Museum raised the Tricolour over it again.

The tower was declared a monument historique in 1964 and listed as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Paris, Banks of the Seine" in 1991. It has belonged to the French state and the City of Paris since 1889 and is run under contract by the Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel.