The Eiffel Tower is without a doubt the most famous monument in Paris and the ultimate symbol of the City of Light. But what do you really know about this metal tower, which sparkles every evening and draws about 7 million travelers a year?
Today, let me take you into an elevator. It won’t take you straight up to the third floor of the tower, but back in time, to the 1880s, so we can discover together the fascinating story of “the upside-down candlestick” and the other odd nicknames Parisians gave to this monumental metal structure.
I promise you that after reading this article, you won’t look at the tower the same way again. So whether you’re “just” a history buff or you’re about to visit the Eiffel Tower soon, I promise you won’t regret spending about ten minutes reading the fascinating story of the tower that changed the Paris skyline.
Let’s step into the time elevator and get going!
Gustave Eiffel’s tower wins a contest against a giant sprinkler and a massive guillotine
France in the 1880s was a turbulent and unstable place. It was only the second decade of the young Third Republic, established in 1870 after the fall of the Second Empire, and plenty of dangers lurked.
On the right, some monarchists still dreamed of restoring the monarchy, while the Bonapartists hadn’t given up on the idea of a third empire. On the left, the anarchists rose up, trying to bring down the Republic through a series of terrorist attacks. It’s no surprise that the Republic’s leaders looked for any way to tie the French people to republican ideals.
The first opportunity that came their way was the death of Victor Hugo (1802-1885). Since, after the publication of “Les Misérables”, Victor Hugo was regarded as one of the symbols of the Republic, his funeral, which ended at the Panthéon, turned into a display of support for those values.
Even that wasn’t enough, and the foundations of the Republic were still shaky, so much so that a flashy general named Georges Ernest Boulanger (1837-1891) nearly managed to seize power in 1888-1889. The leadership, which escaped by the skin of its teeth, understood it needed some big event that would excite the masses and boost the Republic’s prestige.
Luckily for them, the 100th anniversary celebrations of the French Revolution were approaching, bringing with them a wonderful opportunity to show just how glorious, strong and modern the Republic was. To mark the historic event, it was decided to hold a massive fair in Paris, a continuation of the fairs of 1878, 1867 and 1856.
The goal of these fairs was to showcase the best of the era’s scientific progress and show that France stood at the forefront of technology at the time. For instance, the 1867 fair brought the Bateaux Mouches to Paris, while the one held in 1900 would bring humanity the escalator and Paris the métro.
During the 1880s, the fair’s committee put out a call for a technological display unlike anything seen before, one that would become the fair’s main attraction.
Unsurprisingly, the committee received many proposals, and these were the three finalists:
- A giant sprinkler that could be used to water all the parks of Paris (how they intended to do this without soaking the entire population, we’ll probably never know).
- A massive guillotine that would stand at the edge of the Champ de Mars, displayed in memory of the victims of the French Revolution.
- A massive iron tower (318 meters), presented by a bridge engineer named Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), which would become the tallest structure of its time.
After plenty of debate, the committee members decided to choose Eiffel’s tower, and all that’s left for us now is to wonder what would have happened if one of the other options had been picked (I wonder if the symbol of Paris today would be a sprinkler, or whether you and your kids would be climbing on a guillotine standing on the banks of the Seine).
Climbing the tower without an elevator
Before we continue our story, a disclosure, an important historical fact: it’s true that it was Gustave Eiffel’s firm that won the contest, and as a result the tower was named after him and got all the credit. But in practice, it was the engineers Maurice Koechlin (1856-1946) and Émile Nouguier (1840-1897) who conceived and sketched the tower, as you can see in the first sketch of the Eiffel Tower, drawn by Maurice Koechlin in June 1884.
Now that we’ve given proper credit to these two relatively unknown engineers, we can continue our story and jump to 1887, when the tower’s foundations were laid and construction began. I won’t bore you with all the technical details of building this enormous structure, but it’s safe to say that from the very start it stirred up quite a bit of fear, and even disgust. As a result, the construction process was accompanied by sensational headlines claiming the structure was extremely dangerous and that a bit of wind could send it crashing straight onto the Montmartre hill!
Gustave Eiffel and his team were racing against the clock to make sure the tower would be ready by the exhibition’s opening day. They managed not only to meet a tough schedule but also to keep the number of injured workers remarkably low, quite an achievement even today. If you’d like to see how the tower was built, stage by stage, you’re welcome to watch this short video:
And so, on March 31, about two years after construction began, the tower was climbed for the first time. Picture about sixty men, some of them middle-aged, dressed in suits and top hats, slowly climbing the tower’s stairs (the elevators from the American company Otis hadn’t been installed yet).
Prime Minister Pierre Tirard, 62 years old at the time, gave up already on the second floor, and most of the others gave up shortly after him. But Eiffel didn’t give up, and managed to gather ten people who were willing to go all the way and climb to the top of the tower on foot.
And so, gasping for breath and on the verge of a heart attack, the brave group reached the top of the tower, and a breathtaking view unfolded before them. Against this backdrop, Gustave Eiffel received the Légion d’Honneur from the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Édouard Lockroy. There’s no doubt it was the high point of his life (quite literally).
Fear and loathing in Paris
The Eiffel Tower became the biggest hit of the 1889 exhibition, and it’s no surprise at all. It was the tallest structure in the world with the lightest weight relative to its height (it weighed “only” about 7,000 tons). The tower held the title of tallest structure in the world for 41 years, until New York’s Chrysler Building took the crown from it. But while the Chrysler Building never became a symbol of New York, the Eiffel Tower went on being a symbol of Paris long after losing the height contest.
Even though the Eiffel Tower became a symbol, most Parisians didn’t exactly welcome it with applause. Far from it: a large part of the Parisian elite simply despised this tower.
The famous writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) went even further, and decided to start eating at the restaurant on the tower’s second floor for the sole reason that it was the one place in Paris from which you couldn’t see the tower.
A long list of writers and intellectuals joined the protest against the tower, among them the composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893), the writer Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), and the architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898), whom we know for the opera house he built in Paris. In the petition these intellectuals signed, the tower was called a “hollow candlestick”, a “skeleton” and even a “giant enema”, and the government was called on to tear it down, the sooner the better.
By the way, with all due difference, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) didn’t like the Eiffel Tower either. The story goes that during his famous tour of Paris after the occupation, he arrived at the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot, looked at the tower and said, “That’s it?! It’s ugly!” and left (not before posing for a photo in front of it like any other tourist).
Public pressure, and the fact that Eiffel had only a 20-year concession for the tower, meant that the tower’s very existence was at risk. But what saved the Eiffel Tower from being torn down was the invention of the wireless: the tower’s height made it ideal not just for studying the weather (Eiffel himself built a small lab there for that purpose) but also for radio broadcasts.
During the First World War, the French army discovered that the antenna placed atop the tower could be used as a tool for electronic warfare, which made the tower extremely useful. At first, the Signal Corps used the tower to jam German radio communications, and later the Eiffel Tower became a listening tool, thanks to which the spy Mata Hari (1876-1917) was caught in 1917.
All of this saved the tower’s life, and once it seemed like it was here to stay, more and more Parisians began to love it.
The man who sold the Eiffel Tower (twice)
The fact that the Eiffel Tower had become a Parisian symbol didn’t escape the attention of Victor Lustig (1890-1947), a con man of Jewish descent who arrived in Paris in 1925.
The City of Light at the time had already started recovering from the First World War and had become a city where all the high society of Europe liked to stay. In short, a city with quite a few people carrying too much money, just looking for someone to help them lighten their wallets.
One day that year, Lustig read an article in the newspaper about how maintaining the Eiffel Tower was costing the city of Paris a fortune, and that there were calls to tear it down in order to save taxpayers’ money. This innocent news item got the gears turning in Lustig’s head, and before long he’d come up with a plan that was brilliant in its simplicity.
Lustig managed to arrange a forged certificate claiming to be from an official of the French government, and gathered six of the wealthiest scrap metal dealers in Paris at the luxurious Hôtel de Crillon.
At the meeting, he presented himself as a senior official of the French government and told them that the city had decided to tear down the Eiffel Tower and sell it off, since it could no longer afford to maintain it. But, since they didn’t want a public scandal in case the plan became known too quickly, they weren’t allowed to tell anyone about it until the contract was signed.
Afterward, Lustig took the scrap metal dealers on a tour of the Eiffel Tower, and during it he figured out which one of them was the biggest sucker. It was André Poisson, a fairly successful scrap metal dealer with one weakness. As a nouveau riche, he felt that despite his financial success, he hadn’t really been accepted into Paris’s economic elite. A grand gesture like buying the Eiffel Tower could be quite the ticket in.
Suddenly, Lustig ran into an unexpected problem. Poisson’s wife grew suspicious and began asking why the deal was so secret on one hand, yet moving so fast on the other. To ease her suspicions, Lustig “confessed” that, as a city official, his salary was too low, and in order to “make ends meet” he had to look for creative ways to boost his income. So, in order to keep his bosses from finding out, he needed to keep things confidential.
Poisson understood right away. To him, Lustig was nothing more than a corrupt official looking for a bribe. Paradoxically, this completely removed her suspicions. And so our hero managed to get not only a tidy sum of money for the Eiffel Tower, but also an additional sum as a “bribe”.
The moment the suitcase of cash changed hands, Victor Lustig boarded a train to Vienna and went underground. Surprisingly, nothing happened, since Poisson, after discovering he’d fallen victim to a con, refused to go to the police so as not to be shown up as a fool. This encouraged Lustig to return to the City of Light to look for new suckers.
And so Victor Lustig repeated the exact same scheme. He found 6 new scrap metal dealers, drove them to the tower, and found the person with the highest potential to “buy” it.
But this time, the scheme fell apart, and the dealer took the sales contract and the forged certificate straight to the police. Luckily for Lustig, he managed to escape the police at the last moment and board a train that took him out of France, which he never returned to.
Later in life, he moved to the United States, where he carried out various scams and even managed to con Al Capone himself. Eventually, Lustig’s luck ran out, and he was arrested on counterfeiting charges and sent to Alcatraz, where he died in 1947 of pneumonia. The Eiffel Tower, meanwhile, is still standing.
The people who climb to the top on foot, and those who jump off
While a large part of the Parisian intellectual world didn’t much care for the tower, the sports community embraced it enthusiastically. In 1891, about two years after the Eiffel Tower opened, a man named Sylvain Dornon climbed the tower’s stairs to the first floor on stilts.
By 1905, a climbing competition was already being held, with 227 athletes climbing the tower on foot. The winner reached the second floor in 3 minutes and 12 seconds! How did nobody think to make this an Olympic sport?!
Others decided it would be more interesting to go the other way, down, and as fast as possible. Already in 1912, an Austrian man named Franz Reichelt tried to jump from the tower using a parachute. Unfortunately, he landed on his head a few seconds after jumping. That same year, an American pilot flew between the tower’s legs, which cost him his pilot’s license (at least he survived to tell the story).
Over the years, quite a few eccentric people have tried to jump from the tower in various ways. The most famous of them is Mr. A.J. Hackett, who in 1987 made a bungee jump from the top of the tower straight into the arms of the police. And there were also 380 people who decided to end their lives by jumping from the tower. Almost all of them succeeded, except for one woman who, in 1964, jumped from the tower, landed on the roof of a parked car, and survived by a miracle.
If you’d like to read more about people who tried to take their own lives by jumping from the Eiffel Tower, you’re welcome to read the excellent article by Dr. Orna Liberman, The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower in film
The Eiffel Tower isn’t just a tourist attraction and a backdrop for various eccentrics and daredevils. The film industry discovered the tower’s potential pretty quickly, and it has appeared countless times on the big screen.
The first film in which the tower played a starring role was René Clair’s (1898-1981) Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray), from 1924. In this science fiction film, a couple in love manages to survive a ray that puts every resident of Paris to sleep, thanks to the fact that they were both up on the Eiffel Tower when the ray was activated. Here’s a short clip from the film, which takes place on the Eiffel Tower.
Since that film, the Eiffel Tower has starred in many more movies. I don’t remember them all, but as a big James Bond fan, I can’t help but mention the unforgettable scene starring Roger Moore (1927-2017) and Grace Jones (born 1948) in “A View to a Kill”, which starts on the Eiffel Tower and ends in a wild chase across Paris:
When the Eiffel Tower isn’t starring in movies, it’s starring in the life of every single person who travels to Paris. There’s nothing more beautiful or magical than standing on one of the bridges of Paris and watching the tower sparkle in the dark. Take a look at this video, which shows the Eiffel Tower in all its glory, set to music by Erik Satie. I promise you won’t be able to take your eyes off it:
One more thing: in 2022, the Eiffel Tower grew a whole six meters!
In March 2022, the installation of a 6-meter antenna was completed atop the Eiffel Tower, in order to allow for digital audio broadcasting. So, since that year, the Eiffel Tower’s height is 330 meters!
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