There is no silhouette more Parisian than the Eiffel Tower, which is funny when you remember that Paris nearly never had it, and then nearly threw it away. It was built as a temporary entrance arch for a fair, attacked in print by famous artists, and given twenty years before demolition. It is still there, 137 years later, because it turned out to be useful in a way nobody had planned for.
A fair needed a centrepiece
The occasion was the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the world's fair staged to mark one hundred years since the French Revolution. Paris wanted a centrepiece that proved what French engineering could do, and the winning idea came from the company of Gustave Eiffel. His senior engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, had sketched a tall iron pylon with four curved legs. Eiffel improved it and sold Paris on a lattice tower that would be the tallest structure in the world.
Construction began in January 1887 and finished on 31 March 1889, two years, two months and five days later. The secret was preparation: more than 18,000 iron parts made in the factory to exact drawings, joined on site with about two and a half million rivets.
The artists tried to stop it
Not everyone was impressed. In February 1887 a group of prominent writers, painters and architects published a protest in the newspaper Le Temps. They called the rising tower a gigantic black factory chimney and an odious column of bolted metal that would disfigure a city of cathedrals and palaces. The names included Guy de Maupassant and Charles Gounod, which gave the complaint real weight.
Maupassant became the protest's most quoted figure. He is said to have taken lunch regularly in the tower's own restaurant for one simple reason: it was the only place in Paris where he did not have to look at it. The line is too good to argue with, even if he still came and still ate the cooking.
Twenty years, then scrap
The original deal was plain. Eiffel received a permit to operate the tower for twenty years, after which it would pass to the City of Paris and could be dismantled. By 1909, when the deadline arrived, demolition was a serious prospect, and Paris had plenty of voices ready to call the experiment over.
Eiffel had anticipated the problem and spent years making his tower hard to delete. He installed scientific instruments, encouraged weather experiments, and put a laboratory near the top. Usefulness was his insurance policy: a monument can be argued about, a working scientific station is harder to scrap. What saved it, though, was a new technology that needed height more than Paris needed an unobstructed view.
Radio gave it a second life
Wireless telegraphy was young, hungry for altitude, and perfectly matched to a 300 metre iron mast in the middle of the capital. In 1898 the first radio contact was made between the tower and the Panthéon, about four kilometres away. A transmitting station followed, ranges grew, and the military took notice. During the First World War the tower's radio post intercepted enemy messages, work no politician could dismiss as decoration.
The lease was extended for decades. By the time anyone could raise demolition again, the temporary arch had become the shape by which the world recognised Paris. The protest became a footnote. The chimney became the Iron Lady, la Dame de fer, a nickname affectionate and slightly formidable at once.
It still works for a living
Survival has a maintenance bill. The tower is repainted roughly every seven years to protect the iron from rust, by hand, with around 60 tonnes of paint. At night, 20,000 flashing bulbs make it sparkle for five minutes at the start of each hour, a piece of theatre added in 2000 that Paris adopted instantly.
Millions climb it every year, but the more telling fact is how ordinary it has become to Parisians: a compass point, the thing you check without thinking when you surface from the Métro in an unfamiliar quarter. Icons usually sit behind glass. This one gives directions.
Wear the silhouette
Our Paris Eiffel Tower Sketch Tee for Women takes the famous outline back to the drawing board, a light sketch as Koechlin and Nouguier first put it on paper. Wear it in Paris and you are carrying the city's signature. Wear it anywhere else and you are carrying the better argument: that the thing a city tries hardest to stop can become the thing it is known by, forever.
