The Eiffel Tower is famous around the world, a symbol not just of Paris and France but of style, sophistication and romance as well. But did you know it was only meant to stand for 20 years before being dismantled?

Click through the gallery for the fantastic story of how the Eiffel Tower went from a temporary fairground attraction to a universally loved global icon...

The 1889 Exposition Universelle was held in Paris to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution and to showcase France’s industrial and cultural might. In 1886 the organisers held a competition for designs for a suitable monument to be the centrepiece of the exposition. More than 100 plans were submitted, and the Centennial Committee chose the design by the noted bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel. When it was completed, the tower served as the entrance gateway to the exposition.

In fact, the biggest names in the world of art and literature petitioned for the tower not to be built at all. They published an open letter titled "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel" in newspaper Le Temps begging Monsieur Alphand, the World's Fair's director of works, to stop its construction. Novelist Leon Bloy called it a “truly tragic street lamp". Author Guy de Maupassant thought it looked like a “giant ungainly skeleton". And art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans compared it to a half-built factory pipe.

In order to make the project more acceptable to public opinion, architect Stephen Sauvestre was commissioned to work on the tower’s appearance. He proposed stonework pedestals to dress the legs, monumental arches to link the columns and the first level, a bulb-shaped design for the top and various other ornamental features to decorate the whole of the structure. Not all of Sauvestre’s suggestions were incorporated into the final design, but those that were have contributed considerably to the Eiffel Tower’s enduring appeal.

All the elements of the tower were prepared in Eiffel’s factory in Levallois-Perret on the outskirts of Paris. It was here that each of the 18,038 metallic pieces used were designed and, when built, checked that they were accurate to a tenth of a millimetre. On the site itself a team of constructors, each with a team of 150 to 300 workers, assembled the pieces like an enormous Meccano set.

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Once the final go-ahead was given, the Eiffel Tower was built very quickly. Construction work began in January 1887 and was finished on 31 March 1889. It only took five months to build the foundations and 21 to finish assembling the metal pieces of the tower. Journalist Emile Goudeau visited the site in 1889 and described it as such: “A thick cloud of tar and coal smoke seized the throat, and we were deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer.”

The Eiffel Tower was officially inaugurated on 31 March 1889 (pictured) and became an immediate success. The criticisms were soon forgotten as the public embraced its bold design and striking silhouette and flocked to see it. Over two million people visited the 1889 Exposition Universelle and 1,953,122 of them climbed the tower. This was before the age of flight, so the views afforded over Paris from the 1,000-foot-high (300m) tower were unprecedented.

It wasn’t just people of Paris who flocked to the Eiffel Tower during the Exposition Universelle. Celebrities also clamoured to see it. French actress Sarah Bernhardt climbed the tower, as did the future King Edward VII. George I of Greece dropped by, as did the Shah of Persia. The visitor who caused the most excitement, however, was William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. He brought his famous Wild West Show to Paris for the Exposition and very nearly upstaged the Eiffel Tower when he came a calling.

One of the Eiffel Tower’s greatest achievements were its hydraulic lifts. They carried loads and reached heights not previously achieved. However, for the first couple of months after the tower was open to the public, the lifts were not in service. They eventually launched on 26 May 1889, but not before nearly 30,000 of the tower’s first visitors had climbed 1,710 steps to the top of the monument and then back down again.

When the Eiffel Tower was originally built, Gustave Eiffel was only given a 20-year permit to use the land. After that, the tower had to be returned to the City of Paris and as that date approached it looked likely that the tower would be demolished. Visitor numbers had dropped since the tower’s heyday during the 1889 Exposition Universelle and various plans to repurpose it, including turning it into a hotel (pictured), failed to gain traction.

Gustave Eiffel obviously did not want to see his most famous creation dismantled and busily set about finding a way to save it. His first idea was to give it a scientific purpose. To that end he built a laboratory on the third floor where experiments could be conducted and meteorological and astronomical observations made (pictured). Its most famous visitor was American inventor Thomas Edison, who called by a number of times in 1889. 

In the end it was wireless telegraphy that saved the Eiffel Tower from being dismantled. First conceived in the 1890s, this nascent technology developed rapidly and in 1898 Eugene Ducretet established the very first radio contact in Morse code between the Eiffel Tower and the Pantheon, 2.5 miles (4km) away. A transmitting station was installed, enabling radio transmission with London, and by 1908 transmissions were reaching distances of 3,728 miles (6,000km). A strategic purpose had been found for the Eiffel Tower and a 70-year extension added to the original permit.

During the First World War the French military used the wireless station on the Eiffel Tower to intercept enemy messages from Berlin. It helped them organise a counterattack during the Battle of the Marne in 1914, and three years later, brought about the capture of a notorious German spy. Using information intercepted in a coded message between Germany and Spain about Operative H-21, they discovered the secretive spy was in fact Mata Hari, a famous Dutch striptease artist, who travelled around Europe performing – and exchanging secrets with the Germans.

The Eiffel Tower's effectiveness as a radio transmitter should have come as no surprise. When it was completed in 1889, it rose 984 feet (300m) from the ground, and when a flagpole was added for its inauguration, it reached 1,024 feet (312m). That made it nearly double the height of the world’s previous tallest structure, the 555-foot (169m) Washington Monument in the USA. What's more, the Eiffel Tower remained the tallest building in the world until 1930, when the 1,046-foot (319m) Chrysler Building (pictured) was built.

Right from the very beginning, the Eiffel Tower has offered fine dining with equally fine views. During the 1889 Exposition Universelle there were no less than four restaurants on the first level: a Muscovite-style Russian restaurant, Anglo-American bar, a French restaurant and a Flemish restaurant. Today there are two: Madame Brasserie on the first level and the Michelin-starred Le Jules Verne restaurant on the second.

The Eiffel Tower was undoubtedly Gustave Eiffel’s crowning achievement. But his world-renowned expertise in metal structural work saw him involved in other important projects around the world. The Porto viaduct over the river, the Garabit viaduct in 1884, Pest railway station in Hungary (pictured) and the dome of the Nice observatory are all his handiwork. He was also responsible for the ingenious internal structure of the Statue of Liberty, brought in on the project when the initial internal designer, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, unexpectedly passed away.

Read on for the fascinating story behind the Statue of Liberty

In 1887 Eiffel agreed to help build the locks of the Panama Canal as part of Ferdinand De Lesseps' attempt to build the canal in 1880. The project collapsed and Eiffel was embroiled in the huge scandal that followed. As it was a risky project, he had insisted on collecting his profit as soon as work was begun. This saw him convicted of fraud, fined 2,000 francs and sentenced to two years in jail (he is pictured at the trial wearing a blue suit). The verdict was annulled on appeal, but it remained an unsavoury stain on his otherwise glittering career.

The Eiffel Tower is made from puddle iron, mined in Algeria and forged in Pompey, near Nancy in France. To protect it from corrosion, the iron is covered with a thick coat of paint every seven years, following instructions first recommended by Gustave Eiffel. It takes about 50 painters seven years to repaint the tower’s 2.69 million square foot (250,000sqm) surface, using 60 tonnes of paint, all by hand. When they finish, they go straight back to the top and start all over again.

The Eiffel Tower has been painted 19 times and has changed colour several times. In the early days it was a reddish brown before changing to a yellow-ochre between 1907 and 1947. In 1954 it was painted a brownish-red before the colour 'Eiffel Tower Brown' was developed to harmonise with the Parisian cityscape. The colour is perceived as bronze and is applied in three shaded tones – darkest at the bottom, lightest at the top – to give the appearance that it is all the same colour to the sky.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler only visited Paris once, in June 1940. It was the day after the French surrender and the signing of the Second Armistice at Compiegne and Hitler made a point of being photographed in front of the city’s most famous landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, to illustrate that his victory over France was complete.

Whatever its colour, the bold, symmetrical lines of the Eiffel Tower have always inspired artists. Georges Seurat painted it in 1888, before it was even finished. Over the years it has been painted by Le Douanier Rousseau, Signac, Bonnard, Utrillo, Gromaire, Vuillard, Dufy and Chagall, whose bright, vibrant renditions of the tower have once again found favour with art critics. In 1910, French artist Robert Delaunay produced a whole series of canvas paintings in a cubist style (pictured).

The construction of the Eiffel Tower coincided with the birth of moving pictures. It was filmed as early as 1897 by Louis Lumiere and has been an instantly recognisable motif in movies filmed in the French capital ever since. Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire danced through the tower in Funny Face in 1957, while Roger Moore as James Bond chased Grace Jones to the top of the tower in A View To A Kill in 1985. More recently, it housed the headquarters of aliens intent on invading Earth in 2019’s Men in Black: International.

Musicians have felt compelled to pay homage to the Eiffel Tower too. In 1938 Charles Trenet sang about the happiness the tower brought him in Y’a d'la Joie ('There’s Joy'). And in 1994 Pascal Obispo declared his eternal love for the iron lady in Je Suis Tombé Pour Elle ('I Fell for Her'). In 1921 Jean Cocteau wrote a libretto called Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel ('The Marriage on the Eiffel Tower') that was used in a ballet by the same name.

While Grace Jones’ character May Day was able to successfully parachute off the top of the Eiffel Tower to escape James Bond in A View To A Kill, the reality is that it is not that easy. In 1912, Czech-born Franz Reichelt, also known as ‘The Flying Tailor’, perished in an attempt to prove the viability of his parachute suit.

On 18 September 2021 French tightrope walker Nathan Paulin thrilled crowds by traversing a 2,198-foot (670m) rope along a slackline between the first level of the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero Square, 197 feet (60m) above the Seine. The 30-minute performance was part of the European Heritage Days festival held in the French capital that year.

Well, if you’re world-famous golfer, Arnold Palmer, that is. He drove a golf ball from a specially constructed ‘driving range’ on the second level of the Eiffel Tower in November 1977 to help promote the Trophee Lancome golf tournament that was about to begin. 

It wasn’t the first time the Eiffel Tower was used for promotional purposes. From 1925 to 1935 the car manufacturer Citroen used the tower as a giant billboard. The name 'Citroen' was sculpted in letters 99 feet high (30m) and illuminated by 250,000 coloured lamps. It was visible more than 18 miles (30km) away and recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest advertisement in the world at the time.

Over the years, the Eiffel Tower has become so iconic that it is something of an advertisement in itself – not just for Paris, but also for the concepts of style, sophistication and romance. More than 80 places around the world have built their own replicas of the famous tower, hoping to bring a certain 'je ne sais quoi' to their town. You’ll find these doppelgangers in Las Vegas (pictured) and Blackpool, Tokyo and Slobozia in Romania. There are also two in China: in Shenzhen and Tianducheng, the latter of which is an entire town built to look like Paris.

Every evening, just as it gets dark, the Eiffel Tower is illuminated by 336 sodium bulbs, bathing the tower in a golden light. Since 2000, it has also sparkled, on the hour, every hour, for five minutes. The effect is created by 20,000 bulbs, flashing very rapidly, inspired by camera flashes according to its designer, Pierre Bideau. The light show used to continue until 1am in summer, but since a City of Paris energy saving plan was introduced in 2022, the lights are switched off at 11:45pm with the last sparkle at 11pm.

In 2019, the Eiffel Tower celebrated its 130th birthday – not a bad run for an iron tower only meant to stand for 20 years. Over that time it has become a beloved icon, not just in France but around the world. It remains, however, a focal point for Paris and France; a place where spectacular fireworks herald in the new year and gorgeous themed illuminations celebrate everything from World Cups and Olympics to the European Union. Here’s to the next 130 years...

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