Eiffel Tower

Description

The Eiffel Tower is the most visually famous structure in France, perhaps in Europe, and has seen over 200 million visitors. Yet it wasn’t supposed to be permanent and the fact it still stands is down to a willingness to accept new technology which was how the thing came to be built in the first place. In 1889 France held the Universal Exhibition, a celebration of modern achievement timed to coincide with the first centenary of the French Revolution. The French government held a competition to design an “iron tower” to be erected at the entrance to the exhibition on the Champ-de-Mars, partly to create an impressive experience for visitors. One hundred and seven plans were submitted, and the winner was one by engineer and entrepreneur Gustav Eiffel, aided by architect Stephen Sauvestre and engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier. They won because they were willing to innovate and create a true statement of intent for France. Eiffel’s tower was to be unlike anything yet built: 300 meters tall, at that time the highest man-made structure on earth, and built of a latticework of wrought iron, a material whose large scale production is now synonymous with the industrial revolution. But the design and nature of the material, making use of metal arches and trusses, meant the tower could be light and “see-through”, rather than a solid block, and retain still its strength. Its construction, which began on January 26th 1887, was swift, relatively cheap and achieved with a small workforce. There were 18,038 pieces and over two million rivets. The Tower is based on four large pillars, which form a square 125 meters along each side, before rising up and joining into a central tower. The curving nature of the pillars meant the elevators, which were themselves a relatively recent invention, had to be carefully designed. There are viewing platforms at several levels, and people can travel to the top. Parts of the great curves are actually purely aesthetic. The structure is painted (and re-painted regularly).

Facts about The Eiffel Tower

• In fashionable Paris, even the Eiffel Tower must keep up with style trends. Over the decades, the “Iron Lady” has changed her looks with the application of a spectrum of paint colors.
• When it opened in 1889, the Eiffel Tower sported a reddish-brown color. A decade later, it was coated in yellow paint. The tower was also yellow-brown and chestnut brown before the adoption of the current, specially mixed “Eiffel Tower Brown” in 1968.
• Every seven years, painters apply 60 tons of paint to the tower to keep her looking young. The tower is painted in three shades, progressively lighter with elevation, in order to augment the structure’s silhouette against the canvas of the Parisian sky.
• When dusk fell across Paris between 1925 and 1936, a quarter-million colored bulbs attached to three sides of the tower’s steeple illuminated to spell the 100-foot vertical letters of the French automobile company Citroën.
• When the initial designer of the Statue of Liberty’s interior elements died suddenly in 1879, French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi hired Eiffel as his replacement.

Details Of This Palace

1	Opening		:		31 March 1889
2	Tall		:		300 meters tall
3	Construction		:		January 26th 1887
4	Completed		:		15 March 1889
5	Tallest in the world		:		from 1889 to 1930
6	Location		:		7th arrondissement, Paris, France

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