This day in history: Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa began on this day in 1173. It took two centuries for it to be completed. The fact that it leans was not part of the original planning.
The tower began to lean during construction in the 12th century, due to soft ground which could not properly support the structure's weight. It worsened through the completion of construction in the 14th century. By 1990, the tilt had reached 5.5 degrees. The structure was stabilized by remedial work between 1993 and 2001, which reduced the tilt to 3.97 degrees.
Despite the lean, the tower survived four earthquakes.
Italian scientist Galileo Galilei famously used the tower to demonstrate that objects fall at the same acceleration independent of their masses.
The second tallest man-made structure in the western hemisphere, the 2,060 feet tall KXJB Tower at Galesburg, North Dakota, near Fargo, was accidentally knocked down by a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter that was on a training flight from Grand Forks Air Force Base on this day in 1968. All four men on the helicopter were killed after the aircraft struck a supporting guy-wire and then the television tower itself. Fargo's CBS affiliate, KXJB Channel 4 (now KRDK-TV), went off the air for 8 days. The tower had been second in height only to the nearby KTHI tower, which was 2,068 feet tall.
The tower fell again on April 6, 1997 during an ice storm, subjecting it to wind gusts of 70 mph and causing at least four inches of ice to accumulate on the structure.
This Day in History: The Eiffel Tower was officially opened on this day in 1889. "Three hundred steel workers spent two years, two months and five days, from 1887 to 1889, constructing the Tower. They used more than 18,000 individual metallic parts, 2.5 million rivets, and 40 tons of paint." Source
It was built to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.
It was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler Tower was built in 1930. It is still the tallest structure in Paris.
Intellectuals and artists like Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas, Jr., protested the tower as being “useless and monstrous”: "We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal."
Gustave Eiffel responded to these criticisms by comparing his tower to the Egyptian pyramids.
While the Eiffel Tower has 5 lifts, you can actually take the stairs. However, there are 1665 of them.
Tailor and inventor Franz Reichelt leaped from the Eiffel Tower in 1912 and fell to his death wearing a parachute made from cloth of his own invention. More recently, the tower has been the scene of a number of illegal base jumps. A Norwegian man died in 2005 after losing his canopy while attempting a promotional jump for a clothing firm – the first parachuting death at the tower since Reichelt.
In 2009, an 18-year-old girl jumped off the Eiffel Tower and crashed into a restaurant on the lowest level. The deafening sound shocked everyone, but most patrons went on eating their food!
Pierre Labric, the future mayor of Montmartre, was arrested for cycling down the stairs of the tower in 1923.
One lady, Erika Eiffel, married the Eiffel tower in 2007.
The tower gets a fresh coat of paint every seven years. 60 tons of paint are used for this.
More than 250 million people have visited the tower since it was completed in 1889. In 2015, there were 6.91 million visitors. The tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world. An average of 25,000 people ascend the tower every day which can result in long queues.
There are various scale models of the tower in the United States, including a half-scale version at the Paris Las Vegas, Nevada, one in Paris, Texas built in 1993, and two 1:3 scale models at Kings Island, located in Mason, Ohio, and Kings Dominion, Virginia, amusement parks opened in 1972 and 1975 respectively.
