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.
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