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Champ de Mars, 5 Avenue Anatole France, 75007 Paris, France
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With some 7 million visitors per year, the Eiffel Tower is one of the most visited paid monuments in France, along with the Louvre Museum and the Palace of Versailles. Inseparable from the Parisian landscape, its wrought-iron lattice structure resembles an enormous construction set of pieces to be assembled. The building has a total weight of 10,100 tonnes, of which more than 70% is made up of the elegant steel structure. The Eiffel Tower project took place during the Second Industrial Revolution, which was marked by great technical innovations in the construction and production sectors.
The “Iron Lady” (“dame de fer” in French) was erected as part of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution and to embody the genius of the nation. Its construction on the marshy and unstable terrain of the Champ de Mars in Paris was to reach the symbolic height of 1,000 feet (more than 300 metres), a dimension never before achieved in human history. In the end, the construction work lasted only two years, two months and five days in total, a technical achievement at the time. With a height of 324 metres, the Eiffel Tower officially became the world’s tallest monument (almost halving the height of the Washington Monument and Cologne Cathedral, which are “only” 169 and 157 metres high). Initially its existence was intended to be temporary, as the tower was to be dismantled at the end of a 20-year concession granted by the city of Paris. At the beginning, its style caused a stir: many Parisians and popular artists took offence, considering that its monumental appearance and hideous nature risked disfiguring the capital. Then, over the years, the Eiffel Tower became a political showcase and a symbol of French industrial know-how for the whole world.
The Eiffel Tower’s success in France was not immediate, so it escaped destruction at the beginning of the 20th century due to a lack of visitors. Gustave Eiffel, its creator, conducted meteorological and scientific experiments to find another use for the tower. Its function as a radio and television transmitter, tested from 1898 onwards for military and then civilian use, finally convinced the French authorities to extend the concession and keep the monument as it was. There are over 300 similar towers around the world with a close resemblance, but not an exact replica. The Eiffel Tower is today the undisputed symbol of Paris (the “City of Light”), the untouchable emblem of France and a romantic place par excellence.