March 31 — the ceremonial opening of the Eiffel Tower took place in Paris.
On this day in 1889, engineer Gustave Eiffel raised the French flag at the top of the tower. Today, the Eiffel Tower is the most recognizable architectural landmark of Paris.
It is known worldwide as a symbol of France. Eiffel himself simply called it the 300-meter tower. The Eiffel Tower was originally conceived as a temporary structure. Its purpose was to serve as the entrance arch to the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Twenty years after the exhibition, the tower was planned to be demolished.
But the structure was saved from the planned demolition by radio antennas installed at the very top. The French authorities decided to hold a world’s fair to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. The Paris city administration asked the renowned engineer Gustave Eiffel to submit an appropriate proposal. Eiffel presented his drawings of a 300-meter iron tower, which had been gathering dust in his desk until then. And on September 18, 1884, Eiffel, together with his colleagues, received a patent for the project. On May 1, 1886, a competition was opened for architectural and engineering projects that would determine the architectural appearance of the future World’s Fair.
There were 107 entrants in this competition, but most of the works to one degree or another repeated the tower design proposed by Eiffel.
In the end, Eiffel’s project became one of the four winners. Then Eiffel made final changes to it, finding a compromise between the original purely engineering structural scheme and a decorative version.
Ultimately, the committee settled on Eiffel’s plan. Having won the first prize of the competition, Eiffel exclaimed enthusiastically: “France will be the only country to have a 300-meter flagpole!”
For more than forty years after its opening, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world, nearly twice the height of the tallest buildings of that time—the Great Pyramid of Khufu, Cologne Cathedral, and Ulm Minster.
But in 1930 it was surpassed by the Chrysler Building in New York.