What You Never Knew About France’s Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower in Paris has been a hotspot tourist attraction for visitors all over the world. From marriage proposals, couple photoshoots, and date nights, it’s popularly been termed as the place of love.

However, after over a hundred years of its existence, there happen to be some hidden facts about the tower. Named after the engineer behind the bridge, Gustave Eiffel, the tower has been in Paris since 1889 after construction began in 1887.

The first less-known fact about the Eiffel Tower is that it wasn’t designed by Gustave Eiffel as widely assumed. It was rather designed by two engineers who worked in Gustave’s company – Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier- with the help of a French architect, Stephen Sauvestre to give the tower a facelift.

Another intriguing revelation about the tower is the stiff opposition it received from the French in the early days of its construction. Over 300 protesters marched to register their displeasure about a tower being built in Paris.

“To comprehend what we are arguing one only needs to imagine for a moment a tower of ridiculous vertiginous height dominating Paris, just like a gigantic black factory chimney, its barbarous mass overwhelming and humiliating all our monuments and belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly,” the protest letter read.

Another piece of information about the tallest tower in France is its near-demolishment in 1909. The tower was originally constructed to display the industrial power of France at the World Fair in 1889. Its permit expired shortly in 1909 and had to be destroyed. However, a radio antenna was placed atop the tower to become a radio transmission tower and was too important to dismantle by officials.