Paris, France
Tour Eiffel · toor eh-FEL
Built in two years for the world's fair of 1889, and meant to stand for twenty. Writers and painters begged the city to stop it. It was saved because it made a good radio mast.
Photo: Henrique Ferreira from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are looking at a tower made of iron, held together by two and a half million rivets. It went up in two years, two months and five days, and opened in the spring of 1889. At 300 metres it was almost twice as high as anything people had built before.
It was a gateway to a fair, with a permit for twenty years. It is still here, and more than three hundred million people have gone up it.
The square under the tower and its gardens are free, after a security check. Tickets are sold by height: to the second floor or to the top, by lift or by the stairs. The first floor is included in every ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The square and gardens under the tower | Free, after the security check |
| The frieze of names | Seen from the ground, free |
| The stairs, south leg | Stairs ticket, to the second floor |
| The first floor, 57 m | Included in every ticket |
| The second floor, 115 m | Second-floor ticket or top ticket |
| The top, 276 m | Top ticket only; lift from the second floor |
| The Trocadéro terrace | Across the river; free, no ticket |
| The Champ de Mars | Public park behind the tower; free |
France wanted something astonishing for the world's fair of 1889, a hundred years after its Revolution. The winning idea was a tower 300 metres high, made of iron. It came from the firm of the bridge-builder Gustave Eiffel.
Many people hated it before it was built. Some of the best-known writers and artists in France signed a public letter calling it useless and monstrous.
The permit ran out in 1909. Eiffel had seen that coming and had spent years finding uses for the tower: weather readings, wind experiments, and then wireless telegraphy. The army needed the mast, so the tower stayed.
Today it is 330 metres high with its aerials, and it is painted by hand about every seven years.
"Gustave Eiffel designed it." The first drawing was made in 1884 by two engineers in his firm, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier. An architect, Stephen Sauvestre, added the great arches at the base. Eiffel bought their rights, fought for the project, paid for most of it and put his name on it.
"It is made of steel." It is wrought iron, the kind then called puddled iron. The ironwork weighs about 7,300 tonnes.
"You may not photograph it at night." You may, for yourself. The lighting is treated as a protected work, so selling or publishing pictures of the lit tower needs the operator's leave. That is why this page shows it by day.
"The arches hold it up." They do not. Sauvestre added them to make the tower look steadier and to serve as a gate to the fair.
The first stop is across the river and the next three are on the ground. Then come the three floors, and three stops about the tower's history.
The best view of the whole tower is from the terrace of the Trocadéro, across the Seine. In 1889 visitors came down this slope, crossed the bridge and walked in under the arch.
The fair filled the Champ de Mars, the long lawn behind the tower, with halls of iron and glass. Thirty-two million visits were counted. Almost all of it was pulled down afterwards. The tower was the entrance, and the entrance is what is left.
Work on the foundations began on 28 January 1887. On 31 March 1889 Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps and raised the French flag at the top.
Stand in the middle and look straight up. The tower rests on four legs, one at each corner of a square 125 metres on a side. The legs lean inwards and meet at the first floor.
The curve of the legs was calculated. It follows the line along which the wind pushes, so that the iron is squeezed and never bent. Even in a storm the top moves only a few centimetres.
Every piece was drawn in advance, to a tenth of a millimetre, and made at Eiffel's works outside Paris. There are 18,038 pieces. On site, teams of four men put in the rivets red-hot.
About three hundred men worked on the site. One died, and that was on a Sunday, when he had brought his fiancée to see the tower. For the 1880s that was a remarkable record.
Look just under the first floor. Eiffel had the names of 72 French scientists and engineers set there in gold letters, eighteen on each side. He meant them as an answer to the artists who said the tower stood for nothing.
Among them are Lavoisier, Ampère, Foucault and Daguerre, who gave the world practical photography.
All 72 are men. In 2025 the city of Paris announced a plan to add the names of women scientists.
A lift that climbs a curved, leaning leg had never been built. In 1889 it took three companies, one of them Otis of New York, to solve the problem.
Two of the lifts that run today, in the east and west legs, still use the water-powered machinery put in for the next fair, in 1899. Look for the big yellow carriages under the legs.
The stairs are in the south leg. It is 674 steps to the second floor. From there to the top there is only the lift.
This is the widest platform and the one people skip. A section of the floor is glass. You can stand on it and look down between your feet at the people in the square.
From the edge you see the tower's own ironwork closer than anywhere else. A piece of the original spiral stair that once led to Eiffel's rooms at the top stands here.
At 115 metres you are high enough to see all of Paris and low enough to pick things out. Find the white dome of Sacré-Cœur on its hill to the north, the gold dome of the Invalides, the Louvre along the river, and the two towers of Notre-Dame.
Many Parisians will tell you this floor is better than the top.
Look up from here. The four legs have become one shaft.
The top platform is small. On a clear day you can see about sixty kilometres. The city below turns into a map.
Eiffel kept a small apartment up here for himself, with wallpaper, a piano and a laboratory. He received guests in it, among them Edison. You can look into it through a window. Wax figures show Eiffel, his daughter Claire and Edison.
The tower grows and shrinks. On a hot day the iron expands, and the top stands as much as 15 centimetres higher. It also leans a little away from the sun.
In February 1887, as the foundations were being dug, a letter appeared in the newspaper Le Temps. It was signed by some three hundred people, among them the composer Gounod, the novelist Maupassant, the younger Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Garnier, who built the Paris Opera. They called the tower a gigantic black factory chimney.
Eiffel answered that engineers have a beauty of their own, and that the laws of wind and weight, honestly followed, give a harmony. Then he built it.
Poets of the next generation loved it. In 1913 Guillaume Apollinaire opened a poem by speaking to the tower as a shepherdess.
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges is bleating this morning
Guillaume Apollinaire, "Zone", in Alcools (1913)
From 1903 the army officer Gustave Ferrié strung aerials from the top and sent messages farther each year. By 1908 the signal reached North Africa. When the permit ended in 1909, the city renewed it.
In September 1914 the station on the tower picked up German army messages during the battle of the Marne, which helped the French decide where to strike.
Between the wars the tower became an advertisement. From 1925 to 1934 the name of the car-maker Citroën ran down three sides in a quarter of a million light bulbs.
In June 1940 the Germans took Paris. The lift cables were cut, so soldiers who wanted to hang their flag at the top had to climb. In August 1944 Hitler ordered the city destroyed, the tower with it. The German commander did not carry out the order. On the day of the Liberation, firemen climbed up and raised the French flag.
In the Bond film A View to a Kill (1985), Roger Moore chases an assassin up these stairs, and she jumps from the tower with a parachute.
Iron rusts, and paint is what keeps the tower standing. It has been repainted about every seven years, by hand, with brushes. It takes some sixty tonnes of paint. The colour has changed: red-brown in 1889, yellow in 1899, brown since 1968. The latest repainting goes back to the yellow-brown that Eiffel chose in 1907.
When the tower opened in 1889, the Guangxu Emperor of the Qing (1644–1912) had just begun to rule in his own name. The tallest old building in China was, and is, the timber pagoda at Yingxian in Shanxi, 67 metres, built in 1056.
In January 1964 France and China opened diplomatic relations. In the same year the tower was listed as a historic monument. Forty years later, in January 2004, it was lit red for the Chinese New Year.
It was the tallest structure in the world for forty-one years, until the Chrysler Building in New York passed it in 1930.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1887 | Building begins in January | Thirteenth year of the Guangxu Emperor; the Qing recognises Portuguese rule over Macau |
| 1889 | The tower opens for the world's fair | The Guangxu Emperor begins to rule in his own name; Japan adopts the Meiji Constitution |
| 1909 | The permit ends; the tower is kept as a radio mast | First year of the boy emperor Puyi |
| 1914 | The tower's station intercepts German messages | The First World War; Japan takes Qingdao from Germany |
| 1930 | The Chrysler Building passes it in height | The war of the Central Plains in China |
| 1944 | Paris is liberated; the French flag goes back up | China has been at war with Japan since 1937 |
| 1964 | Listed as a historic monument | France and China open diplomatic relations |
| 2004 | Lit red for the Chinese New Year | The Year of China in France |
One line to remember: built in two years for 1889, meant to last twenty, saved by radio.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Maupassant, who hated the tower, ate lunch in its restaurant day after day. Asked why, he said it was the one place in Paris from which he could not see it.
Source: Told by the critic Roland Barthes in 1964; no source from Maupassant's own time is known
In 1925 a swindler named Victor Lustig, posing as a government official, told scrap dealers the tower was to be pulled down in secret, and sold it to one of them. The buyer was too ashamed to go to the police.
Source: Lustig's story as told in later American accounts; French records of it are thin
When Hitler came to Paris in June 1940 the lifts did not work, and he would not climb. So people say he conquered France but never the Eiffel Tower. After the Liberation the lifts are said to have been running again within hours.
Source: A saying repeated in Paris guidebooks
Eiffel was offered great sums by rich Parisians for a single night in his rooms at the top, and refused them all.
Source: Told in accounts of the tower; we have found no first-hand source
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Travel guides and price tables of 2026 that agree with each other; the tower's own site could not be opened from our tools.
Checked 2026-11-12
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