The Eiffel Tower Was Nearly Torn Down. Here’s What Saved It

In 1887, Gustave Eiffel, the French engineer commissioned to build the tower for the 1889 World’s Fair, signed the agreement with the French government and the city of Paris. The city also contributed to the construction costs and gave Eiffel years of ticket revenue to help offset the expense. As part of the agreement, however, Eiffel had to give the tower back to the city at the end of 1909, when it was to be dismantled.

On February 14, 1887, Le Temps, a Paris daily, carried an open letter signed by 47 artists and writers protesting the erection of Gustave Eiffel’s tower, then only partially built. It was signed by such figures as the novelist Guy de Maupassant, the author Alexandre Dumas fils, and Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera. These individuals called themselves the Committee of 300, because they wanted to emphasize that the tower would be that many meters high, not that there were that many of them. They dismissed it as a “monstrous chimney.” Construction proceeded anyway.

Eiffel knew he had only until the end of 1909 before his tower was scheduled to be dismantled, and so he didn’t bother waiting for the public’s opinion to shift. He invited French scientists to use his tower to conduct experiments at its height of 300 meters for no charge. Then he bought them labs and equipment for meteorology, physics, and aerodynamics, and he paid for everything himself. It was a very calculated move. He wanted to make tearing the tower down politically unthinkable long before a vote ever happened.

In 1889, the director of France’s national weather service, Eleuthère Mascart, had an observatory built atop the tower to take atmospheric measurements at altitude. A couple of years after that, the physicist Louis Paul Cailletet ran a mercury-filled glass tube down the spiral staircase to measure air pressure under extreme conditions. In the years that followed, Eiffel dropped things from the second platform of the tower, collecting data that turned out to be quite valuable for aviation pioneers.

On November 5, 1898, French inventor Eugène Ducretet and his assistant, Ernest Roger, transmitted the first wireless telegraph signal in the country, sending a burst of Morse code from the top of the tower to the nearby Panthéon some four kilometers away. There was no human voice or music to transmit, only Morse code pulses, but that is all it took for the military to realize the tower’s skeleton could act as an antenna for wireless communication.

Paris held another world’s fair in 1900, with the tower at the center of Eiffel’s 20-year deal. It drew around 50 million visitors, and the box office kept bringing in money until 1909, when the structure was scheduled to be torn down. But with tickets still being sold, the tower was anything but a liability.

Gustave Ferrié, a French army officer interested in the potential of wireless radio, couldn’t convince the War Ministry to fund his experimental equipment. Eiffel funded the installation of the high-altitude antenna and the radio station at the top of the tower with 60,000 francs from his own money. The tower became an asset the army relied upon.

The wireless reach of the tower kept increasing: 400 kilometers in 1904, 6,000-plus by 1908. Captain Gustave Ferrié’s men used long-wave transmitters to beam signals to French naval ships across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, and to French outposts in North Africa. Within five years, the tower was no longer just an engineering marvel. It had become something the military could not do without.

In 1909, the final year of the tower’s lease, the French Ministry of War built an underground radio station below the Champ de Mars, the lawn at the tower’s foot, adjacent to its south pillar. The generators and transmitters were shielded from possible shelling by being placed underground, and cables were run up the iron legs of the tower. The military was now permanently committed to a structure slated for destruction.

But on January 1, 1910, the Paris City Council lifted its threat of demolition, voiding the clause in the tower’s contract that called for the structure’s razing in 20 years. With the tower’s radio mast now considered essential to national defense, the council awarded Gustave Eiffel a 70-year extension.

With the outbreak of war, the tower was transformed from a scientific instrument into a permanent military installation. In September 1914, the Eiffel Tower picked up unencrypted radio messages from German forces, key intelligence that was used by General Joseph Joffre, France’s Commander-in-Chief, to plan a successful counterattack at the First Battle of the Marne. This engagement, one of a series that halted the German advance on Paris, marked the tower’s first success in wartime.

In January 1917, operators at the Eiffel Tower picked up a coded radio dispatch from a German military attaché’s agent in Madrid, using the codename “H-21.” The cryptographers at the French Ministry of War recognized that the transmission was talking about a Dutch dancer named Margaretha Zelle, living in Paris and known by the stage name Mata Hari. She was arrested on February 13, 1917, and eventually tried and convicted for spying. Historians now believe she was a fairly inconsequential agent whose apparent importance may have been overstated during the war by prosecuting lawyers.

On Christmas Eve in 1921, the army officer and radio pioneer Gustave Ferrié gave a hand in launching Radio Tour Eiffel, the first civilian public radio station in France. The station would relay news, weather, and live music from the tower’s heights. The move encouraged more people to invest in their own radios, and it made the tower known for its new purpose as a broadcasting center rather than a military outpost or laboratory.

Victor Lustig, an Austro-Hungarian swindler, stayed in a Paris hotel in May 1925. He claimed to be a high-ranking civil servant and met with a group of scrap metal dealers. He informed them that Paris was going to demolish the Eiffel Tower because of the cost of its maintenance. The men bid on the demolition contract, and one dealer, André Poisson, gave Lustig the bribe money and a “contract fee.” Not wanting to admit that he had been duped by Lustig, Poisson allowed him to escape to Vienna.

The carmaker Citroën leased the lights in 1925, wrapping three sides of the tower in 250,000 lightbulbs, forming the word CITROËN in enormous letters, the largest electric sign in the world at the time. It stayed lit for around ten years and consistently generated advertising revenue for Paris, even during the Depression.

On April 26, 1935, the French engineer René Barthélemy placed a transmitter on top of the tower and broadcast France’s first official electronic television signal, with regular broadcasts beginning before the year was over. The tower that had relayed telegraph pulses, military radio signals, and civilian broadcasts was now in the business of television as well.

In June of 1940, with the Germans poised to enter Paris, a group of French Resistance technicians cut the Eiffel Tower’s elevator cables and disabled the drive motors. When asked, they told the German military that they were unable to locate replacement parts. When Hitler came to Paris later in June, he chose not to climb the almost 1,700 stairs to the top of the tower. The elevators remained out of commission throughout the German occupation.

When the Allies closed in on Paris in August of 1944, Hitler issued an order to his military governor for the city, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to demolish the city’s most famous buildings, including the Eiffel Tower. But the Germans didn’t have the explosives or the engineers, and they were pinned down by Allied troops and a French Resistance rebellion. Choltitz surrendered the city on August 25, 1944, without destroying anything.

Built using 7,300 metric tons of puddle iron, a purer form of wrought iron rather than steel, the Eiffel Tower resists the kind of deep rust that eats away at ordinary iron. It needs repainting every seven years, and that has kept it in service at less cost than throwing it away during Paris’ decades of fiscal squabbles.

In May of 1956, a fire in the equipment room atop the tower destroyed part of the upper section. When workmen rebuilt the damaged area a year later, they added a steel antenna mast to the top of the tower, which brought its height to 320 meters, permanently securing its role as the host of television and FM radio transmitters. What was supposed to be a temporary structure to be removed in 1909 was now a permanent broadcast facility.

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