Paris's greatest artists signed a petition against the Eiffel Tower.
In 1887 a 'Committee of Three Hundred', one member per metre of the planned tower, called it useless and monstrous. It was meant to be temporary and due for dismantling in 1909. It survived because it was useful as a giant radio mast. Gustave Eiffel didn't even come up with the idea.
The tower was built as the centrepiece of the 1889 World's Fair, marking a century since the French Revolution. Although it bears Gustave Eiffel's name, the first sketch was made in 1884 by two senior engineers at his company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier: four lattice girders spreading at the base and meeting at the top. Eiffel was initially unenthusiastic; the architect Stephen Sauvestre added the decorative arches and flourishes, and Eiffel then bought the patent rights and championed the design.
Nothing had ever been built to 300 metres, or even 200, and many thought it impossible. Others objected on aesthetic grounds. On 14 February 1887 the newspaper Le Temps published a protest by writers, painters, sculptors and architects, led by the Opéra architect Charles Garnier and including Guy de Maupassant and Charles Gounod, against a 'useless and monstrous' tower looming over Paris like a black factory chimney. Eiffel replied by comparing it to the pyramids. Maupassant was later said to lunch in its restaurant daily because it was the one place in Paris he could not see it.
It is a marvel of economy. The wrought-iron structure weighs about 7,300 tonnes; melted down, it would cover its 125-metre square base to a depth of only about 6 centimetres. Eiffel said his main concern was wind resistance, and the flaring curve of the legs follows from that. On completion it became the tallest structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until New York's Chrysler Building in 1930.
Eiffel's concession ran for twenty years, after which the tower was due to be dismantled. What saved it was science: it proved invaluable for radio telegraphy, and from 1910 it broadcast time signals as part of the International Time Service. The once-hated tower was declared a historical monument in 1964.
Source: Wikipedia — Eiffel Tower · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
