Things to know about Eiffel Tower , Paris, France
Paris: named ‘the city of love’ by the greatest poets, writers, actors, and musicians who found inspiration in the beauty of this mesmerizing city. Whitestone townhouses ooze luxury, the smell of freshly baked croissants drifts through the air, and flowers hang at the sides of cobbled streets.
Located in: Champ de Mars
Address: Champ de Mars, 5 Av. Anatole France, 75007 Paris, France
Timing: 9:30am–10:45pm
Height: 300 m, 330 m to tip
Construction started: 28 January 1887
Opened: 31 March 1889
What does Eiffel Tower mean?
The Eiffel Tower took the name of its creator, Gustave Eiffel, 19th century French entrepreneur and engineer who specialized in building large-scale metal structures (bridges, train stations, viaducts).
Why was the Eiffel Tower built?
The Eiffel Tower was built to be one the main attractions at the Paris World's Fair in 1889. That year, the World's Fair covered the entire Champ de Mars in Paris and its focus was the vast constructions in iron and steel that were the great industrial advancement of that time.
First called the 300-meter Tower, it soon took the name of the man who built it, Gustave Eiffel. The Tower opened to the public the same day as the World's Fair, on May 15, 1889.
Why is the Eiffel Tower shaped that way?
We have to first put the Eiffel Tower back in its historical context. It was two engineers who worked in Gustave Eiffel's company who, in 1884, imagined building a metal tower 300 meters high for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris.
These engineers were specialists in large-scale metallic structures like bridges, railway stations, viaducts, etc. It was only natural that the first sketch of the 300-meter Tower, issued from the calculations made by these two engineers, shows a pylon with 4 legs, each made of 4 robust beams linked together by open-web- joists that rise diagonally to meet at the summit.
All these shapes and curves simply recall the biggest viaducts built by Eiffel around the same time!
Who built the Eiffel Tower?
The Eiffel Tower was built from 1887 to 1889 by French engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company specialized in building metal frameworks and structures. Gustave Eiffel is at the origin of many metallic works in Europe including the Porto Viaduct (Portugal), the Viaduct du Garabit (France) and the Budapest train station (Hungary).
Gustave Eiffel's company, that was located in Levallois Perret, very near Paris, France, also built the metal framework for another world-famous monument: the Statue of Liberty (New York, United States), designed by Auguste Bartholdi and offered to the United States as a gift from France to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in 1886.
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