Champ de Mars, Paris

A tower two-thirds risen

By August 1888 the Eiffel Tower had reached the upper edge of its second platform. The first platform at 57 metres had been finished and was already open to inspection visitors; the second at 115 metres was complete; the upper third — the narrowing lattice that gives the tower its silhouette — was still rising at a rate of about 12 metres per month. At completion in March 1889 it would stand 300 metres tall (312 with the flagpole), surpassing the Washington Monument and holding the record until 1930.

The rivet teams

Each of the tower's 18 000 wrought-iron components was held together by hand-driven rivets — 2.5 million of them. The work was organised in four-man teams that became one of the iconic images of late-19th-century industrial labour. A heater pulled a glowing rivet from a portable charcoal forge and tossed it across the open framework. A catcher fielded it in a leather scoop, often across thirty metres of empty air, and placed it in the prepared hole. A holder braced the rivet head with a heavy hammer-back while a hammerer flattened the protruding shaft. The teams worked without safety harnesses — the equipment did not yet exist — and the Champ de Mars site saw only one fatal fall during the entire two-year build, an exceptional record for the period.

What Paris looked like across the Seine

The skyline visible behind the tower in 1888 is unfamiliar to anyone who knows the modern view. Directly across the Seine stood the old Trocadéro Palace built for the 1878 Exposition — a Moorish-style building with two minaret-like towers and a central rotunda. It would be demolished in 1936 to make way for the curved white Palais de Chaillot, the building that frames the tower in every modern postcard. The Tour Montparnasse (1973), La Défense, the modern electric streetlights — none of these existed. The Haussmannian five-storey limestone buildings with grey mansard roofs that define central Paris were largely in place, and the silver dome of Les Invalides was already visible to the east.

Why the tower almost wasn't permanent

The tower was built as the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle marking the centenary of the French Revolution, and its demolition permit ran out in 1909. What saved it was not its aesthetics — a petition signed by Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod, Alexandre Dumas fils and forty-six other artists had denounced it as a "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower" — but its usefulness as a long-wave radio mast, first for the French military and then for transatlantic time signals. By the time the lease expired the army refused to give it up, and the iron lattice that the Paris intelligentsia had wanted torn down became, by accident of physics, the most recognisable structure in Europe.