The Eiffel Tower Was Meant to Be Torn Down — A Radio Antenna Saved It

The Eiffel Tower receives approximately 6 million visitors per year, making it the most visited paid monument in the world. It appears on millions of postcards, in thousands of films, and in the mental shorthand that represents Paris for billions of people who have never been there. It is, by any measure, one of the most culturally significant structures ever built. It also came within a few years of being demolished as planned, its iron structure melted down and sold for scrap, its site returned to undeveloped land on the banks of the Seine. What saved it was not sentiment. It was wireless telegraphy.

A Temporary Monument

The tower was commissioned as the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the World's Fair held in Paris to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution. The French government held a design competition, and Gustave Eiffel's firm — specifically his engineers Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with architectural input from Stephen Sauvestre — submitted the winning design. The tower was to be the tallest man-made structure in the world (a title it held until the Chrysler Building surpassed it in 1929) and the centerpiece of the most ambitious world's fair yet staged.

The critical condition was temporary use. The lease for the Champ de Mars plot on which the tower stood was for twenty years, and the agreement stipulated that Eiffel's company would dismantle the structure when the lease expired in 1909. Eiffel himself received no government funding for the tower — he financed most of the construction cost of 7.8 million francs himself, in exchange for the right to operate it commercially for the first twenty years.

The Critical Reception

When the tower opened in 1889, critical reception was mixed to hostile. A petition signed by three hundred prominent French artists, writers, and architects — including Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils — called the structure a "disgrace to Paris" and a "ridiculous tower dominating the city like a gigantic black smokestack." The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans called it a "hollow candlestick." The architectural establishment, committed to stone, classical proportions, and historical ornament, found the naked iron engineering aesthetically offensive.

Popular reception was considerably more enthusiastic. The tower attracted 1.8 million visitors during the 1889 World's Fair alone, and public fascination with the structure persisted throughout the twenty-year lease period. But popular affection was not, by itself, sufficient to override the demolition agreement. As 1909 approached, the question of the tower's future became pressing.

The Antenna That Changed Everything

What tipped the balance was a new technology. Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated practical wireless telegraphy in 1895, and within a decade, military and commercial wireless communications were becoming strategically important. A tall metal structure in the center of a major city was an almost ideal radio antenna — the height improved transmission range, and the central location provided access to a wide geographic area.

The French military, which had been using the tower experimentally as a radio transmission point since 1898, recognized its value and argued successfully for its preservation. In 1909, the year demolition would have occurred, the French government took over ownership of the tower and formally committed to its preservation on the grounds of its military telecommunications value.

During World War I, the Eiffel Tower's radio transmitter was used to jam German military communications and to intercept messages — including communications that led to the arrest and execution of the spy Mata Hari in 1917. The tower that had been called a monstrosity had become a military asset and, eventually, the symbol it is today. The twenty-year temporary structure has now stood for over 135 years, and no one is discussing demolition anymore.