The plan to build a tower 300 metres high was conceived as part of preparations for the World's Fair of 1889. The assembly of the supports began on July 1, 1887 and was completed twenty-two months later. All the metal pieces of the tower are held together by rivets, a well-refined method of construction at the time the Tower was constructed. The uprights rest on concrete foundations installed a few metres below ground-level on top of a layer of compacted gravel. The tower was assembled using wooden scaffolding and small steam cranes mounted onto the tower itself. Various pamphlets and articles were published throughout the year of 1886, then on February 14 1887, with the construction work barely begun, there appeared the Artists' Protest. In order to make the project more acceptable to public opinion, Nouguier and Koechlin commissioned the architect Stephen Sauvestre to work on the project's appearance.

Being made of iron, the Tower has been protected from oxidation by several layers of paint, which ensure that it will last for ever. The Tower has been repainted seventeen times since it was built, an average of once every seven years. It has changed colour several times, passing from red-brown to yellow-ochre, then to chestnut brown and finally to the bronze of today, slightly shaded off towards the top to ensure that the colour is perceived to be the same all the way up as it stands against the Paris sky.

As early as 1889, the Eiffel Tower served as a laboratory for scientific measuring and experimenting. With the recognition of the Tower's scientific utility, it had won the right to be preserved as a monument. Eiffel strongly encouraged research into radio transmission by proposing the use of his tower as a monumental radio mast. The top of the tower has been modified over the course of the years in order to accommodate ever more antennae.

In 1889 the tower was a colossal fairground attraction, but during the 1920s it became a symbol of modernity and the avant-garde, inspiring poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, film-makers, photographers and numerous painters. The Tower very soon became a favourite subject for painters, and contemporary artists, and even today, continues to be used as a model. Eiffel had not foreseen that this materialisation of an artistic vision would soon become the world famous emblem of a city like Paris, unique in its exceptional size but reducible and reproducible ad infinitum.

view the official website for the Eiffel Tower.