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However difficult its birth may have been, the Tour Eiffel is now completely accepted by both Parisians and all French citizens, and is internationally recognized as the symbol of Paris itself. The world's acceptance of this icon is confirmed by the number of yearly visitors to the tower since its building:

As of 2004, a total of 216,476,171 visitors, from the four corners of the world, have gone up to at least the tower's first level.

                        Built for the Exposition Universelle
 

Design Competition
The French government organized the 1889 International Exposition to mark the anniversary of the French Revolution, and held a design completion for a suitable monument. From over 7 hundred submittals, the proposal by the noted bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel was chosen unanimously. It called for an entirely open-lattice iron tower 984-feet [300-meters] tall.

Tower Conception

The tower was conceived in June, 1884, by the two chief structural engineers of Eiffel's company: Emile Nouguier [trusted employee of Eiffel, born in Paris, Feb. 17, 1840 -died in June, 1898] and Maurice Koechlin [long time employee of Eiffel, born Mar. 8, 1856 in Buhl, Haut-Rhin, France - died Jan. 14, 1946 in Veytaux, Switzerland - an officer of the Légion d'honneur]. Their concept was that of a large pylon with four columns of iron lattice work girders. At the base, the columns were to be separated, coming together at the top. The columns were joined to each other by iron girders at regular intervals. This design was a bold extension of bridge building principals. The

Architectural Beautification

Eiffel then commissioned architect Stephen Sauvestre [born 1874 - died 1919] to enhance the tower's appearance. Sauvestre's greatest contribution to the project was his use of monumental decorative arches to link the columns and the first level. Making use of his advanced knowledge of the behavior of metal arch and metal truss forms under loading, Eiffel had designed a light, airy, but strong structure that presaged a revolution in civil engineering and architectural design. In 1884, he took out a patent "for a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 meters. The final tower did not include the stone pedestals that Sauvestre had proposed; nor did it include the large glass-walled halls on each level or the bulb-shaped top.
The Eiffel Tower had several antecedents. Among them were the iron-supported railway viaducts designed by Eiffel: an arch bridge over the Douro River in Portugal, with a span of 160 m [525 ft]; and a design for a circular, iron-frame tower proposed by the American engineers Clarke and Reeves for the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Eiffel knew, and publicly acknowledged the influence of the latter. Eiffel was no stranger to the United States, having recently designed the pylon and wrought-iron infrastructure of Frederic Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty in 1885.

Construction Period

The Tour Eiffel was under construction from 1887 to 1889 to serve as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle [1889], a World's fair marking the centennial celebration of the French revolution. When it was completed, the tower was the tallest man made structure in the world during the 40 years before the completion of New York's Chrysler Building in 1930.
The tower was inaugurated on March 31, 1889, and opened on May 6. During its construction, three hundred workers joined together 18,038 pieces of puddled iron, using two and a half million rivets, to build the tower.

                                 Eiffel Tower Construction

Building the Tower

After the site had been graded, four immense foundations were dug and poured with cement to support the tower's four vertical piers. The foundations were completed only 5 months after work on them was started. The tower was then assembled [up to the first level], using 12 wooden scaffolds, plus a few small steam cranes, to build each of the tower's legs which rest upon their own foundations. The pressure applied, to each foundation, was about 3 to 4 kilograms per square centimeter. The base, of the tower, measures 125m by 125m. The last of the major girders, up to the first level, were joined on December 7, 1887.

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