The tower built to be torn down after 20 years

A junior engineer sketched a tower nobody asked for

A junior engineer named Maurice Koechlin sat at his desk at home and sketched an idea nobody had asked for. He drew a great pylon: four iron legs standing wide apart at the base, curving together at the top. He described it plainly, as "a great pylon, consisting of four lattice girders standing apart at the base and coming together at the top, joined together by metal trusses at regular intervals." His employer, Gustave Eiffel, looked at it and shrugged. He approved more study but showed little enthusiasm for a tower nobody had commissioned.

The sketch might have stayed a drawing. Then the company brought in an architect, Stephen Sauvestre, to make the skeleton look less like scaffolding. He added decorative arches at the base, a glass pavilion on the first level, ornamental flourishes meant to soften raw iron into something Parisians might accept. That version won Eiffel over. He bought the rights to the patent from all three men and put his own name on it.

Paris needed a centerpiece for its 1889 World's Fair, marking a century since the Revolution. A contest went out for a 300-meter iron tower on the Champ de Mars, a height nobody had built before. The terms were written so precisely that Eiffel's design was close to the only one that could win. It did. Construction began in 1887, thirty paces from where the bust of Eiffel now stands, thirty paces from this spot.

Eiffel staked his own money on a demolition clause

The tower went up in two years, two months and five days. Gustave Eiffel signed the contract himself, not through his company, staking his own money on more than three-quarters of the cost. In return he kept every franc of income from the tower for twenty years, after which Paris could tear it down. Nobody expected to want to keep it.

While it rose, France's cultural establishment turned on it. Painters, writers and architects denounced the half-built Eiffel Tower as a monstrous scar on the Paris skyline, an insult to the city's stone and its history. Their protest changed nothing. The tower kept climbing past 200 meters, then past 300, a height no human structure had ever reached.

Eiffel had one final act of confidence in his own creation. At the very top, above the public platforms, he built himself a private apartment, furnished by Jean Lachaise. He used it to entertain guests, among them the inventor Thomas Edison, high above the fairground where his critics said the tower did not belong. The Eiffel Tower opened in March 1889, and its twenty-year demolition clause quietly expired unused. It held the record for the tallest structure on Earth for forty-one years, until the Chrysler Building rose in New York in 1930.

A painted globe's footbridge collapsed and killed nine

Iron and glass were not always so lucky on this ground. Eleven years after the Tower opened, the Globe Céleste rose close by, a painted sphere 45 meters across, built for the 1900 Exposition as another marvel meant to dazzle and then vanish. Visitors climbed inside to watch painted panoramas of the solar system roll past. On April 29, 1900, the footbridge carrying them to it collapsed near Avenue de Suffren. Nine people died. Others were hurt.

An inquiry followed. France created a national committee on reinforced cement because of it. Courts later found the City of Paris responsible, for digging too close to the bridge's foundations. The globe itself did not survive the year the fair closed. It came down like most exposition structures were built to.

The Tower had opened to the same kind of doubt, the same temporary license. It outlived the doubt. The globe did not outlive its bridge.

A temporary footbridge became a bridge honoring a desert battle

A quarter mile downriver, another structure went up as a stopgap and ended as something France chose to keep. A footbridge built for the 1878 exposition once crossed the Seine where the Pont de Bir-Hakeim stands now. It lasted twenty-five years, then made way for something permanent. A steel bridge went up between 1903 and 1905, on stone piers, carrying trains above and traffic below.

For its first four decades it was called the Pont de Passy, after the neighborhood it reached. In 1948 Paris renamed it, to honor Free French soldiers who held a desert outpost in Libya called Bir Hakeim against German tanks in 1942. A statue called La France Renaissante was later added at its tip, a gift from Danish Parisians in 1930.

A structure raised to get fairgoers across a river for one season became infrastructure, then became a memorial to a battle fought two thousand miles away. It still carries the Métro over the water today.

The largest telescope ever built was later scrapped

Two miles across the fairground from the Globe, engineers built the largest refracting telescope ever made for the same 1900 Exposition, its lens over a meter wide. It was meant to let visitors peer at the moon and planets from the ground, through a fixed tube too clumsy to properly aim at the sky. It drew crowds. It made no scientific discoveries worth keeping.

When the exposition closed, its builders tried to sell it. Nobody bought a telescope that size. It sat unused for years before it was broken up and sold for scrap, glass and iron alike.

The Tower survived its own uselessness clause. The telescope did not survive its own size.

Guardsmen fired on a crowd on the Champ de Mars

Long before any of these structures stood, this same open field had already turned deadly once. A crowd gathered on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition against King Louis XVI, two days after the National Constituent Assembly had ruled he would keep his throne despite trying to flee the country. Paris officials sent the National Guard to break up the gathering. Guardsmen opened fire on the petitioners. People were killed where they stood, on ground that later hosted a fair, a globe, and a tower nobody had asked for.

The killing came from the authority meant to keep public order on this field, a century before iron towers or glass globes gave it new reasons to draw crowds.