How the Eiffel Tower was built so fast: two years, two months, 18,038 pieces of iron, and why it was meant to be torn down

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Eiffel Tower was built between 28 January 1887 and 31 March 1889, in two years, two months and five days, by about 300 workers, for the Paris World's Fair of 1889 marking the centenary of the Revolution, and it was fast for one reason: every one of its 18,038 wrought-iron pieces was drawn, cut and drilled in Gustave Eiffel's factory at Levallois-Perret to a tenth of a millimetre, so that on site the men only had to hoist the pieces and rivet them, 2.5 million rivets in all. At 300 m (984 ft, 330 m with antennas) it was the tallest structure in the world until the Chrysler Building in 1930, twice the height of anything before it, and it was designed to be dismantled after twenty years. Below: who designed it, how the foundations, the legs and the upper tower were built, the numbers, the artists' protest, why it survived, and the stories, with the tower's engineering relatives in the Buildings by style collection.

Who designed it

Not Eiffel, or not at first. In June 1884 Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, chief engineers at the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel, sketched a "great pylon" for the coming exhibition: four lattice columns curving together to a point, tied by girders at intervals, a scaled-up version of the pylons the firm built for railway viaducts. Eiffel was unimpressed, but let them work with the firm's architect Stephen Sauvestre, who added the arches at the base, the glass halls on the first floor and the cupola on top; Eiffel then bought the patent from the three of them, put his name on it and sold the idea to the government with the argument that it would show the world what French engineering could do, and that a structure shaped by the wind, its curve calculated so that wind load on every part was balanced, was beautiful in itself. In 1886 the state ran a competition for the fair's centrepiece with a brief that all but described Eiffel's tower; 107 entries were received and his won. The contract of January 1887 gave him 1.5 million francs toward a cost of 7.8 million, and in return the income from the tower for twenty years, after which the City of Paris could remove it. Eiffel Tower.

The foundations

The site on the Champ de Mars runs along the Seine, and the two legs nearest the river stand on ground that is wet gravel a few metres down. The two landward piers were built in open pits on beds of concrete 2 m thick; the two riverside piers needed sheet-iron caissons sunk into the ground with compressed air, the men digging inside them below the water table, the technique used for bridge piers, to reach firm gravel 5 m down and 22 m below the water level. Each leg of each pier rests on four masonry blocks, each with two 7.8 m anchor bolts, and the whole tower weighs about 10,100 tons, of which the iron is 7,300; the pressure on the ground is about 4.5 kg per square centimetre, roughly the same as a man sitting on a chair. The foundations took five months, from January to June 1887, and were the only part of the job with any uncertainty.

The iron: a kit of 18,038 parts

• Material. Puddled wrought iron from the Pompey forges in Lorraine, not steel, which Eiffel considered less reliable and more expensive in 1887; iron was what the firm had built bridges from for twenty years, and the tower's 7,300 tons of it would fit, melted down, into a cube 12 m on a side.
• Drawing. 50 engineers and draughtsmen made 5,300 drawings covering 18,038 pieces, with the position of every one of the 2.5 million rivet holes, all computed by hand for the tower's curved geometry.
• Factory. In the Levallois-Perret works, 150 men cut, drilled and partly assembled the pieces into sections of no more than 5 m and 3 tons, the limit of the site cranes, fastening them with temporary bolts and about a third of the rivets.
• Transport. Horse-drawn carts carried the sections the few kilometres to the Champ de Mars, where they were checked and lifted; anything that did not fit was sent back rather than adjusted on site.
• Rivets. Teams of four: one heated the rivet in a forge, one held it in the hole, one held the dolly, one hammered; the hot rivet shrank as it cooled and clamped the joint. Of the 2.5 million rivets, 1.05 million were driven on site.

Raising the four legs

The dangerous part was the first 57 m, the four legs leaning inward at 54 degrees with nothing to tie them, and the whole design depended on their meeting exactly at the first floor. Each leg rose on wooden scaffolding, with two 12-ton steam cranes per pier, of the type used to build viaducts, that climbed the legs on the rails intended for the lifts. Eiffel put each leg's feet on hydraulic jacks of 800 tons and sandboxes: when the legs were nearly at first-floor height, the engineers levelled them by pumping the jacks and letting sand out of the boxes, adjusting the position of the tops by millimetres until the girders of the first floor could be bolted in; the joining took a few days in March 1888 and went right first time, and the jacks were then replaced by fixed wedges. Above the first floor the tower was self-supporting and the scaffolding was no longer needed; above the second floor, at 115 m, a single crane climbed the tower on a central track, lifting each section from the one below. The top was reached on 31 March 1889, when Eiffel climbed the 1,710 steps to raise the flag. Twelve months for the legs, four for the rest.

Workers, safety and the lifts

Between 150 and 300 men worked on the tower, most of them the firm's bridge riveters, for twelve hours a day in winter and more in summer; they struck twice, in September and December 1888, for more pay for the height and the cold, and were given a bonus and a canteen on the first floor. Eiffel fitted guard rails and moving screens at every level, and one man died, an Italian rigger, Angelo Scagliotti, who fell after hours in 1889 showing off to his fiancée; the official count for the site is one death, a figure without parallel for the time. The lifts were harder than the tower: no maker in France would bid on the curved run up the legs, and the American Otis company built the two lifts to the second floor with hydraulic pistons and cables, while Roux, Combaluzier and Lepape built the others in the east and west legs and Edoux the vertical lift to the top, which met halfway and required passengers to change; the lifts opened weeks after the fair began.

The protest and the lease

In February 1887, as the foundations were dug, Le Temps published a "protest of the artists" signed by Charles Garnier, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Gounod and some forty others against "the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower", "a giant black factory chimney" that would humiliate Notre-Dame, the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. Eiffel answered that engineers also had a sense of beauty and that the tower would be the tallest thing man had made. Maupassant is said to have lunched in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it. Two million people climbed it in the fair's six months and it earned back most of its cost in the first year. The lease ran out in 1909, and the tower was saved because Eiffel, who had spent the years since making it useful, had installed a meteorological station, a wind-tunnel laboratory and in 1903 an antenna for the army's radio experiments; by 1909 the tower was the transmitter for the French military and the city renewed the concession. It jammed German radio in the Marne campaign of 1914, caught the messages that convicted Mata Hari, broadcast the first French public radio in 1921 and television from 1935, and has never been in danger since. Gustave Eiffel.

The numbers

• Height. 300 m in 1889; 330 m today with antennas; the first floor at 57 m, the second at 115 m, the top platform at 276 m. Heat expands it by up to 18 cm, and wind sways the top by 6–7 cm.
• Weight. 10,100 tons, 7,300 of them iron; 60 tons of paint every seven years, in three shades of "Eiffel Tower brown", lighter toward the top so it reads as one colour against the sky.
• Cost. 7,799,401 francs, about 40 million dollars today; paid back within a year.
• Time. 2 years, 2 months, 5 days: foundations 5 months, iron 21 months.
• Visitors. Around 6 to 7 million a year, the most visited paid monument in the world; about 300 million since 1889.
• Steps. 1,665 to the top today; 674 to the second floor for the public.

The tower's rivals in iron are the Shukhov Tower in Moscow, the same idea in a hyperboloid of steel, and the skyscrapers that took its height record, in the first skyscraper; the tallest structures since are in the tallest buildings in the world.

Versions and theories

• Eiffel designed it. He owned the patent and built it; Koechlin drew it and Nouguier and Sauvestre shaped it. Eiffel gave them credit in his own book and the plaque at the base names all three, but the tower carries his name because his firm carried the risk.
• It was going to be built in Barcelona. A story with no document behind it: the city's 1888 exhibition never received a proposal. Eiffel's "pylon" was always aimed at Paris 1889.
• Sold twice for scrap. True. In 1925 the con man Victor Lustig, posing as a government official, "sold" the tower to a scrap dealer, André Poisson, who was too embarrassed to go to the police; Lustig tried again with another dealer and fled.
• Hitler ordered it destroyed. In August 1944 the order to General von Choltitz to leave Paris "a field of ruins" included the tower's bridges and monuments; he did not carry it out. The story that French workers cut the lift cables in 1940 so that Hitler would have to climb is true; he did not climb.
• The tower's shape follows a formula. Eiffel described the curve as the shape that balances wind load, and mathematicians have since fitted it to an exponential; the actual profile was worked out by Koechlin graphically, section by section, and matches the formula closely rather than exactly.
• Eiffel's apartment. He kept a small flat at the top with a piano and received Thomas Edison there in 1889; it is restored, with wax figures, and can be seen through a window on the summit.

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