Built to Fall in 20 Years - How the Eiffel Tower Saved Itself and Paris

When it was constructed for the 1889 Paris World's Fair, the Eiffel Tower was legally scheduled to stand for only twenty years before being dismantled and sold for scrap metal. Denounced by Paris's cultural elite as a "gigantic factory smokestack" and facing daily public ridicule, this colossal iron giant pulled off one of the greatest survival stories in architectural history. From pushing through river mud using pressurized underwater caissons to designing aerodynamic lattice arches that turned hurricane winds into stabilizing forces, Gustave Eiffel defied 19th-century physics. But the tower's ultimate salvation didn't come from tourism—it came from a secret summit laboratory and military radio transmissions that changed the course of World War I.