Eiffel Tower celebrates 120 years with spectacle of lights

When the tower opened to the public in May 1889 (as part of the World’s Fair celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution), it was considered by some to be an eyesore. Indeed, Eiffel’s creation had been rejected a year earlier by the city of Barcelona, before it was put forward and accepted as the iconic entrance arch for the Paris fair.

French writer Guy de Maupassant was one many influential figures in the Paris art world to sign the Artists’ Petition against the “useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower”, a blot on the Paris landscape. He is said to have lunched every day in the tower’s restaurant, because, he claimed, it was the only place from where his view was not spoiled by the tower itself

One hundred and twenty years later, the tower is the most visited paying attraction in the world: some seven million paying visitors every year, not to mention the millions more who make the trip to the Tower just to walk around below it.

Gustave Eiffel is, of course, most famous for the tower, but his engineering achievements can still be seen in cities all over the world: Budapest railway station, the road bridge over the oued Djemma in Algeria, the interior skeletal armature of the Statue of Liberty in New York, the railway bridge over the Douro in Portugal - all bear the Eiffel stamp of elegance, strength and economy in materials and labour.

Eiffel specialised in portable bridges – an activity he developed through his company workshop in Levallois-Perret, north of Paris. Amazingly, considering their size, they were exported all over the world in kit form.

In France he designed the Bordeaux bridge - at 500 metres, the longest in Europe at the time - and the Garabit viaduct. But it was the Douro viaduct in Portugal, built in 1877, that brought Eiffel international renown. Eiffel later made another fortune from a contract to build locks on the Panama Canal in the early 1890s. He was accused of corruption, and lost his légion d’honneur. Though he was later vindicated, he retired from the Eiffel Company and turned to research into aeronautics.

He worked with aviators Bréguet and Blériot and designed a fighter plane in 1917. His aerodynamics laboratory in Paris’s 16th arrondissement is still in operation and specialises in construction research.

This year’s celebration reminds us the tower very nearly didn’t survive its twentieth birthday. The city of Paris planned to tear it down once Eiffel’s 20-year permit expired, but the tower had already proved popular and useful, and it gained a temporary reprieve which became permanent after the 1914-18 war.

The Eiffel tower was lit up in a spectacular show of animated multicoloured lights last night to celebrate its 120th birthday. The show will be repeated four times every night until the end of the year.

Although 7 million visitors a year pay to ascend the tower, many more make the trip just for this view.