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Gustave Eiffel did not design the Eiffel Tower

The design came from two of his engineers

Koechlin's first sketch was four curved lattice columns meeting at the top. It was an engineer's object, and it looked like one. Sauvestre, who ran the company's architectural department, added the decorative arches at the base, a glass pavilion on the first floor and the masonry pedestals — the things that made it look deliberate rather than merely tall.

Eiffel bought the rights, submitted the refined design, and won. The patent registered on 18 September 1884 is in four names: Eiffel, Koechlin, Nouguier and Sauvestre.

None of this diminishes what Eiffel did. He carried the financial risk, ran the construction, and defended the thing in public while much of literary Paris was calling it an atrocity. But the sentence "Eiffel designed the Eiffel Tower" is not accurate, and the drawings say so.

It was supposed to come down in 1909

The tower was built under a temporary land-use permit. Twenty years, then dismantling. It was the entrance arch to the 1889 Exposition Universelle — a fair staged to mark the centenary of the Revolution and, more urgently, to show a France that had lost the Franco-Prussian War and was in the middle of a recession that it could still build something nobody else could.

The famous protest published in Le Temps on 14 February 1887 was signed by Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod and Charles Garnier, among others. They called it useless and monstrous.

What saved it was radio

The permit expired in 1909 and the tower survived because by then it had become the tallest antenna in France, and the army wanted it.

General Gustave-Auguste Ferrié had pushed for its use in wireless telegraphy, and a military radio station was installed in a bunker beneath the south pillar in 1909, with underground corridors and telegraph rooms. In September 1914 its transmitters jammed German signals during the Battle of the Marne. In 1917 the station intercepted the German transmissions that led to the arrest of Mata Hari.

The most photographed monument in the world is standing because it was militarily useful.

The money came partly from Haiti

This is the uncomfortable part, and the dossier does not leave it out.

The state subsidy was 1.5 million francs. The tower cost about 8 million. Eiffel covered the gap through a private company and loans, including from the Crédit Industriel et Commercial.

Research published in a 2022 investigation traced part of the CIC's capital to the Haitian independence debt — the 150-million-franc indemnity France forced Haiti to pay former slaveholders after the Haitian Revolution. Through its control of the National Bank of Haiti, the CIC drew interest payments back to Paris.

[The link between the bank and the tower's financing rests on that modern investigation rather than on a nineteenth-century document naming it. The Haitian indemnity itself is not in question.]

The shape is a wind calculation

The curve is not styling. The tower is a vertical cantilever designed so that wind pressure at any height is balanced by tension in the structure at that point — which produces an exponential profile.

The consequences are strange and specific:

• 18,038 prefabricated parts, made at Levallois-Perret to a tenth of a millimetre, assembled with

2.5 million rivets by a crew of around 300.

• 7,300 tonnes of iron. Melted down and poured into its own 125-metre square base, it would form

a layer about six centimetres deep.

• It is puddled wrought iron, not steel — cheaper and more predictable in the 1880s.
• In summer heat the tower grows by up to 15 centimetres, and the sunlit side expands more than

the shaded sides, tilting the summit as much as 18 centimetres away from the sun.

The 1889 elevators needed three different systems, because no single mechanism could handle legs that start at 54 degrees and end vertical: articulated chains in the east and west legs, inclined Otis hydraulic rams in the north and south, and Léon Edoux's vertical rams from the second level to the summit, where passengers changed cars halfway up.

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What to look at, if you only have eleven minutes

The apartment. Just below the lantern at the summit, Eiffel built himself a small private flat — wallpaper, wooden cabinets, velvet sofas, a piano, all of it deliberately domestic inside a machine made of iron. He used it to receive scientists. Thomas Edison came in 1889 and gave him a phonograph. Eiffel turned down every offer to rent the place out.

Then look at the names. Seventy-two French scientists, engineers and mathematicians are carved in letters around the first level — and every one of them is a man. In January 2026 the city announced the Hypatia project, to add seventy-two women to that roster.

Below your feet, under the south pillar, is the 1909 radio bunker that is the reason any of this is still here.