In the offices of Gustave Eiffel's engineering firm, draftsmen Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier sketched a soaring lattice tower intended for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, marking the centennial of the French Revolution. Eiffel initially showed little interest until the design was refined and he purchased the patent, later attaching his name to what became the most recognizable structure in the world.
Koechlin's original sketch, made almost as an afterthought, showed a tapering iron tower nearly 300 meters tall—far taller than any structure on Earth at the time. When Eiffel first saw it, he reportedly shrugged it off, but architect Stephen Sauvestre reworked the design with decorative arches and a more elegant silhouette, and Eiffel changed his mind, buying the rights to the patent under his own name.
The project faced fierce public opposition. A group of artists and writers, including Guy de Maupassant, signed a furious open letter denouncing the planned tower as a 'gigantic black smokestack' that would disfigure Paris. Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant specifically because it was the one place in the city from which he couldn't see it.
Completed in 1889 after just over two years of construction, the tower was meant to stand for only twenty years before demolition. It survived thanks to its usefulness as a radio transmission tower—an accident of engineering history that saved what is now visited by roughly seven million people annually.