In the months following its completion, the Eiffel Tower continued to draw celebrated visitors eager to see Paris from nearly 1,000 feet above the ground. Gustave Eiffel's iron lattice tower, built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, had already proven its structural daring; each new ascent by a notable figure added to its growing legend as an engineering marvel and tourist sensation that skeptics had once dismissed as a monstrosity.
When Gustave Eiffel's tower opened earlier in 1889, Parisian intellectuals had signed petitions calling it a 'gigantic black smokestack' that would disfigure the city. By December, that outrage had curdled into fascination, and visitors from around the world queued for the hydraulic elevators—engineering marvels in their own right—that carried them up the tower's curved iron legs.
The tower's observation platforms, especially the topmost one just below the flag mast, became a magnet for adventurous travelers wanting to claim a personal record. Newspapers of the era delighted in cataloguing such firsts, whether the first foreign dignitary, the first bicycle ascent attempt, or notable women defying Victorian expectations of decorum by climbing the exposed iron stairs and platforms in full skirts.
Eiffel had built the tower to last only 20 years, intending it as a temporary spectacle for the World's Fair before demolition. Its survival owed much to its usefulness for wireless telegraphy experiments in the following decades, which convinced the French military to spare it. What began as a controversial iron curiosity became, within a generation, the undisputed symbol of Paris itself.