On May 15th, 2009, the Eiffel Tower celebrated its 120th birthday. Here are some “oddball” facts and curiosities about one of the most recognized man-made structures in the world.
Did you know…
The tower is composed of 18,038 pieces of iron, which have been welded together. (Total number of rivets: 2.5 million.) The Eiffel Tower is completely repainted every seven years. (Total weight of eroding paint, 15 tons.) The tower has close to 7 million visitors per year, over 200 million since first being built in 1889 (and being derided as an eyesore and embarrassment by many Parisian “gentry”). Tower elevators travel upwards of 100,000 kilometers per year, approximately 6213 miles.
The tower was originally built as the centerpiece for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. The design of the tower was submitted in a competition with other entries, one of which was a giant guillotine! (Claes Oldenburg would have been proud.)
As the tower was in its initial stages of being built, a number of well-respected French luminaries, artists, writers, and intellectuals of the time wrote and signed a letter in protest of the tower’s construction, referring to the structure as “an odious column of bolted metal.” (Jonnes 2009)
In or around the year 1912 (exact date unknown), one Franz Reichelt, wearing his own home-made version of a parachute and hoping to demonstrate an early form of hang-gliding, leapt from the tower and proceeded in a vertical direction directly back down to earth. He did not make a second attempt. (Amazingly, there is a video record of this jump. See Morbidly Curiouser.) The tower is a favorite jumping off point for many adventurous practitioners of base-jumping.
The tower has provided inspiration for countless films and film directors, almost since its inception. French cinema pioneers, the Lumiere brothers, featured the tower in one of the earliest films ever made, Panorama Pendant l’Ascension de la Tour Eiffel/Panorama Whilst Climbing TheEiffelTower (1897). Famed French director Rene Clair filmed a documentary, La Tour, in 1928, which explored the construction of the tower in detail. Burgess Meredith used the tower as an integral plot element in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), and who can forget the scene featuring Grace Jones as May Day in the James Bond movie, A View to a Kill (1985), whereby, having eluded Bond, she leaps off the tower in order to effect her escape with the use of a small, hidden parachute.
And finally…
Erika La Tour Eiffel (yes, that is her name), an ex-U.S. Army officer, is married to the tower (yes, she is married to the tower.) Apparently, Ms. La Tour Eiffel has a condition called “objectum sexual”, whereby an individual transfers normal romantic and sexual feelings onto an inanimate object, usually a large public structure of some sort. (Different strokes for different folks.)
Vive La Tour Eiffel!
Sources:
Shyman, Carol. TheEiffelTowerin the Movies. (http://www.filmfestivals.com/reportage/toureiffel/toureiffel.htm)
La Tour Eiffel. 2008. (http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/pratique/faq/index.html)
The Independent. I Married theEiffelTower. May 25, 2008.
