In 1886 Gustave Eiffel, a very famous French builder, was chosen to build a tower in Paris for the 1889 International Exposition.
However, when people first saw his drawings, they were not pleased.
In fact, many people truly hated the new tower.
"What is this?" asked a famous artist.
"It is a picture of the new tower they are building for the International Exposition," replied his friend.
"Do you like it?"
"No," declared the artist, "I hate it.
It is the strangest-looking tower I have ever seen.
It has no beauty and it will ruin Paris."
Around Paris, other people were saying the same thing.
"The tower that Gustave Eiffel is building looks like a big streetlamp," wrote one newspaper reporter.
"Eiffel is building a factory pipe," wrote another reporter.
Many of the artists and other important people wrote letters demanding that the Eiffel Tower not be built.
They believed that Paris was too great a city for such a horrible tower.
But thankfully, the people in charge did not listen to these complaints.
Gustave Eiffel was one of the first builders to use metal in his constructions.
He was famous for building large and strong bridges and tall buildings made of metal.
Before building the Eiffel Tower, he also designed and built the Statue of Liberty in New York City.
On July 1, 1887 Eiffel and his company began working on the tower.
It was a very unusual building project because they first made all the pieces of the tower in a factory.
Then they brought the pieces to Paris and put them together like a puzzle.
Each piece of the puzzle was put together with special nails called rivets.
The rivets were so large that it took four men to put one in.
Since there were over two million rivets, this was a very big job.
But slowly the pieces were put together, and the tower went up and up and up.
By March 15, 1888, the workmen completed the first level.
Then six months later, they had put the second level together.
By March of 1889, the tower was completed and ready for the exposition.
When it was finished, it was 324 meters tall and weighed more than 10,000 tons.
When the Eiffel Tower was finished, the people of Paris were very pleased with it.
Those who thought that the tower would look ugly, now thought it was one of the most wonderful structures ever made.
Because the tower was made for visitors to the exposition, it needed to have elevators that could bring people up to the first, second, and top floors.
Today that might seem easy, but in 1889 that was a very difficult job.
No one had ever built elevators so high before.
In most buildings, the elevators go straight up and straight down, but not in the Eiffel Tower.
Because of the shape of the tower, the elevators had to travel along a curve.
When people first saw these unusual elevators, they were amazed and excited.
Because it was specifically built for the exposition, the Eiffel Tower was going to stay up for only a few years at first.
But soon it became very popular and visitors from around the world came to see it.
These days, over six million people visit the tower each year.
So instead of taking the tower down, Gustave Eiffel found other good uses for the tower.
In the early 1900s, there was a new invention called the radio.
In order to travel far distances, radio signals must come from radio towers that are very tall.
So Gustave had the great idea of using the Eiffel Tower as a radio tower.
The Eiffel Tower is beautiful in the daytime because you can see the wonderful metal structure that Gustave built.
However, it is also wondrous at night because there are more than 350 beautiful lights that cover it from head to toe.
On top are two light beams that can be seen from over eighty kilometers away.