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Eiffel Tower Paris Tours › 14 Eiffel Tower Facts That Surprise First-Time VisitorsUpdated 2026-09-09

14 Eiffel Tower Facts That Surprise First-Time Visitors

Hours, prices and access verified by the Eiffel Tower Paris Tours team — last checked 2026-09-09

The Eiffel Tower rising between Haussmann facades on a Paris avenue

The short answer. It was built to be demolished after twenty years, from 18,038 iron parts positioned to a single millimetre, by teams of four men per rivet. It has been painted twenty times in twenty different eras of taste. And the beam that sweeps the sky from its top reaches fifty miles.

Every fact below is from the monument’s own published record, and every one of them passes the only test worth applying to you as a reader: either you did not know it, or you do not quite believe it. Take three of them up with you and you will look at the thing differently. Guided ascents that cover this ground are with the small-group Eiffel Tower tours.

1. It was only ever meant to last twenty years

The permit required it to be taken down. In 1909 that clock ran out. What saved it was not affection: Gustave Eiffel had spent two decades inviting science onto the structure, and when wireless telegraphy arrived, 300 metres of iron in the middle of Paris turned out to be the best aerial in France.

Ask your guide about the twenty-year clause. It is the fact that changes how you look at the thing you are standing in, and most guided ascents cover it in the first five minutes. If you would rather read it in full first, the whole story is on the history page.

2. Eiffel did not have the idea

Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, the two chief engineers in his company, conceived it in June 1884: four lattice-girder columns splayed at the base and drawing together at the top. Eiffel patented the configuration on 18 September 1884, and the tower has carried his name for a century and a half. Their story is on the history page.

3. It beat 106 other projects

The competition was announced in the Journal Officiel and the brief was almost absurd: study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ-de-Mars with a square base 125 metres across and 300 metres tall. A hundred and seven answers came back.

4. An architect was hired to make it look acceptable

Public opinion was against a bare iron pylon in the middle of Paris, so Koechlin and Nouguier brought in Stephen Sauvestre to work on its appearance. The arches under the first platform are his. They are also the single feature that makes the silhouette unmistakable, which is a good joke on everyone who objected.

5. Two years, two months and five days

DateStage
26 January 1887First digging
1 July 1887The piers begin to rise
1 April 1888First floor complete
14 August 1888Second floor complete
31 March 1889Top and assembly complete

Five months went on the foundations and twenty-one on the metal. With the equipment of 1887, that is closer to a stunt than a schedule.

6. Every girder was placed to one millimetre

Using sand boxes and hydraulic jacks, later replaced by permanent wedges. On a structure 330 metres tall, assembled outdoors, by hand, in the 1880s. Stand under the nearest pier and look up the inside of it, and you will see why that number matters.

7. It takes four men to place one rivet

One to heat it, one to hold it in place, one to shape the head and one to beat it with a sledgehammer. You will pass tens of thousands of them on the stairs. There are 2,500,000 in the tower, and only about a third were driven on site — the rest were done in the workshop at Levallois-Perret, which is why it went up so fast.

8. Part of it was built underwater

On the Seine side, the builders sank watertight metal caissons and pumped compressed air into them so men could dig below the water line inside a bubble. Eiffel’s company built bridges; this is a bridge technique applied to a tower.

9. It has been eight different colours

Venetian red in the workshop, reddish-brown in 1889, ochre in 1892, and then in 1899 something genuinely strange: five shaded tones, running from yellow-orange at the base to light yellow at the top. Yellow-brown held from 1907 to 1947, brownish-red in the fifties, “Eiffel Tower Brown” from 1968, and yellow-brown again for the 2024 Games. The full sequence is on the facts page.

10. It is repainted every seven years, by hand, in 60 tonnes

Twenty campaigns in 136 years, and the colour you are looking at is the twentieth. Eiffel wrote in 1900 that painting was the essential element in the conservation of metal work and that the more meticulous the job, the longer the tower would endure. The 2019 campaign was the first ever to strip parts of the structure back rather than paint over them.

11. The lighting is on the inside

336 spotlights with yellow-orange sodium lamps, aimed upward from inside the structure, inaugurated on 31 December 1985 and designed by Pierre Bideau. That is why the tower glows through its own lattice instead of being floodlit flat. They replaced 1,290 exterior floodlights that had been doing the job since 1958.

12. The beacon reaches fifty miles

Four motorised marine floodlights with 6,000W xenon lamps, computer-piloted, each rotating 90 degrees in sync to form a cross-shaped double beam that pivots through a full circle. It first ran at midnight on 31 December 1999, alongside the sparkle. The mechanics are on evening visits.

13. The sparkle is exactly five minutes long

The first five minutes of every hour, from nightfall until the monument closes. Not ten, not on the half hour, and not continuous. If you are walking towards the Trocadéro hoping to catch it, you have five minutes and no more, and the monument’s own worked example is worth memorising: night falls at 8.35pm, the lights come up within ten minutes, the first sparkle runs at 9.00pm.

14. The top is one eighteenth the size of the first floor

The first floor runs to 14,485 square feet. The second floor is 4,692. The top is 820. That collapse in area is the real reason the queue at 115 metres behaves the way it does, and it is on the ticket page as a set of prices rather than as an explanation. The comparison is on the second floor and summit page.

15. You can still see the 1889 tower, at 1:50

At the top there is a scale model of the summit as it was originally planned, painted in the red-brown it wore when it opened. You are standing in the finished version and looking at the drawing, and if you like that sort of thing it is the best two minutes on the platform. It is easy to miss, which is most of why you should look for it.

And one that is not a fact

You will read that there is free entry to the Eiffel Tower. There is not: every floor is ticketed, and the only free ground is the gardens and the esplanade beneath the piers. Those genuinely are free, which is where the confusion comes from — and they are worth the walk on their own. The rates are on the visiting page.

Hear it on the tower rather than read it. These three spend the most time on the engineering and the history, and one of them ends in front of the reconstructed office at the top. The rest are compared on Eiffel Tower Paris Tours.

Tours that tell this story on the way up