Eiffel Tower audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stand out on the Champ de Mars with the whole thing in front of you, because this is the only place you get all 330 metres at once. From under the pillars it is too close; from here the four legs, the two braced platforms and the spire read as one shape.

Look at the curve of the legs first, because it is not a styling decision. The uprights follow a line that is mathematically determined for wind resistance: tangents drawn to each leg at the same height always meet at the point through which the wind load above them passes, so the whole cutting force of a storm runs down inside the leading edges and into the ground. The operator's own description is that the uprights appear to burst out of the ground and to be shaped by the action of the wind, and once you have read the curve that way you cannot unsee it.

It was not Gustave Eiffel's idea. In May 1884, in the Eiffel drawing office, two of his engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, were talking about the coming World Exhibition and wondering what could be done to make it more attractive. On the sixth of June, at home, Koechlin made a rough calculation and a sketch and titled it 300-Metre-Tall Pylon: four legs of solid columns, joined by lattice girders, rising obliquely to meet at the top. Eiffel was not impressed and set it aside, but he let them carry on. They brought in an architect, Stephen Sauvestre, who stood the legs on stone pedestals, threw the four great arches between them and rounded off the crown. Most of Sauvestre's ornament was simplified away before building began. The arches stayed, and they are most of what you are looking at.

Eiffel's project won the competition of 1886 against 106 others. Digging started on the twenty-sixth of January 1887 and the structure was finished on the thirty-first of March 1889: two years, two months and five days, 18,038 iron parts, 2,500,000 rivets.

The best-known writers and artists in France signed a protest in the newspaper Le Temps against what they called the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower. Charles Gounod signed, and Guy de Maupassant, and Charles Garnier, who had built the Paris Opéra. Maupassant called it a high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders. The writer Léon Bloy called it a truly tragic street lamp. Eiffel answered in the same paper: because we are engineers, does one assume that beauty does not concern us in our constructions?

He never owned it, either. A convention signed in January 1887 let him build it at his own expense and run it for twenty years, and on the first of January 1910 it passed to the City of Paris, which owns it still. Twenty years was all it was ever meant to stand, and in 1906 the City had decided to destroy the 1889 Gallery of Machines, then the largest building in the world, because it had not found a use for it. What saved this one was radio: an aerial at the top made it too useful to dismantle.

One last thing before you walk towards the pillars. The colour is not the brown you remember from old photographs. The twentieth painting campaign, begun in 2019, took the tower back to the yellow-brown Gustave Eiffel chose in 1907, and it goes on in three tones, darkest at the bottom and lightest at the top, so that from where you are standing it reads as one single shade against the sky.

Fifty-seven metres up, and the first thing worth doing is looking down at the lattice apron under your feet, because this platform is where the whole thing could have failed. The four legs went up as separate cantilevers and had to be brought together here, at this level, to the millimetre. Hydraulic jacks able to push 800 tonnes were fitted into the shoes at the base of each leg, the legs were deliberately raised at a slightly steeper angle than they needed and held on boxes of sand on a timber scaffold, and then they were eased into line. The joining was finished at the end of March 1888. There was no version of this where you fix it afterwards.

Walk round to the outside passageway between the south pillar and the west pillar and look for a street sign. This walkway is called Rue Maurice Koechlin et Émile Nouguier, after the two engineers who drew the tower and did not get their name on the front of it. Koechlin oversaw 5,300 workshop drawings and the calculations behind all of them, then supervised the foundations and the construction. Asked in 1939 whether it ought not to have been called the Koechlin Tower, he said that Eiffel was the undeniable father of the Tower.

Along the same passageway there is a piece of staircase standing on its own, 4.3 metres of it. A spiral staircase used to run from the second floor to the top, and it is how Gustave Eiffel reached the office he had built for himself up there. It became obsolete and came down in 1983. Twenty of its sections went to auction and did very well; this is one of the pieces that stayed behind.

Now the iron around you, and it is iron, not steel: puddled iron from the Pompey forges in eastern France, refined to burn off the excess carbon until it was nearly pure. Less rigid than steel, lighter, and in Eiffel's judgement the best material he could get. Only about a third of the 2,500,000 rivets were driven on site, and each one took four men: one to heat it, one to hold it, one to shape the head, one with the sledgehammer.

The journalist Émile Goudeau came up here while they were still working and wrote that a thick cloud of tar and coal smoke seized the throat, and that the riveters, striking sideways instead of down, threw off sparks with every blow and looked as though they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds. Three hundred men worked on this site. One of them died.

Two hundred and seventy-six metres, nothing above you but the aerials, and the noise of the boulevards simply does not reach this far. The wind does.

Before the view, find the windows. Set into this level is a reconstruction of Gustave Eiffel's office, and behind the glass are wax figures of Eiffel himself, his daughter Claire, and a visitor, the American inventor Thomas Edison. The office is too small to walk into, so you look in from outside, which is oddly fitting, because hardly anybody was ever let in.

Eiffel kept a flat for himself from the start, not out here on the open platform but in the level just under the spire. About a hundred square metres, much of it taken up by the lift cabin, the stair landing and machinery, holding a sitting room with a table, a couch, a piano and three small desks, a kitchen and a bathroom. No bedroom. He almost certainly never slept here. He used it to entertain.

The Edison visit is real. He came to Paris for the 1889 exposition, Eiffel brought him up, and he gave Eiffel one of his phonographs and signed the guest book on the tenth of September 1889.

Claire is not scenery in that tableau. The eldest of Eiffel's five children, born in 1863, she took over running the household at fourteen when her mother died, and for more than forty years she was her father's confidante and private secretary. She married the engineer he had picked to succeed him at the head of the company.

Now the other list of names. The seventy-two on the first-floor beam are scientists and engineers of the century before, and not one of them built this. Up here there is a plaque carrying the names of the engineers who actually did.

There is a second plaque up here, and it is about a morning in 1944. On the twenty-fifth of August, with fighting still going on at the foot of the tower, six Paris firefighters under Captain Lucien Sarniguet climbed the stairs, dodging German fire, and put a French flag made out of scraps of fabric back where it belonged. Sarniguet was the same officer who had been ordered to take the French flag down in June 1940.

Getting up here used to be harder. The tower opened on the fifteenth of May 1889 with the lifts unfinished, and nearly thirty thousand people climbed the 1,710 steps to this platform before the machines started running on the twenty-sixth of May. Somewhere near your feet is a model of this summit as it looked in 1889, at a fiftieth of full size, painted in the tower's first red-brown.