Today is Trivia Thursday, where we intrigue the trivia buff in you with a bit of trivia!

I wanted to do something with a tinge of romance to it, and the Eiffel Tower came to mind as a romantic location.

Here are some fun factoids:

• When it comes to monuments you have to pay to visit, the Eiffel Tower is the most visited monument in the entire world! On average, 25,000 people ascend the tower every day. (I cannot even imagine the logistics involved in corraling that many people.)
• The Eiffel Tower has two restaurants.
• The Eiffel Tower’s design was initially criticized by a lot of French bigwigs. (Boy, I bet they would be eating their hats now if they were still alive! It’s such an iconic image of France that it’s hard to picture the country without it.)
• Its height is equivalent to about 81 stories.
• When the Eiffel Tower was being built, there were concerns about its structural integrity, and one person did die during its construction.
• Making lifts was one of the big challenges faced in the tower’s construction, as the lifts could not be on a straight track.
• Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the tower’s namesake, had a 20-year permit for the tower. After that, it was supposed to be torn down by the City of Paris! But it was decided that the tower was too useful for radio telegraphy, so it was allowed to remain in place.

I think there is a definite glimmer of gold in this–that radio telegraphy was important enough to Paris to keep the Eiffel Tower! I think the tower will stick around until there start to be structural concerns.

That reminds me of a bridge in Little Rock that I used to often drive across. They thought the bridge was too old and unstable, so they planned to take the bridge down and replace it. People camped out to watch when they set off the explosives. But guess what? The bridge that lacked “structural integrity” didn’t collapse! It remained despite the explosives that were placed by experts, and the people camping out were disappointed when they failed to see the bridge fall down into the water. It even made international news.

It just goes to show how sometimes life throws you curveballs!

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower