La Dame de Fer (Eiffel Tower)

Published Dec 31, 2020, 10:00 AM

The Eiffel Tower is one of the top destinations on Planet Earth. It turns out to be a pretty cool feat of engineering as well.

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Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jacques Clark, and there's Charles Brand and there's Jerry Roland out there, and this is stuff you should know. That's right, The Eiffel Tower Edition at Long Last. Yeah, you've been there, right, Yes, I love the Eiffel Tower. It's great. I don't care what anyone says about tourist traps. It can be a little disheartening there at the bottom when you're you know, they're selling glow noodles and dumb chot keys and stuff like that. But block all that out in the Eiffel Tower is an amazing, amazing thing to behold. It is amazing. Um, it's also chuck. I don't know if you notice or not, but it is where I developed my fear of heights. Really, it happened on the Eiffel Tower. I was never, for ever, ever, for a moment in my life afraid of heights until I went up the Eiffel Tower. And it took me like an hour to get down because I was so afraid of falling off, even though it's impossible to fall off because like there's fencing everywhere, like you can't fall off. But I mean I must have looked like the biggest psycho trying to come down the steps of this thing, and it happened. I was like seventeen. I was with my dad and sister and you didn't take the elevator. No, we walked up the first floor and we got to the top and I looked down and it was just like lights out that just from the first floor. You were, yeah, oh yeah, I've never been higher than that, but I've I've had a fear of heights ever since then. Well, I think these days. Uh was your dad like man, No, No, he was never like just kidding um now he just quietly judged me exactly. The first two floors, I think of the only ones you can still walk up, um by staircase. But uh, previously you could. You could walk all the way to the tippy top. In fact, you said ten steps. Yeah. The first couple of weeks the Eiffel Tower was open. If you wanted to go to the top, you had to walk up, and that took an hour for people to climbing stairs. For an hour. No, I would lose my mind because I'd be up so high. I would just start crying. Yeah, I mean I would have had heart failure probably halfway up, so neither one of us would have made it. It would have Yeah, No, it would have been a lot for sure. Um And apparently during well we'll talk about that later. There's a little teaser for you. You You guys don't even know what I'm talking about. So when you come up on the Eiffel Tower, the first thing you're gonna walk upon is what's known as the Esplanada, which is that that whole big ground level part of the Eiffel Tower with those four massive, massive iron pillars at cardinal, north, southeast, and west. Yes, it's pretty hard to miss, and they cover something like four acres of footprint between them. I think they're like fifteen thousand square feet or something like that. More than that. Um, And like you said, they're all oriented to the cardinal directions, and if you follow upwards, it's very tough not to look up when you're at the Eiffel Tower. Up you you have to be a real jerk, you know, like Castanza level jerk to go to the Eiffel Tower and not look up. But um, you would, you would see that each of these four pillars go up, up, up, and they come together, um a little further up, a little above the second platform, and um they go all the way up in a single joint tower from that moment on. And it's really kind of neat if you stop and think about what you're looking at, these four for um posts kind of starting separately and then coming together to form this this tower. Um. But it's also just a marvel of engineering. Like I had always heard that was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever. But and so I researching, and I had no idea exactly with that man, But it is an masterpiece of engineering for sure. Yeah. And it's a you know, it's a lovely scene aside from all the trappings of tourism. Uh. There's a lot of green space around it, there are other monuments, it's right there by the river. Uh. It's it's just a really kind of a lovely scene. Like if you can manage to find some off hours to go where it's not quite so crowded, which I have done, Um, you really get a different sort of experience. But it is what it is. It's a it's a it's one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. So it's like, you know, you can't go stand on the the popular edge of the Grand Canyon without being surrounded by hundreds of people. UM, so don't expect to just sort of keep that in the back of your head. Sure, I mean it's the number one, it's the most visited paid tourist attraction in the world. I didn't know that. I believe something like three million people have been there. But that's just counting the paying customers. That's not including the cheap skates like me and you, Me and my brother and sister in law and niece who went and visited and didn't pay to go up. Most recently, we just walked around and kept walking. I've never been up. Oh you haven't you just three times? Never even had the urge to stand in those lines and go to the top. I'll tell you what, chuck. You just go onto YouTube and people have filmed it before. You don't have to don't have to do anything. You don't have to leave your house. And I saw the crowds on those elevators and at the top, and I was like, I don't need this, I don't like it. I'd rather just walk around and drink some wine and look at it. Yeah, I mean it's really impressive. Just walking around the basis of the whole thing, like, you definitely get a feel for it. And yeah, if you're afraid of heights, it's all you need to do. Um. So, talking about this thing, there's there's actually three levels that you can get to. There's that first level where I lost my mind. Then it goes further up to a second level, and then there's a third level and third levels like almost nine feet in the air. It's about three a little less than three ds that that third platform. And at each of these platforms there's like stuff to do. It's not just like a steel platform that you step onto and look out and that's it. There's restaurants, there's shops on that top platform where so many people apparently like two people a day propose. Um. There's like a champagne bar. Um. It's there's just a lot of really neat, little interesting details that make the Eiffel Tower the Eiffel Tower. But even more than that, even more than just this the you know, the glow noodles that you can only get there at the Eiffel Tower. Um, what makes it so unique is just the design of it, the execution of it, the fact that it's still around, and then also um, some of the things that have happened, Like it's it's an iconic structure, and when that many people flock to it every year for more than a century, Um, it's going to have like a pretty rich history to you. Yeah, I mean, um, you talked about the restaurants. If you want to eat at the nicest restaurant, it'll be the Jewels Urn And I was just kind of curious about their menu. It looks very good. But it looks so good, it is pricey. It is your your seven course dinner tasting menu is gonna run you about two seventy five bucks each euros dollars buck a Roogs. Uh. And that's without its two thirty euros I think. And that's without wine or anything like. I think it's without wine. It didn't say anything about with a pairing, but um, it only goes up from there. So I imagine it's quite a dining experience. Maybe one day I'll save about my bucks and make a reservation. Because if you do have a reservation, you can you can kind of skip most of the line and go straight there, which is kind of nice. Yeah if you Yeah, you can just take an elevator straight to the Jewels Burn restaurant. I'm sad because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too scared to go up. Yeah. OK, care she can go to another great restaurant and just pretend you're off the ground. But that's the point. I don't want to pretend like your feet are firmly planted on the ground. And another cool thing that they have is uh, and this is something that I didn't know because I've never been up there is uh, Gustav Eiffel built himself an apartment up top. And this thing has not really been touched since then. I mean they've they've kept it in order, but um, I think ed said they had recreated it. But apparently that's the real thing that has just sort of left untouched. Um. It's got a living room with a table, couch, a piano, grand piano, a few desks, kitchen, bathroom. There is no bedroom and by all accounts he probably did not sleep there. But back in the day in Paris, it became quite the talk of the town and just made um rich. Parisians just seethed with jealousy, and he was offered huge, huge sums of money from people just to like airbnb it for a night, and he declined every single time. He never allowed anyone to rent it out and spend the night. Well, you know, one of the things that I keep running up against during research of the Eiffel Towers that it was a democratizing structure, because up to the point when the Eiffel Tower opened to the public, if you wanted a really amazing view of Paris, you basically had to rent a hot air balloon ride that was your your one shot at it. And you had to be very very rich to do that, to go up in a balloon, and and so I mean that's just the way it was until Gustave Eiffel and then the the leaders of Paris and France came along as it was to build this three tower um and open it to the public. I mean, yeah, you had to pay, but it was a reasonable price and just about everybody could afford it. And and now you could walk up and see these amazing views of Paris that to that point had been reserved only for the very wealthy, which again I just keep seeing it referred to as a democratizing structure. All right, So let's talk about the man himself, right, Yeah, Gustave eiffel Um, who is widely credit is the guy who created this this structure, but it was definitely a collaboration, and I don't he never seemed to make any any secret of that. But he was definitely the head cheese on the whole thing. But he didn't create this whole thing by himself. I think you mean the head brisk I met head cheese cross, so he was. I can never get over that word. Um, it's terrible. He was born in eighteen thirty two and was an engineer by trade. I went to engineering school at uh cal Tech. Now I thought you were going to do that. You want me to say it? Okay? He went to the Cole Central des Arts manufacturers. That's right, and uh he was well regarded as an engineer all over France and Europe. Um had a consultancy firm, had his own workshop, had his own construction company. And it should be noted that he was an engineer first and foremost. He was not an architect. He was obsessed with function um and mechanics and strength of any structure he built, because he built things like railroad bridges, where he really needed it to be strong and maybe pretty. Second, um, he did like things to look nice. It's not like that's all he cared about. But he was very big into structure and form and function. Uh. And was also a big believer in iron as opposed to steal, which you know, this one could have been all steel. So it was around could he steal? But for something this big, he was like, iron is what it has to be built out of. Well, that's what he was like, you know, that was his trade, Like he knew iron, and had he moved into steel, he would have been out of his depth. This is not a project where one should be out of their depth, right. But then also steel would have been prohibitively expensive. It was still a pretty new technology, so I thought that was another reason he didn't use steel. But so as iron, and it's a specific kind of iron, it's um puddled raw iron to where during the the the smelting process you actually swirl it would keeps the impurities from crystallizing into the structure of the of the iron. So it's actual raw iron. That's what the the Eiffel Tower is made out of. But if you put those two things together, that he's an engineer, not an artist, and his his his expertise is in iron. All of it kind of culminates into this the Eiffel Tower. It's like it makes total sense what you're looking at, Like it couldn't have been anything else. Um. But it also kind of underscores just how much of a masterpiece it is under those two constraints. Yeah, and he was Another little fun fact is when the person that was charged with building the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty died, he came in as an emergency replacement and he took on that project and he built that internal lattice work the Great Statue of Liberty. Uh. And he also financed the Eiffel Tower largely um. The Paris and France said hey, let's let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair coming up in eighteen nineteen nine and we want a big, big tower. What did I say, eighty nine? And he Uh, he got one point five million francs from the state is seed money, but it was gonna cost about six point five million. And this became one of the first sort of Uh, what we look at now is how you finance projects like this one of the first ones to do it like this public private partnership. Well, yeah, I mean he went out in and issued shares. Uh, he started an LLC, issued two kinds of shares and raised the other five million francs to build this thing, and as a result had twenty years um to recoup money from ticket sales and souvenirs and champagne bottles and stuff like that, in which he would pay the stuff back, and in that time he and his shareholders made a lot of money in the process. Yeah. But what I saw was he was such a good businessman that he managed to get the you know, all the all the proceeds from you know, admission and concessions and all that stuff for twenty years from the exposition founders. But then he also with the people he went and raised the money from, they didn't get a huge cut of that either. So he made out like a total bandit in this deal. Um, he didn't screw anybody over, swindle anybody. It was just a really good deal that he made for himself. But it required a lot of vision to like he you know, he put his own his own took us in his own reputation on the line. Um with this one big project. Yeah, it may have been the kind of thing where they made a certain amount of money back that was kept. I don't really know, because his shareholders made a lot of money to like you, if you invested in the Eiffel Tower, you didn't do it out of the goodness of your heart. You made some dough sure, sure, but I think there was a lot of a certain amount of like um municipal pride in in that project, especially with the proponents of the project UM and the whole the whole design contest to to create an iconic structure for the ten eighty nine World Fair in Paris. Um. Apparently it was at first kind of vague, and I even saw that it was um Uh. It was Eiffel himself who suggested that they have this design competition, and if that isn't the case, he at the very least kind of guided the details of what they were looking for until it basically was his tower. Um. The other big competitor was a guy named um Jules Bourdet, and he wanted to make his three D tower out of stone, which was total insanity. Would have killed everybody it would have It would have crumbled immediately. I don't know if they ever would have even been able to successfully finish it. Apparently the there there's a big push and pull intention between Eiffel's iron and boot Boord Bourdet's stone in this side, this kind of transition between modern and traditional and modern in the form of Eiffel's tower one out. That's right. I think we should take a break, okay and talk about what happened there in the lead up to nine right after this. All right, so you mentioned that it was a collaboration, uh, and not just in the building of it obviously, which I think range from a hundred and fifty to three hundred people at any given time, right little know, In fact, Eiffel did not build it himself, saying he did not, Uh, it was designed by other people to The initial design was by Emil Boy new Gear and Maurice Coclean. And you know, apparently this first design wasn't just like with anything else. It's not like they drew it up on paper and that was it. Um. It wasn't that great. It was four iron pillars that met near the top like we're sort of familiar worth and it was connected by grids, but it wasn't that hot. They went back to the drawing board, sent it to an architect named Stephen uh Sevestre. You, I was gonna say earlier, you don't need me at all, but yeah you do, Salvesta. Sure is that how you say it? Sure? All right? That inspires a lot of confidence. Um. And he made it really freely, added a lot of Victorian flourishes. They got it back from him and said, why don't we meet in the middle, get rid of a lot of this stuff, keep some of the stuff. And what they ended up with was, um, sort of a magical little compromise on the final design. Yeah. It was, like I said, a real collaboration. Um. And what came out of that collaboration was just something something really amazing. UM. And the fact that each each group or each person or you know, each everyone involved, they all worked for Eiffel. Um. The first two were his chief chief engineers, and uh, where is going to call him? Sylvester was his chief architect, I believe, and then along with Eiffel himself, all of them kind of adding to and subtracting and like I don't like that or I do like this. It came to fruition. UM, and he Eiffel purchased the designs from his employees, so that he personally owned the design outright, which allowed him to go, um, raise money himself and uh take in all of the the admission and concession fees that he was going to break in over the next twenty years too. Yeah, man, I wonder, I don't know. I looked up the brand worth and and the only thing I could find was from like seven years ago. In the Eiffel brand at that time was worth like four hundred and thirty billion dollars euros. As I saw that too, Oh, I thought that was in dollars. Was that in euros? I'm pretty sure it was in euros, But it's I mean, that is just a crazy amount of money. And it's a shame that he couldn't work out some sort of a stake in that early on that could have been passed down to his heirs. Yeah, because he he was able to break that in for just the first twenty years. And the reason why twenty years is such a significant number, Chuck, I did not know this, but the original part of that design competition was that this this structure, the winning structure, was going to only stand for twenty years and then it would be disassembled to make way for something new, and that was really in the tradition of World's fairs. Um, it's very rare for any structures to remain for very long, more than a couple of decades after a World's Fair, because they're just they're meant to be temporary. They're to be part of the world's fair and to commemorate the world's fair. But then you have more World's Fairs that come along, and progress is to be made, and so the old structures get torn down and new ones get um built in their place. So the Eiffel Tower was going to just live for twenty years and then be disassembled. Yeah, I bet you that does have something to do with it, because if you look at any most World's Fair structures over the years, they do end up looking very dated, Like this is the only one I can think of that really had this indelible iconic design, um, And they probably just don't want that reminder of you know, the Knoxville World's Fair right years later. It looks really kind of silly, right, Well, the Sun's Fear is still around, weird, is it? Yes, as far as I know, Yeah, yeah, it was Knoxville with the sun's fear. I'm almost positive. But there was another building built. I mean, like, if you look at some of the buildings that were built for this Paras exposition in eighty nine, Um, these are like major, huge buildings that today we would spend untold number count like countless money to to preserve and keep from crumbling. Um, they just torn down twenty years. There's one called the Gallery Day Machine UM, and it some critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece of um iron work and modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself. They tore it down into Yeah, so that's just kind of how it was with the World Fare, and that's how it was supposed to be with the Eiffel Tower. But if you start to dive into how the Eiffel Tower was constructed, it's abundantly clear that Um Gustav Eiffel never intended for his tower to be taken down. He built that thing Ford tough man. If you want to make a French person's head spend, tell him that the Eiffel Tower is built forward tough Oh my go I was trying to think of a French car. Uh, what's the one? Yeah, n all tough the tough. So they start construction in January seven. Um. Obviously that's a pretty tight timetable to pull something like this off before the World's Fair, and it came down to the wire. But uh, they started um building the tower itself in July seven. They were building you know, that might not um make sense, but they were doing those foundations. It took a long time just to get the foundation work done. And he had a manufacturing um warehouse and facility about six kilometers away, so most of it was built there in pieces. They would bring it over and ship it over to the site to kind of assemble it and put it together. And you know, this thing is right by the river, so you've got you know, you don't have the most stable uh you know, land base in which to drill down. And they ended up. Uh did we do a show on tunnels or was it just it must have been bridges or something, because I think we talked about the Brooklyn Bridge being built like this. Yeah, may have been it, or maybe it was the New York aqueducts. I don't know, but basically they had to do sort of the same thing as they had to go under sea level, so they had to work in these compressed air chambers, which was very, very dangerous, and they ended up only losing one human life during the construction, which is remarkable. It is remarkable. And this thing was also completed in record time too, Like I mean you said it was a tight schedule. To build this thing in twenty one twenty six months today would be impressive. So they did this in you know, the eighteen eighties and only lost one worker. Part of that was because Gustave Eifel himself, um, was well known for basically being an additional foreman on the job side. He was not one of these guys who went and smoked cigars and just hung out all day at the country club with his buddies. Like he was hand is on on his his most important projects, and um, the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects. So because of this dedication to safety and this level of oversight from the guy himself, uh that that just one person like the person and you have to die there, like no one will believe it if nobody died. So they had they pushed one guy off the top. A Pierre, what's that over there? I know, Well, you've been down been down and pick it up for me. So the other thing he had going in his favor was as far as getting it built in record time, was he had a great crew. He had, Like I said, he was a big builder anyway, so he had all these regular workers that were really really experienced, especially iron workers, and uh, he was able to pull it off using uh method of riveting, um bolts, pretty good rivets better, way better. I mean, this is the These rivets are the reason why I say, like, he did not mean for this thing to be take in Ampart in twenty years. So what they did was they use heated rivets. And here's here's how that works. You bring over this sub piece that's built together with temporary bolts, and then you remove those bolts and you replace it with a heated rivet. And this is on site, Like they had blacksmiths hammering this thing on site. Apparently made quite a racket and you would heat it in or you would heat it up and knock it in, and then as the thing cools, it shrinks and that just cinches everything really really tight. That is trying to cinch together after it's cooled. And so you've got you know, two thirds of this thing. Two thirds of the rib these ribbits were actually installed on site with human power and hammers. Yeah, and each side of the rivet was hammered into a head, so it's not like a bolt where you could just take off. I don't know how you would get those things apart, frankly. And that this this seal like so was I guess then the seal was was so tight because it cool old and since some tighter together and then the actual um One of the reasons why the Eiffel Tower is just so revered. It's just incredibly precise. Like each piece, like you said, was made off site and then maybe partially assembled and brought to the to the job site, but they were they were created in the eighteen eighties within a tenth of a millimeter precise. And if they weren't a tenth of a millimeter precise, Uh, they were sent back to the factory to be um altered so that they were brought into that level of precision. So the entire Eiffel Tower is within a tenth of a millimeter precision, the entire thing. That's just astounding to me. Yeah, and it's really cool too, and that they you know, you obviously you're building this thing from the ground up. And they used scaffolding until they made that first floor plateau, and then from that point on that was their new foundation, so they could actually be up there in the tower itself supported itself from that point forward as they moved up right, and um, this is just so scary to me. But the the as they worked further and further up, they got steam cranes that they attached to what would um eventually be the rails used by the lifts, the very specific elevators of the U Eiffel Tower. And uh, these steam cranes just climbed up and up and up. It just worked their way up the tower. And just again, this is eighteen eight the eighteen eighties, and you're in a steam crane attached to the Eiffel Tower that you're building hundreds of meters up. I can barely even say these words. You would have been the second guy that died. Yeah, because your knees gave out, exactly. I just I can't even deal right now. So they they eventually finish. Um, as the World's Fair approaches. Um, it didn't even open. This is how tight it was. It wasn't even open to the public until nine days into the fair, and it took two more weeks for those elevators to be operational. So if you were those first people, you paid a little bit of money to climb seventeen hundred and ten steps to the top, like you mentioned earlier, takes about an hour, and a lot of people still did that remarkably, and they all smoked cigarettes at the time, So I can't imagine that was fun, that's right. So, UM. One of the things about the Eiffel Tower, uh, that I didn't know about, was that there was a tremendous amount of protest when it was announced, when when the design was unveiled or the plans for it were unveiled, um, mostly by the French artistic community. There was a famous petition again which I didn't know about, UM, called the the the Petition of the three hundred, three hundred artists, three hundred architects, UM, three hundred musicians. Basically anybody who is anyone in the Parisian art and cultural scene at the time signed this petition basically saying like, don't build this thing. This is horrible, this is it's going to look like an industrial iron smoke stack. And and we don't want this to to mar the beautiful landscape of Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And um, I mean that was it was a substantial public outcry and like kind of a campaign against the Eiffel Tower that Eiffel and the Parisian Exposition um planners had to deal with. But they, I guess ultimately the artists were there. Their protests fell on deaf ears because the tower was made. But one of the great things about it was Uh. In the years after, some of those petition signers came out and publicly apologized to Eiffel. They said that they had they'd gotten it wrong, that that the Eiffel Tower is just that, you know, that beautiful. They finally kind of came around to understanding what was beautiful about it? Did guide Rick can't No, he was one who ever did uh de mapossan he uh. He was a very famous writer who would lunch at the base of the Eiffel Tower very frequently because it was the only place in Paris he could go eat where he didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, so he wrote and this this became one of the sort sort of the most famous, uh, put down or the Eiffel Tower. He said, this high and skinny pyramid of iron letters, this giant, ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney. Ps. I fart in its general direction. Nice, I didn't see that coming, and he he was. You might not recognize his name, but I'll bet you'd recognize his pen name, Jackie Collins. Oh interesting, I just know that that's because I made it up. So Eiffel himself, the man, I'm sure. I'm sure his feelings were a little bit hurt by some of these artists. He wanted to be beloved. But um, he wasn't made of puddle eye. He was not, uh, he said, uh announced just sort of paraphrase here. Um he said. For my part, I believe that the tower will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature of the monuments four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be, will give a great impression of strength and beauty, For it will reveal to the eyes of the observer, the boldness of the design as a whole. Moreover, there is an attraction in the colossal and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable. And I think that kind of sums it up. It's like, man, this is a massive, amazing, gorgeous feat of engineering, and like you can't think of it with your little sculpture brain and try and look at it as as that kind of art. Like you got to rethink what art and architecture are. And I think he's told right. I mean, it's it's amazing when you look at this thing and you can sort of see maybe back then how it didn't fit the landscape and people might have thought it was obnoxious, but uh they were wrong. Yeah, it's I saw a UM, I guess an architecture blog on the Eiffel Tower and it had it broken down by like loads and stresses and geometry and all that. But on one of the pages it was um it was showing a graph of how wind pressure increases with height, right, And when they traced the curve of the different wind pressures as it went up, it made one. It made the curve of the Eiffel Tower. And he said later that the Eiffel Tower was designed by the wind, and that's what he was talking about, Like they used math to determine what the perfect shape of this was to put up this to to have the same wind pressure. So the base is under the same load from wind that the top is because of the taper. So it was like it's math personified. It's math and and science and engineering um in in iron form. I had no idea about that until I started researching this, and it just made me appreciate this so much more. Um. And it's also really really strong too, Like the thing can hold four and a half times Uh, it's its own weight. It's like it's never going to fall down. And a lot of people were worried about that when when Iffel was building it, and he publicly said, I take personal responsibility if this thing ever collapses. Uh, he just knew it wasn't going to because that's how precise he was, and that's how smart he was with his calculations and the people he was working with. Two. But but it's it's just it's a it's masterful. It is it's it's nature revealed, just carved out of the sky and iron. All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk about why that thing it's still stand today and wasn't torn down twenty years later right after this. Alright, so Eiffel built this thing to last, like we said, and uh, during that twenty year period, as he was breaking in money from glow noodle sales, he uh he decided to start trying to make it useful, uh and give it a practical purpose so maybe they'll say, well, we kind of got to leave it up now. So he started doing all these in resistance experiments and those were fine, those were all well and good, but it was uh, it was radio that really is what saved it when in a Morse code signal was sent from the tower to another part of Paris and it was a big success. So they put in a permanent radio installation there, and all of a sudden they were like, hey, this thing is really valuable, especially with wars approaching, which they obviously didn't know that at the time, but they were sending messages, you know, overseas to London and thousands of kilometers away, and they said in nineteen ten, all right, this is actually pretty valuable to us now the military is involved, it's playing roles in our wars, so you can keep it up for seventy more years. And they then tore it down in Yeah, and that was the end of the Eiffel Towel. Never forget that day. That was. Yeah. Do you remember how excited Reagan was, like you have against the Eiffel Tower man and Jimmy Carter descried quietly. It was very sad. Yeah, I thought that was the right reaction to that, you know, but that's the big split. You know, there's two kinds of people in the world. Now. They gave him seventy more years, and obviously in I didn't even look it up, but I assume that's when they said, and maybe we should just all agree that it's it'll probably be here forever. Yeah. Yeah, So it survived even Adolf Hitler, the big jerk. He apparently, after the Nazis had occupied um Paris for years, as the war was seemingly coming to an end, he ordered not just the Eiffel Tower, but all monuments in Paris to be torn down. And the guy who was running the France on behalf of the Nazis, a general Dietrich von Scholitz just never got around to it. I guess he was kind of resisting. But one of the speaking of resisting, one of the um little pieces of World War two history was that the French resistance cut the cables for the elevators to the Eiffel Tower, so that if any Nazi sightseers on his day off wanted to go up and see the sights, he had declined the sev ten stairs. He wasn't going to take an elevator as long as the French resistance was around. That's right. And then the Nazis were liberated from Paris. Unless you talked to Senator elect Tommy Tubberville. Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard all that. Former Auburn football coach now Senator elect uh said has said a few times now that Paris was liberated from the Communist and the Socialist Like, no, they were Nazis. Yeah, there's one other piece of World War two trivia I had not heard about, what the Eiffel Tower. There was a dog fight that went under under the Eiffel Tower. People. That's the thing that planes want to try and do now as a sort of a Dare slash stunt. You should not do that. No, no, no, you really you just really I think it's worth saying again, Chuck, you don't fly a plane under the Eiffel Tower. I don't care who you are. Don't fly a plan period. If you're if you're a German. Uh, if you're a German fighter ace and you've got an American P fifty one Mustang on your tail, you're gonna take some risks. Apparently, the the dirty Nazi flying ace, I thought he was gonna shake him by going under the Eiffel Tower, and that P fifty one Mustang pilot went right after him and shot him down over Paris. Amazing, and't it? I mean that they had a dog fight under under the Eiffel Tower. That's astounding. Uh. Because this thing is made of iron, there's a very one, big, big key to keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. Um. It is strong, iron is very strong. It's also malleable. Um. I think we've already mentioned that it does flex in the wind some. It shrinks with temperature changes and gets larger with temperature changes. And that's all well and good, but you gotta have a really good paint job on there. And I think it's been painted eighteen times times over the years, and they're on a seven year cycle now, which they started in eighteen nine nine. UM, And it takes about eighteen months to remove what paint they remove. And it's been various colors over the years. Um, Eiffel Tower brown is what we call it now. But Ed, who helped us put this together with with zero irony, I think, said it is often depicted as simply red. I didn't pick up on that. I think it probably doesn't even know that's a band. I think it's tastes are a little harder than that, right, I don't know. I think he's got a bunch of varied tastes. Like I could see him knowing about simply ready. Just I don't know. Maybe he did mean that. It's also been yellow orange, sort of a yellowish brown. Uh. And like I said, now they call it since nineteen sixty eight Eiffel Tower brown. But it's lit up at night. It's marvelous to behold. Um, twenty thousand lightbulbs on this thing. No, No, no, five billion light bulbs. I don't think that's right, dude. I looked everywhere the only place I can find that was in Business Insider. I've seen it a bunch of places, but I guess it it got Yeah, I could see that. Man, you're probably right. I mean on the Eiffel Tower website it's just twenty lights. So I'm gonna go with that, all right, I'll go with that one too, stupid five that's a big disparity. But it's all lit up, like they have the lights, and then they also have these projectors projecting light and um, five billion projectors. It's brilliant to look at at night, and uh, I suggest you go at night. It's it's great during the day of course as well, but at night is when it's really really special. Right. Um. I've looked up their electric bill and it's apparently about one point one million dollars a year, which is too bad. I guess it's more in line for twenty thousand lights. I was like, that's pretty low for five billion lights. It's like al Gore's electric bill. Wow. Hey, I try to take shots at both sides, right you can, man, Yeah, for sure, you're a centrist. So, um, that repainting stuff it takes eighteen months, did you say that? And they take fifteen tons of the old paint off every time when it's a when the whole job is done, I think it's like sixty tons of new paint. Right, Yes, that is so much pain, it's crazy. But um, the last time we were there, like three to three years ago, Um, I remember being shocked that it was brown. I had totally forgotten it. And anytime you see it, it's it's shadowed enough that it looks black or maybe like a dark gray or something. It does not look like it does in person and pictures. Right, But they apparently there's an optical illusion where the higher up in the sky the Eiffel Tower is um, that part seems darker than the stuff closer to the ground. So they actually do kind of an ombre thing where they painted in this the same color, but yeah, grated shade to where the stuff at the top is the lightest shade and then towards the bottom it's the darkest shade, so that the whole thing has a uniform color to it. Emily and I always have a running joke from that we got from Saturday Night Live. There was one sketch where one girl to the other and said, that is one severe ambre. So we say that now whenever we see you a lady with an ombre hairstyle, Man, when's the last time you saw somebody with an ombre? I don't know. Is that not a thing anymore? I don't I don't see people, think so I don't see I haven't seen people either. I guess I'm just assuming it died out because nobody's going to the hairdresser anymore. Uh. We should maybe do a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably a show into itself, but um, I guess the easiest way to say it is that these are not like any elevators in the world, obviously because they go up on a on a slope and then straightened out. So they're built, obviously, um, just for the Eiffel Tower, and they would work only there, and they work on a hydraulic system. And here's my fun fact that has greased every day with beef fat no from the Jewels Verne restaurant. No, I had not heard that. That's a great fact, man. Yeah, And apparently a lot of the machinery is um some of the original stuff from eighteen ninety nine that they have just sort of modernized and retrofitted over the years. Yeah, I've got one more elevator fact for you. So for the original opening, Otis Elevator was invited to build one of the elevators. Yeah. I think they actually build three of the ones that are there now. But this is for the ex exposition and to show off, to show how how great their elevator was, Otis sent some representatives up to switch out the cable with rope. And then once they had the cable that was holding the elevator aloft changed out to rope. They cut it with hatchets to show off how the emergency brake system worked. Yeah, holy cal Yeah, and they all cross their fingers behind their backs. Yeah, exactly exactly. But if you look at some of the original um, the original drawings, they were like sit down elevators with like pews basically like you find in a church, like a few a few rows of pews, where people just sit down on these things and go up, up, up. You know, now that I'm looking at this list from Business Insider, it also says it costs one point five million to build and in in dollars. I saw that elsewhere too. M hmm. That sounds like confusion to me, because they gave them one point five million francs and it really costs six point five I don't trust anything on this list. Now, five billion lines? Is that on the list that I sent you? That was from Live Science, not Business Insiders? Well, the same exact list was on Business and Business Insider. Yeah, that's what we should call them. So somebody science is usually pretty Uh I'm guessing Business Insider copy pasted from Live Science. Live Science is usually pretty accurate. That's why I fell for the five billion. I was like, why would I fall for that from Business Insider? Now I understand I fell for it from Live Science. All right, well that's more acceptable. What else you got anything? I got nothing else? Go see this thing. It's worth it. Yeah, definitely, It's worth worth traveling to Paris to see and then just turn around and leave. Uh well, chuck, this is coming out I think on New Year's Eve, isn't it? I think? So? Yeah? Right? Should we should we wish everybody happy New Year's now or after listener mail? Uh? No, let's do it now. You know we say it every year that without you guys, we wouldn't even have jobs. So it doesn't change over the years. It just gets better and better, and we really really value everyone that's listening to this right now in a big, big way. Yeah, thanks for listening to us, everybody. We hope that we've kind of helped you in some small measures through because you guys have helped us through. Appreciate you, guys, So thank you. Okay, Well, since I said thank you to all of you listening out there in podcast land, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this pet Turkey. This from Steph Steph t Hey guys, Turkey podcast is my new favorite. We used to have a pair of white domestic turkeys that we kept as pets. They slept in my flower bed every night and look like your yard ornaments. Um. I can attest to their superhering, as the tom could hear a bag of feed being open from a mile away. We kept the feed in a trash can and I had to use the lid as a shield, Captain America style so he wouldn't hop into the can and take me with him. He was a jerk. The female, however, was actually really really sweet and duscile, uh docile. My special need son was just learning to walk at the time, and she would walk beside us ever so slowly, and then sit down for him to pet her. I was so heartbroken when she died that I went out in the field and read a Bible verse over her body. She says, don't judge me. We would never judge you for that. That's amazing. They're also wild turkeys in the area and often had to stop the car to let them cross the road. I love to stick my head out of the window and gobble at them because they would always raise their heads and gobble back. And here's a lady coming again into the gobble. I love it. That's from Steph T. Thanks Steph T. Is it really Steph T? Well? I mean ste F hard Stuff letter T Right, But there was a joke I made in the Tricky episode where like somebody was named Tom T like it was Tom Turkey. So maybe this is she said she gobbles. Maybe. Well, if you're a Turkey and you want to get in touch with this about her Turkey episode or for whatever reason, you can send us an email. The Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com and again, Happy do Year, everybody. Have you know you here? Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M hm hm

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