Today Is...The Eiffel Tower Is Officially Opened

For something which was only meant to last 20 years, the Eiffel Tower hasn't done bad although if you want to climb to the top of it, you had better set aside a day because as the most visited monument in the World with 7 million visitors a year, the first time we went and our line was 6 hours long and apparently that was an average day so we gave up and went for a trip down the Seine instead.
We did have better luck the second time and had a wait of about 15 minutes but that was a few weeks after the Paris Bataclan Theatre massacre and Paris was pretty much deserted although you do make a handy target for the tat salesmen and the people trying to con money out of you by signing up for a fake donation.
At 1083 feet tall and weighing 10,100 tons, it is impressive and it was the invention of radio which saved it as the Paris authorities discovered that if you stick a radio mast 1083 foot up in the air you get great wireless signal transmission.
It is France’s famous symbol in the world and named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower for the 1889 World's Fair although it wasn't that popular at the time and many French artists and intellectuals couldn't wait for it to be torn down including one man in particular, an Austrian named Victor Lustig who almost pulled off the biggest and best con of all time when he tried to sell it for scrap, not once but twice.
Using some stationery he had knocked up made to look like it was from the French government saying that the Eiffel Tower was going to be sold for scrap, he toured scrap dealers until he found one gullible enough to hand over £70,000 for his acquisition of 10,100 tonnes of scrap metal which never arrived.
With his bank balance look very rosy, he tried it again a year later but a couple of the dealers checked with the Government first, was told it was a con and informed the Police so he fled to the U.S. where he conned Al Capone out of $5000 so balls made of the same steel as the Eiffel Tower obviously.
Some would say as it costs €40 to walk up the Tower (the lifts are either permanently full or not working), it is still being used to con people out of money but it is still a very impressive piece of architecture.