Eiffel Tower

January 26th, 1887 - workers break ground on a foundation that will hold the impossible... a 300-meter iron tower that critics are calling "Gustave Eiffel's folly." Standing here on the Champs de Mars, you're looking at what was once just empty parkland in Paris's 7th arrondissement, but Eiffel saw something nobody else could imagine. Here's the wild part - every single one of those 18,000 iron pieces you see spiraling above you was calculated to one-tenth of a millimeter precision at Eiffel's factory in Levallois-Perret, then shipped here like the world's most complex puzzle. The genius wasn't just in the design - it was in those 2.5 million rivets. Workers would bolt pieces temporarily, then replace each bolt with red-hot rivets that contracted as they cooled, creating an unbreakable grip. And that lattice ironwork that looks so delicate? It made this the first structure on Earth to smash through both the 200 and 300-meter barriers - twice as tall as St. Peter's dome or the Great Pyramid. But here's what locals know that tourists miss - Eiffel had to fund most of this himself because the government only covered a quarter of the costs. That's why he got to keep the profits for twenty years after it opened on May 15th, 1889. Today, as you stand beneath those iron legs, you're experiencing the birth of modern architecture - where engineering became art.