Petrin Tower

This guide to Petrin Tower in Prague opens in 1889, when members of a new Czech tourism club returned from the Paris World's Fair determined to build their own version of the Eiffel Tower, despite having no money and no government support. You'll hear how a journalist named Vilem Kurz solved the problem by writing a newspaper article describing the tower as though it already stood finished, and how the fictional story brought in enough donations to build the real thing in under five months. By the end of its first year, over sixty-one thousand tickets had already been sold.