Eiffel Tower

This guide to the Eiffel Tower in Paris opens on Valentine's Day 1887, when forty of France's leading artists and writers, Guy de Maupassant among them, published an open letter denouncing the half-built tower as a monstrous iron skeleton. It follows the tower through its two-year construction and the crowds who climbed it once it opened, then into the early 1900s, when Paris officials began weighing whether to tear it down once its contract ran out. You'll hear how Maupassant himself reportedly kept eating lunch inside it anyway. Listen from below the first platform, where the lattice work is easiest to take in.