Once we’d spread our oh-so-French déjeuner sur l'herbe (luncheon on the grass—provisioned from nearby shops on Rue Cler, following the advice of travel guru, Rick Steves), I noticed my mom’s posture shift as she looked up from our shady spot on the Champ de Mars toward the Eiffel Tower, its curves and latticework soaring into the blue above us.

Having built the iron framework for the Statue of Liberty, Gustave Eiffel was certainly aware of Bartholdi’s plans to install electric light atop the colossus. And Edison’s incandescent bulb was set to play an enormous role illuminating the 1889 world’s fair. But electric grids at the time were small, expensive, and temperamental.

Built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the Eiffel Tower served as a gateway to the world’s fair being held in Paris to mark the centennial of the French Revolution, and to celebrate the nation’s ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité represented in its blue, white, and red flag. The exposition’s official name was the Exposition Tricolorée.

Edison unlocked the promise of 1,093 patents to improve the human condition, beginning with the successful taming and commercialization of electricity and including the production of ubiquitous and affordable incandescent light. Meanwhile, Eiffel inaugurated a new era of construction that let us pierce the heavens, reaching heights today more than 5X that of the Great Pyramid in Giza.

With a deluge of innovation the order of the day, it’s only natural that Thomas Edison and Gustave Eiffel would admire one another’s achievements in advancing human progress. Eiffel had built his Tower out of new-fangled wrought iron, and Edison had dabbled in iron ore production. The two men of industry had much to discuss.