CDG

48˚ 51’ 32” N | 2˚ 17’ 40” E
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The Eiffel Tower was originally painted Venetian Red, followed by a reddish-brown, then ochre-brown. In 1899 it was painted in five shades of yellow. By 1907 Eiffel settled on a yellow-brown hue but in 1954 a reddish-brown returned. In 1968 the bronze-like ‘Eiffel Tower brown’ became the Tower’s official livery. © Vast Compass, 2025.

More than a gateway

The Eiffel Tower was initially slated for demolition after 20 years, but visionary Gustave Eiffel had a plan all along to prevent the Tower’s demise.

From the beginning he had promoted the monument as more than a gateway to the Exposition Universelle of 1889. He had promoted the Tower as a harbinger of untold value for France, proclaiming it, “will provide essential services to science and national defense”. As the Tower’s final ‘event horizon’ of 1909 approached, traditionalists, including architect Charles Garnier, pressed for its contracted end of life. After all, visitations were down and the iron behemoth was showing its age with rust having its inevitable say. Also, city dads had plans in hand to re-develop the Champ de Mars from which the Tower rose.

Mata Hari should have used a burner phone

In 1898 first radio contact was established between the Eiffel Tower and the Pantheon. Then, in 1903 Gustave Eiffel partnered with French radio pioneer and army general Gustave-Auguste Ferrié to install late-breaking military-grade hardware atop the Tower. This enabled wireless telegraphy from the heart of Paris, making the Iron Lady equivalent to today’s mobile phone towers disguised as palm trees (Los Angeles), Douglas firs (Seattle), or saguaro cacti (Phoenix). Eiffel’s monument-as-flagpole for the tricolor became a monument-as-radio tower.

With what we now call ‘telecommunications’ growing by leaps and bounds, the Tower’s value became evident, so in 1910 the contract granted to Eiffel was renewed for an additional 70 years, a fortuitous decision by the city. in 1914 the Tower’s antenna’s intercepted enemy messages, including German transmissions that proved vital in the First Battle of the Marne which prevented the capture of Paris. The Tower also played a role intercepting messages related to Mata Hari whose participation as a spy for the Germans put her before a French firing squad.

With such obvious proof of its utility, was the Tower’s future at last secure?

Yes...and, no.

Stealthy transmission

Recycling in the Roaring 20’s

Well before her contracted disassembly date of October 31, 1909, Gustave Eiffel fitted his Tower with radio antennas to prolong her life. While the Eiffel Tower wasn’t originally intended to be a stealth tower, her contributions during WWI as a beacon of communications gave her a second lease on life. Alas, time is a cruel taskmaster, so after the ‘war to end all wars’ the lady was increasingly showing her age. For one thing, paint then wasn’t what it is now. It lacked the properties of materials like acrylic, urethane, and specialized resins we take for granted today. And none of the finishes produced 100 years ago provided the benefit of UV protection or the flexibility of modern coatings designed for temperature extremes.

By 1925 the Eiffel Tower was once more under serious consideration of being taken down. Enter Charles Ponzi on the world stage. If his name seems familiar, perhaps you have a relative who happens to be an Ethiopian prince with your email address. In truth, Ponzi isn’t an exact analog for what came next in the Tower’s story, but one of Ponzi’s contemporaries did create a false sense of value and legitimacy to defraud his victims which are the hallmarks of a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme. That’s victims—plural.

Because American con artist ‘Count’ Victor Lustig managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, twice. For scrap.

Scrappy strategy

Born Robert Miller, the con man heads his own chapter of wily and lucrative subterfuge in the Flapper Age. Wanted on two continents, he saw a rusting monument from the 19th century as an attractive opportunity, given it was sitting on property that city planners had their eye on. Which is how Count Lustig came to advertise in Parisian papers in May of 1925, “Because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory.” A booming, er, roaring economy drove a huge need for raw materials, making scrap metal a growing part of the supply chain (by the end of the decade the U.S. alone would have 150,000 scrap metal recycling businesses open across the country).

Investors thirsty for sharing the profits derived from recycling the Tower’s 18,038 iron parts (7,300 tons of iron!) were instructed to arrange a secret appointment with a ‘government official’ at posh Hôtel de Crillon. Heavily-tipped hotel employees went along with Lustig’s façade of legitimacy, providing him with an address and operational space to appear legit.

In the end two investors plunked down cold cash. Not for the Tower itself, but for bribes equivalent to $200,000 today, all to ‘grease the wheels of government’ in processing paperwork related to the Tower’s ‘sale’ to them. The second scam was likely successful because the first mark was too embarrassed to report Lustig’s swindle either to the police or the press.

Irony, anyone?

Meanwhile, across the Pond in New York another scammer in the mold of Ponzi and Lustig was George C. Parker, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge multiple times, as well as the Statue of Liberty, and Madison Square Garden. George Parker often targeted New York’s immigrant community with his grifting schemes which is especially heartbreaking, considering it was the Statue of Liberty on which pedestal a bronze plaque is inscribed with a promise to welcome the world’s, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

History doesn’t repeat itself,
but it often rhymes.

SOLD!

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While 11,100 search results in Google claim otherwise, Mark Twain never actually said it. But the aphorism endures because it’s often true and Twain is known for speaking truths in memorable language. All of which is to say the Taj Mahal joins the list of famous monuments sold by a charlatan. Not once, or even twice, but thrice. Even today Natwarlal (né Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava) is said to be regarded for his audacity as a hero in his hometown of Bangra in the Siwan district of Bihar. His bravura in salesmanship extended to selling the Red Fort and Parliament House of India in Delhi, as well as escaping from prison multiple times. And this, of course, explains why we can’t have nice things.

We can’t lose hope

Scammers’ gonna scam. Not only did Lustig target the Eiffel Tower for profit, he sold reams of documents purported to be written in the hand of famous and important people—Marie Curie, the Wright Brothers, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain. Often, he ‘just happened’ to have a newly-discovered poem by Walt Whitman for private sale. Even Al Capone fell for one of Lustig’s swindles. Alas, other monuments sold by scammers include London’s Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal.

But we can’t lose hope, because there is good—and goodwill—in the world. On July 4, 1889, during the Exposition Universelle, the American community in Paris donated a quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution and the close ties between France and the United States.

On the replica statue’s base are two dates: July 4, 1776 (the date the Continental Congress of the nascent United States adopted the Declaration of Independence) and July 14, 1789 (the date of the Storming of the Bastille, resulting in the overthrow of the French monarchy). Resting on a pedestal on *Île aux Cygnes* (Island of Swans) the statue initially faced east. In 1937 if was turned to face west, towards New York City. There are four more replicas of the statue in Paris. Photo credit: Cristian Lourenço, iStock.

Recommended

This book is magnifique. Half of its pages capture the story of building the Tower—the Timeless Monument. Turn the book upside down and flip it around to open its ‘second cover’. The rest of the pages tell the story of the Tower’s lasting impact on global culture—the Universal Icon.

A visionary and a scam artist

CDG

History doesn’t repeat itself,but it often rhymes.

SOLD!

What a piece of work

Portrait of a lady, a stylish lady

History doesn’t repeat itself,
but it often rhymes.