While impassioned fans and critics can argue the merits of Paris’ star attraction (and they still do), most of us today see the famed Eiffel Tower with the benefit of time and distance from when ‘The Iron Lady’ (Fr. La dame de fer) was erected for a third world’s fair in Paris—one of numerous events being staged across the globe to showcase human innovation in an era when the Industrial Revolution was re-shaping life in dramatic ways.

From the beginning Gustave Eiffel had promoted his eponymous 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”. But was the Tower’s future secure?

With the elements of style so deeply rooted in the idea of France, it seems pre-destined that Gustave Eiffel’s iron creation would take its place as one more entry in a record of sophistication going back centuries. On that front, La dame de fer (the Iron Lady) does not disappoint. With her elegant profile she’s the loveliest lady at the ball, a chic declaration of timeless design daring us to look away.

In 1883 American poet Emma Lazarus donated a bespoke Petrarchan sonnet on behalf of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in advance of the arrival of the completed Statue of Liberty donated by France to commemorate its alliance with the U.S. during the American Revolution a little more than a century earlier. The fund was created to raise money for the pedestal’s construction.

Gustave Eiffel was a leading innovator in iron, but one of his highest-profile projects is visible only from the inside—his studio created the armature for the Statue of Liberty rising over New York City Harbor. Its internal truss framing and rivets are familiar from the Eiffel Tower’s design with parts for both monuments being forged in the same workshop.

By the time of 1889’s Exposition Universelle, engineering entrepreneur Gustave Eiffel headed a highly successful eponymous business with increasingly global reach. His engineering know-how and depth of experience made wrought iron ascendant in an age during which architects and builders were pivoting away from wood and stone, but when concrete was not yet re-perfected.