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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm John Clarke and there Charles Byeong and there's Jerry Roland out there. And this is stuff you should know. Oh, that's right. The Eiffel Tower edition at long last here. You've been there, right? Yes. I love the Eiffel Tower. It's neat. It's great.

I don't care what anyone says about tourist traps. It can be a little disheartening there at the bottom when you're you know, they're selling glo noodles and dumb tchotchkes and stuff like that. But block all that out. And the Eiffel Tower is an amazing, amazing thing to behold.

It is amazing. It's also, Chuck, I don't know if you noticed or not, but it is where I developed my fear of heights. Oh, really? It happened on the Eiffel Tower. I was never, ever, ever, for a moment in my life afraid of heights until I went up the Eiffel Tower and it took me like an hour to get down because I was so afraid of falling off, even though it's impossible to fall off because like there's fencing everywhere, like you can't fall off.

But I mean, I must have looked like the biggest psycho trying to come down the steps of this thing. And it happened. I was like 17. I was with my dad and sister. And you didn't take the elevator? No. We walked up the first floor and we got to the top and I looked down and it was just like lights out.

Oh, that's just from the first floor you were? Yes.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I've never been higher than that. But I've had a fear of heights ever since then.

Well, I think these days with your dad like being man. No, no, he was just kidding. Now he just quietly just. Yeah, exactly. The first two floors I think are the only ones you can still walk up by staircase. But previously you could you could walk all the way to the tippy top. In fact, you said to 710 steps.

Yeah. The first couple of weeks the Eiffel Tower was open. If you wanted to go to the top, you had to walk up. And that took an hour for people just climbing stairs for an hour.

No, I would lose my mind because I'd be up so high, I would just start crying. No, I mean, I would have had heart failure probably halfway up. So neither one of us would have made it.

It would have, yeah. No, I would have be a lot for sure. And apparently doing well. We'll talk about that later. There's a little teaser for you.

You guys don't even know what I'm talking about. So when you come up on the Eiffel Tower, the first thing you're going to walk upon is what's known as the Esplanade, which is that that whole big ground level, part of the Eiffel Tower with those four massive, massive iron pillars at Cardinal North, south, east and west.

Yes, it's pretty hard to miss them. And they cover something like four acres of footprint between them. I think they're like 15000 square feet or something like that. More than that. And like you said, they're all oriented to the cardinal directions. And if you follow upwards, it's very tough not to look up when you're at the Eiffel Tower.

I dare you to not look up. You you have to be a real jerk, you know, like Castanza level jerk to go to the Eiffel Tower and not look up. Yeah, but you would you would see that each of these four pillars go up, up, up, and they come together a little further up, a little above the second platform and they go all the way up and a single joined tower from that moment on. And it's really kind of neat if you stop and think about what you're looking at, these four, four posts is kind of starting separately and then coming together to form this tower.

But it's also just a marvel of engineering. Like I had always heard, there was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever, but until I started researching and I had no idea exactly what that meant. But it is a masterpiece of engineering for sure.

Yeah. And it's you know, it's a lovely scene. Aside from all the the trappings of tourism, there's a lot of green space around it. There are other monuments. It's right there by the river. It's just a really kind of a lovely scene.

Like if you can manage to find some off hours to go where it's not quite so crowded, which I have done, you really get a different sort of experience. But it is what it is. It's a it's one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. So it's like, you know, you can't go stand on the the popular edge of the Grand Canyon without being surrounded by hundreds of people. So don't expect to just sort of keep that in the back of your head.

Sure. I mean, it's the number one. It's the most visited, paid tourist attraction in the world. I didn't know that. I believe something like 300 million people have been there. But that's just counting the paying customers. That's not including the cheapskates like me and you, me and my brother and sister in law and niece who went and visited and didn't. Way to go up most recently, we just walked around it and kept walking. I've never been up.

Oh, you haven't you're just one man, OK? I've been in that thing three times, never even had the urge to stand in those lines and go to the top. I'll tell you what, Chuck, you just go on to YouTube and people have films where you don't have to do sister-in-lawnything. You have to leave your house. And I saw the crowds on those elevators and at the top and I was like, I don't need this. I don't like it.

I'd rather just walk around and and drink some wine and look at it. Yeah.

I mean, it's really impressive just walking around the bases of the whole thing. Like, you definitely get a feel for it. And yeah, if you're afraid of heights, that's all you need to do.

So talking about this thing, there's actually three levels that you can get to. There's that first level where I lost my mind. Then it goes further up to a second level. And then there's the third level and third levels like almost 900 feet in the air. Yeah, it's about three, 300 meters, a little less than 300 meters that that third platform. And in each of these platforms, there's stuff to do. It's not just like a steel platform that you step on to and look out and that's it.

There's restaurants. There's shops on that top platform where so many people apparently, like two people a day, propose there's like a champagne bar. It's there's just a lot of really neat little interesting details that make the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower. But even more than that, even more than just the, you know, the glo noodles that you can only get there at the Eiffel Tower. What makes it so unique is just the design of it, the execution of it, the fact that it's still around.

And then also some of the things that have happened, like it's an iconic structure. And when that many people flock to it every year for more than a century, it's going to have like a pretty rich history, too.

Yeah, I mean, you talked about the restaurants. If you want to eat at the nicest restaurant, it'll be the Jules Verne. And I was just kind of curious about their menu. It looks very good, but it looks OK. It is pricey. It is your seven course dinner tasting menu is going to run you about 275 bucks. Each box are euros, dollars, buckaroos, OK, and that's without this. Two hundred and thirty years, I think.

And that's without wine or anything like I think it's without wine or anything with a pairing, but it only goes up from there. So I imagine it's quite a dining experience. Maybe one day I'll save up my bucks. Yeah. And make a reservation because if you do have a reservation, you can, you can kind of skip most of the line and go straight there, which is kind of nice. Yeah.

If yeah. You can just take an elevator straight to the Jules Verne restaurant, I said, because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too scared to go up and I care.

She can go to another great restaurant and just pretend you're 300 feet off the ground. But that's the point. I don't want to pretend like your feet are firmly planted on the ground. And another cool thing that they have is and this is something that I didn't know because I never been up there is Gustaaf Eifel built himself an apartment up top. Yeah. And this thing has not really been touched since then. I mean, they've they've kept it in order.

But I think Ed said they had recreated it. But apparently that's the real thing that is just sort of left untouched. It's got a living room with a table, a couch, a piano, a grand piano, a few desks, kitchen, bathroom. There is no bedroom. And by all accounts, he probably did not sleep there. But back in the day in Paris, it became quite the talk of the town and just made rich Parisians just seethe with jealousy.

And he was offered huge, huge sums of money from people just like Airbnb it for a night. And he declined every single time. He never allowed anyone to rent it out and spend the night.

Well, you know, one of the things that I keep running up against during research of the Eiffel Tower is that it was a democratizing structure because up to the point when the Eiffel Tower opened to the public, if you wanted a really amazing view of Paris, you basically had to rent a hot air balloon ride. That was your your one shot at it. And you had to be very, very rich to do that, to go up in a balloon.

And so, I mean, that's just the way it was until Gustave fell and then the the leaders of Paris and France came along and said, let's build this 300 metre tower and open it to the public. I mean, yeah, you had to pay, but it was a reasonable price and just about everybody could afford it. And now you could walk up and see these amazing views of Paris. To that point had been reserved only for the very wealthy, which again, I just keep seeing it referred to as the democratizing structure.

All right. So let's talk about the man himself. Right. Yeah, Gustav Eiffel, who is widely credited, is the guy who created this this structure, but it was definitely a collaboration and he never seemed to make any any secret of that. But he was definitely the head cheese on the whole thing. But he didn't create this whole thing by himself.

I think you mean the head, Brie, so I mean head cheese across. So he was I can never get over that word. It's terrible. He was born in 1832 and was an engineer by trade. Went to engineering school at.

Kaltech, now that you're going to do that, you want me to say it, OK? He went to the a call center called the RSA Manufacturers.

That's right. And he was well regarded as an engineer all over France and Europe, had a consultancy firm, had his own workshop, had his own construction company. And it should be noted that he was an engineer. First and foremost, he was not an architect. He was obsessed with function and mechanics and strength of any structure he built because he built things like railroad bridges where you really needed to be strong and maybe pretty second. He did like things to look nice.

It's not like that's all he cared about, but he was very big into structure and form and function and was also a big believer in iron as opposed to steel, which, you know, this thing could have been all steel. Steel was around, could ease steel. But for something this big, he was like, iron is what it has to be built out of.

That's what he was like. You know, that was his trade. Like he knew iron and had he moved into steel, he would have been out of his depth. This is not a project where one should be out of their depth. Right. But then also steel would have been prohibitively expensive. It was still a pretty new technology. So I thought that was another reason he didn't use steel. But so as iron is a specific kind of iron, it's puddled raw iron to wear during the the the smelting process.

You actually swirl it, which keeps the impurities from crystallizing into the structure of the of the iron. So it's actual raw iron. That's what the the Eiffel Tower is made out of. But if you put those two things together that he's an engineer, not an artist and is his his expertise is in iron, all of it kind of culminates into this, the Eiffel Tower. It's like it makes total sense what you're looking at, like it couldn't have been anything else.

But it also kind of underscores just how much of a masterpiece it is under those two constraints.

Yeah. And he was another little fun fact is when the person that was charged with building the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty died, he came in as an emergency replacement and he took on that project and he built that internal lattice work of the great Statue of Liberty. And he also financed the Eiffel Tower largely. Right. The Paris and France said, hey, let's let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair coming up in 1899. And we want a big, big tower, 1899.

What I say 99. Yeah, 1889.

And he he got one point five million francs from the state is seed money, but it was going to cost about six point five million.

And this became one of the first sort of what we look at now is how you finance projects like this, one of the first ones to do it like this, a public private partnership.

Well, yeah. I mean, he went out and issued shares, right? He started an LLC, issued two kinds of shares and raise the other five million francs to build this thing and as a result, had 20 years to recoup money from ticket sales and souvenirs and champagne bottles and stuff like that in which he would pay the stuff back. And in that time, he and his shareholders made a lot of money in the process.

Yeah, but what I saw was he was such a good businessman that he managed to get the, you know, all the all the proceeds from, you know, admission and concessions and all that stuff for twenty years from the Exposition Founders. But then he also with the people he went and raised the money from, they didn't get a huge cut of that either. So he made out like a total bandit in this deal. He didn't screw anybody over, swindle anybody.

It was just a really good deal that he made for himself. But it required a lot of vision, too, like he you know, he put his own his own torgeson and his own reputation on the line with this one big project.

Yeah, it may have been the kind of thing where they made a certain amount of money back that was capped. I don't really know, because his shareholders made a lot of money, too. Like if you invested in the Eiffel Tower, you didn't do it out of the goodness of your heart. You made some dough.

Sure. Sure. But I think there was a lot of a certain amount of, like municipal pride in that project, especially with the proponents of the project and the whole the whole design contest to create an iconic structure for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. Apparently, it was that first kind of vague. And I even saw that it was it was Eifel himself who suggested that they have this design competition. And if that isn't the case, he at the very least kind of guided the details of what they were looking for until it basically was his tower.

The other big competitor was a guy named Joules per day.

And he wanted to make. His 300 meter tower out of stone, which was total insanity, would have killed everybody, it would have would have crumbled immediately. I don't know if they ever would have even been able to successfully finish it. Apparently, there's a big push and pull and tension between Iphicles iron and birds stone in the side. This kind of transition between modern and traditional and modern in the form of Eiffel Tower one out.

That's right. I think we should take a break, OK, and talk about what happened there in the lead up to 1889 right after this.

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Listen to cadaver goes on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so you mentioned that it was a collaboration and not just in the building of it, obviously, which I think range from 150 to 300 people at any given time.

Right. Little known fact. Eifel did not build it himself, but he did not.

It was designed by other people to the initial design was by Emile Boy Nudger Nice. And Maurice Koechlin, very nice. And, you know, apparently this first design wasn't just like with anything else. It's not like they drew it up on paper and that was it. It wasn't that great. It was four iron pillars that met near the top, like we're sort of familiar with. And it was connected by grids, but it wasn't that hot. They went back to the drawing board, sent it to an architect named Stephen Silvestri.

I was going to say earlier, you don't need me at all.

But yes, you do. Sylvester Sure he did. Sure. All right. That inspires a lot of confidence.

And he made it really freely added a lot of Victorian flourishes. They got it back from him and said, why don't we meet in the middle, get rid of a lot of this stuff, keep some of the stuff. And what they ended up with was sort of a magical little compromise on the final design.

Yeah, it was, like I said, a real collaboration. And what came out of that collaboration was just something something really amazing. And the fact that each each group or each person or, you know, each everyone involved, they all worked for Eifel. The first two were his chief chief engineers and was going to call him. Sylvester was his chief architect, I believe. And then along with Eifel himself, all of them kind of adding to and subtracting in like, I don't like that or I do like this.

It came to fruition. And he Eifel purchased the designs from his employees so that he personally owned the the design outright, which allowed him to go raise money himself and take in all of the admission and concession fees that he was going to rake in over the next 20 years, too.

Yeah, man, I wonder. I don't know. I looked up the brand worth and and the only thing I could find was from like seven years ago in 2013, that Eifel brand at that time was worth like 430 billion dollars euros, as I saw that, too.

Oh, I thought that was in dollars. Was that in euros? I'm pretty sure it was in euros. Yeah.

But it's I mean, that is just a crazy amount of money. And it's a shame that he couldn't work out some sort of a stake in that early on that could have been passed down to his heirs.

Yeah. Because he was able to take that in for just the first 20 years. And the reason why 20 years is such a significant number. Chuck, I did not know this, but the original part of that design competition was that this the structure, the winning structure was going to only stand for 20 years and then it would be disassembled to make way for something new. And that was really in the tradition of world fairs. It's very rare for any structures to remain for very long, more than a couple decades after a world's fair, because because they just they're meant to be temporary.

They're meant to be part of the world's fair and to commemorate the World's Fair. But then you have more world's fairs that come along and progress is to be made. And so the old structures get torn down and new ones get built in their place. So the Eiffel Tower was going to just live for 20 years and then be disassembled.

Yeah, I bet you that does have something to do with it, because if you look at any most world's fair structures over the years, they do end up looking very dated. Like this is the only one I can think of that really had this indelible, iconic design. Right. And they probably just don't want that reminder of, like, you know, the Knoxville World's Fair. Right. Twenty five years later, it looks really kind of silly, right?

Well, the sun sphere is still around. Where is it? Is it. Yes, as far as I know.

Yeah. Yeah, it was Knoxville with the sun sphere, I'm almost positive. But there was another building built.

I mean, like if you look at some of the buildings that were built for this Paris exposition in 1889, these are like major, huge buildings that today we would spend untold number, like countless money to to preserve and keep from crumbling. Yeah, they just took him down after twenty years. There's one called the Gallery Day Machine, and it some critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece of iron work in modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself they tore down in 1910.

Mao. Yeah, so that's just kind of how it was with the World Fair and that's how it was supposed to be with the Eiffel Tower. But if you start to dive into how the Eiffel Tower was constructed, it's abundantly clear that Gustav Eiffel never intended on his tower to be taken down.

The thing, Ford, tough man. If you want to make a French person's head spin, tell them that the Eiffel Tower is built. Ford tough. Oh, my God.

I was trying to think of a French car. What's the one? The Renault's. Yeah, RENEL tough. Liaqat Tough. So they start construction in January of 1887. Obviously, that's a pretty tight timetable to pull something like this off before the World's Fair. And it came down to the wire, but they started building the tower itself in July 1887. They were building. You know, that might not make sense, but they were doing those foundations.

It took a long time just to get the foundation work done. And he had a manufacturing warehouse and facility about six kilometers away. So most of it was built there in pieces. They would bring it over and ship it over to the site to kind of assemble it and put it together. And, you know, this thing is right by the river. So you've got you know, you don't have the most stable, you know, land base in which to drill down.

And they ended up did we do a show on tunnels or was it just I must have been bridges or something because I think we talked about the Brooklyn Bridge being built like this. Yeah. May have been at or maybe it was the New York Aqueduct, I don't know. But basically they had to do sort of the same thing and they had to go under sea level. So they had to work in these compressed air chambers. Yeah. Which was very, very dangerous.

And they ended up only losing one human life during the construction, which is remarkable. It is remarkable.

And this thing was also completed in record time, too. Like I mean, you said it was a tight schedule to build this thing in 21. No, 26 months today would be impressive. We did this in, you know, the eighteen 80s and only lost one worker. Part of that was because Gustav Eifel himself was well known for basically being an additional foreman on the job. So he was not one of these guys who went and smoke cigars and just hung out all day at the country club with his buddies like he was.

The hands on on is his most important projects. And the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects, though, because of his dedication to safety and this level of oversight from the guy himself that just one person like the person and you have to die there like no one will believe it if nobody died.

So they had one guy off the top apair what's that over there? I know you've been down there.

Bend down and pick it up for me here. Oh.

So the other thing he had going in his favor was as far as getting it built in record time was he had a great crew. He had like I said, he was a big builder anyway. So he had all these regular workers that were really, really experienced, especially iron workers, and he was able to pull it off using a method of riveting bolts. Pretty good rivets, better, way better. I mean, this is these rivets are the reason why I say, like, he did not mean for this thing to be taken apart in twenty years.

So what they did was they use heated rivets. And here's here's how that works. You bring over this sub piece that's built together with temporary bolts and then you remove those bolts and you replace it with a heated rivet. And this is on site. It had blacksmiths hammering this thing on site, apparently made quite a racket. And you would heat it in or you would heat it up and knock it in. And then as this thing cools, it shrinks and that just inches everything really, really tight.

That is trying to cinch together after it's cooled. And so you've got, you know, two thirds of this thing, two thirds of the these rivets were actually installed onsite with human power and hammers. Yeah.

And each side of the rivet was hammered into a head. So it's not like a bolt where you could just take off. I don't know how you would get those things apart, frankly. And this does seem like it was so was I guess then the seal was was so tight because it cooled and cinched him tighter together. And then the actual one of the reasons why the Eiffel Tower is just so revered, it's just incredibly precise, like each piece, like you said, was made off site and then maybe partially assembled and brought to the to the job site.

But they were they were created in the 1980s within a tenth of a millimeter precise. And if they weren't a tenth of a millimeter precise, they were sent back to the factory to be altered so that they were brought in to that level of. Decision, so the entire Eiffel Tower is within a tenth of a millimeter precision. The entire thing, that's just astounding to me.

Yeah, and it's really cool, too, in that they you know, you obviously are building this thing from the ground up and they use scaffolding until they made that first floor plateau. And then from that point on, that was their new foundation. So they could actually be up there in the tower itself, supported itself from that point forward as they moved up.

Right. And this is just so scary to me. But the the as they worked further and further up, they got steam cranes that they attach to what would eventually be the rails used by the lifts, the very specific elevators of the Eiffel Tower. And these steam cranes just climbed up and up and up and just worked their way up the tower. And just I this this is eighteen the eighteen eighties. And you're in a steam crane attached to the Eiffel Tower that you're building hundreds of metres up.

I, I can barely even say these words. You would have been the second guy that died. Yeah. Because your knees gave out. Exactly. I just, I can't even deal right now.

So they, they eventually finish as the World's Fair approaches. It didn't even open. This is how tight it was. It wasn't even open to the public until nine days into the fair. And it took two more weeks for those elevators to be operational. So if you were those first people, you paid a little bit of money to climb. Seventeen hundred and ten steps to the top, like you mentioned earlier, takes about an hour. And a lot of people still did that remarkably.

And they all smoked cigarettes at the time. So I can't imagine that was fun.

So one of the things about the Eiffel Tower that I, I didn't know about was that there was a tremendous amount of protest when it was announced, when when the design was unveiled or the plans for it were unveiled mostly by the French artistic community. There was a famous petition, again, which I didn't know about, called the the petition of the 300 300 artists, 300 architects, 300 musicians, basically anybody who is anyone in the Parisian art and cultural scene at the time signed this petition basically saying, like, don't build this thing.

This is horrible. This is it's going to look like an industrial iron smokestack. And we don't want this to to mar the beautiful landscape of Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And I mean, that was a it was a substantial public outcry and like kind of a campaign against the Eiffel Tower that Eiffel and the president exposition planners had to deal with. But they I guess ultimately the the the artists were there. Their protests fell on deaf ears because the tower was made.

But one of the great things about it was in the years after some of those petition signers came out and publicly apologized to Eifel, they said that they had they gotten it wrong, that the Eiffel Tower is just that, you know, that beautiful. They finally kind of came around to understanding what was beautiful about it, did guide them as part of some.

Recant. No, he was one who never did the Maupassant, he he was very famous writer who would lunch at the base of the Eiffel Tower very frequently because it was the only place in Paris he could go eat or he didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower.

Yeah, so he wrote. And this this became one of this or sort of the most famous put down the Eiffel Tower.

He said this high and skinny pyramid of iron letters, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclopes, but which just peters out into a ridiculous, thin shape, like a factory chimney piece. I fart in its general direction.

And I didn't see that coming. And he he was you might not recognize his name, but I'll bet you'd recognize his pen name. Jackie Collins.

Oh, interesting. I know that that's because they made it up. So I himself the man. I'm sure I'm sure his feelings were a little bit hurt by some of these artists. He wanted to be beloved, but he wasn't made of puddle and he was not. He said announcers sort of paraphrase here. He said, For my part, I believe that tower will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature of the monuments for outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be, will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole.

And moreover, there is an attraction in the colossal and the singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable. And I think that kind of sums it up. It's like. Man, this is a massive, amazing, gorgeous feat of engineering and like you can't think of it with your little sculpture brain.

And try and look at it, is that kind of art like you got to rethink what art and architecture are? And I think he's totally right. I mean, it's amazing when you look at this thing and you can sort of see maybe back then how it didn't fit the landscape and people might have thought it was obnoxious, but they were wrong.

Yeah, it's I saw a, I guess, a architecture blog on the Eiffel Tower and had it broken down by like loads and stresses and geometry and all that. But I'm one of the pages. It was it was showing a graph of how wind pressure increases with height. Right. And when they traced the curve of the different wind pressures as it went up, it made one it made the curve of the Eiffel Tower. And he said later that the Eiffel Tower was designed by the wind.

And that's what he was talking about, like they used math to determine what the perfect shape of this was, to put up this, to have the same wind pressure. So the base is under the same load from wind that the top is because of the taper. So it was like it's math personified. It's math and science and engineering in iron form. I had no idea about that until I started researching this. And it just made me appreciate this so much more.

And it's also really, really strong to like the thing can hold four and a half times its own weight, like it's never going to fall down. And a lot of people were worried about that one when Effa was building it. And he publicly said, I take personal responsibility if this thing ever collapses. He just knew it wasn't going to because that's how precise he was and that's how smart he was with his calculations and the people he was working with, too.

But it's it's just it's a it's masterful. It is. It's nature revealed. Just carved out of the sky and iron.

All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk about why that thing is still standing today and wasn't torn down twenty years later, right after this. I don't see lot. Hey there, it's LeAnn Rimes. You know, these days, it's pretty easy to feel way too overwhelmed and disconnected not only from each other, but ourselves. My new podcast, Wholly Human Focus, is on living our best fullest lives by expanding into our most complete and whole selves.

I'd love you to join me as I sit down with people who I've found to be some of the world's most inspiring and enlightening motivators. Healers and wise souls together will make more sense of this crazy existence. We all share ourselves and each other. Listen and follow. Holy Human with me. LeAnn Rimes on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Nearly 600 years after the invention of the printing press, the most important book in the history of the world has arrived, there might be overstating things, stuff you should know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

It will change your life forever.

Well, that's not necessarily true. Most scientists agree that stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is proof that time travel is possible because that is the only way to explain how a book this impressive was possibly made. Why that stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things will regrow hair, white your teeth and improve your love life.

That's just not at all. Right.

Well, the love life part, maybe if you find someone who thinks smart is sexy stuff, you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things available now at stuff you should know dotcom and everywhere you buy books.

Now, that is true. All right, so Eifel built the thing to last, like we said, and during that 20 year period, as he was raking in money from glo noodle sales, he he decided to start trying to make it useful and give it a practical purpose. So maybe they'll say, well, we kind of got to leave it up now. So he started doing all these wind resistance experiments and those were fine. Those were all well and good, but it was it was radio.

That really is what saved it when in 1898, a Morse code signal was sent from the tower to another part of Paris. And it was a big success. So they put in a permanent radio installation there. And all of a sudden they were like, hey, this thing is really valuable, especially with wars approaching, which they obviously didn't know that at the time, but they were sending messages, you know, overseas to London and thousands of kilometres away.

And they said in 1910, all right, this is actually pretty valuable to us. Now, the the military is involved. It's playing roles in our wars. So you can keep it up for 70 more years. And they then tore it down in 1980.

Yeah. And that was the end of the Eiffel Tower. I'll never forget that day.

I was it was nine years old. Yeah. Do you remember how excited Reagan was? Like you say, it was very strong against the Eiffel Tower and Jimmy Carter just cried quietly. It was very sad.

Yeah, I thought that was the right reaction to that, you know, but that's the big split. You know, there's two kinds of people now. They gave him 70 more years. And obviously in 1980, I didn't even look it up. But I assume that's when they said maybe we should just all agree that it's it'll probably be here forever. Yeah. Yeah.

So it survived. Even Adolf Hitler, the big jerk. He apparently after the Nazis had occupied Paris for years as the war was seemingly coming to an end, he ordered not just the Eiffel Tower, but all monuments in Paris to be torn down. And the guy who was running the France on behalf of the Nazis, General Dietrich von Shultz, just never got around to it. I guess he was kind of resisting. But one of the speaking of resisting, one of the little pieces of World War Two history was that the French Resistance cut the cables for the elevators to the Eiffel Tower so that if any Nazi sightseers on his day off wanted to go up and see the sites, he had declined the seventeen hundred and ten stairs.

He wasn't going to take an elevator as long as the French Resistance was around. That's right.

And then the Nazis were liberated from Paris. Unless you talked to Senator elect Tommy Tuberville. Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard all that. Former Auburn football coach, now Senator elect said has said a few times now that Paris was liberated from the communists and the socialists. Yeah. Like now they were Nazis. Yeah.

There's one other piece of World War two trivia I had not heard about with the Eiffel Tower. There was a dogfight that went under under the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, people that's the thing that planes want to try and do now as a sort of a derogate stunt. You should not do that.

No, no, no. You really you just I think it's worth saying again, Chuck, you don't fly a plane under the Eiffel Tower, I don't care who you are, don't fly a plane, period.

If you're if you're a German, if you're a German fighter ace and you've got an American P 51 Mustang on your tail, you can take some risk. You're apparently the the dirty Nazi flying ace thought he was going to shake them by going under the Eiffel Tower and that P 51 Mustang pilot went right after him and shot him down over Paris.

Amazing, isn't it? I mean, they had a dogfight under under the Eiffel Tower.

That's astounding because this thing is made of iron. There's very one big, big key to keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. It is strong. Iron is very strong. It's also valuable. I think we've already mentioned that it does flex in the wind. Some it shrinks with temperature changes and gets larger with temperature changes. And that's all well and good. But you got to have a really good paint job on there. And I think it's been painted 18 times over the years and they're on a seven year cycle now, which they started in 1899.

And it takes about 18 months to remove what paint they remove. And it's been various colors over the years. Eiffel Tower Brown is what we call it now. But Ed, who helped us put this together with with zero irony, I think said it is often depicted as simply red. No, I didn't pick up on that. I think it probably doesn't even know that's a band.

I think it's Taysir a little harder than that, right?

I don't know. I think he's got a bunch of varied tastes I could see him knowing about. Simply ready. Just I don't know, maybe he did mean that it's also been yellow, orange, sort of a yellowish brown.

And like I said, now they call it since 1968, Eiffel Tower Brown, but it's lit up at night.

It's marvelous to behold 20000 light bulbs on this thing. No, no, no.

Five billion light bulbs. I don't think that's right, dude. I looked everywhere. And the only place I could find that was in Business Insider.

I've seen it a bunch of places, but I guess it got. Yeah, I could see that man. You're probably right.

I mean, on the Eiffel Tower website, it says 20000 lights. So I'm going to go with that. All right.

I'll go with that one. Too stupid. This is a big disparity. Yeah. But it's all lit up like they have the lights and then they also have these projectors projecting light and five billion projectors. And it's brilliant to look at at night. And I suggest you go at night. It's great during the day, of course, as well. But at night is when it's really, really special.

Right. I looked up their electric bill and it's apparently about one point one million dollars a year, which is not too bad. I guess it's more in line for 20000 lights. I was like, that's pretty low for five billion light.

It's like Al Gore's electric bill.

Wow. Hey, I try to take shots at both sides, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, for sure. There a centrist. So that repainting stuff, it takes 18 months. Did you say that? I did. And they take 15 tons of the old paint off every time when it's when the whole job is done.

And I think it's like sixty tons of new paint, right? Yes. That is so much pain. It's crazy. But the last time we were there like three to three years ago, I remember being shocked that it was brown. I'd totally forgotten. Any time you see it, it's it's shadowed enough that it looks black or maybe like a dark gray or something does not look like it does in person in pictures. Right. But the apparently there's an optical illusion where the higher up in the sky the Eiffel Tower is, that part seems darker than the stuff closer to the ground.

So they actually do kind of an ombre thing where they painted great in the same color. But yeah, a graded shade to wear the stuff at the top is the lightest shade and then toward the bottom it's the darker shade so that the whole thing has a uniform color to it.

Emilion I always have a running joke from that we got from Saturday Night Live. There was one sketch where one girl to the other and said that is one severe ombre.

And so police say that now whenever we see a lady with an ombre hairstyle man, when's the last time you saw somebody with an amber?

I don't know. Is that not a thing anymore? I don't I don't see I don't think so.

I don't think I even seen people either. I guess I'm just assuming it died out because nobody's going to the hairdresser.

We should maybe do a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably a show unto itself. But I guess the easiest way to say it is that these are not like any elevators in the world, obviously, because they go up on a on a slope. And then straighten out, so they're built obviously just for the Eiffel Tower, and they would work only there and they work on a hydraulic system. And here's my fun fact that is greased every day with beef fat.

No. Yeah. From the Jules Verne restaurant. No, I heard that. It's a great fact, man. Yeah.

And apparently a lot of the machinery is some of the original stuff from eighteen ninety nine that they have just sort of modernized and retrofitted over the years. Yeah.

I've got one more elevator fact for you. So for the original opening, Otis Elevator was invited to to build one of the elevators. Oh wow. And legendary. Come on. Yeah. I think they actually built three of the ones that are there now, but this is for the exposition and to show off to show how how great their elevator was. Otis sent some representatives up to switch the cable with rope. And then once they had the cable that was holding the elevator aloft, changed out to rope.

They cut it with hatchets to show off how the emergency brake system worked.

Wow. Yeah, holy cow. Yeah, they all across the fingers behind their back. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But if you look at some of the original the original drawings, they were like sit down elevators with like pews, basically, like you find in a church like a few a few rows of pews where people just sit down on these things and go up, up, up.

You know, now that I'm looking at this list from Business Insider. It also says it cost one point five million to build. And that in in in 1889, I saw that elsewhere to. That sounds like confusion to me because they gave them one point five million francs. Yeah. And it really costs six point five. I don't trust anything on this list now.

OK, five billion light. Is that on the list that I sent you? Yeah, that was from LifeScience, not Business Insider. Well, the same exact list was on business. Business Insider. Yeah, that's what we should call them.

So somebody is usually pretty, I'm guessing. Business Insider. Copy paste it from LifeScience LifeScience is usually pretty accurate. That's why I fell for the five billion. I was like, why would I fall for that from Business Insider. Now I understand I fell for it from lifescience. All right. Well, that's more acceptable. What else you got anything? I got nothing else. Go see this thing. It's worth it. Yeah, definitely is worth worth traveling to Paris to see and then just turn around and leave.

Well, Chuck, this is coming out, I think, on New Year's Eve, isn't it? I think so, yeah. Right. Should we should we wish everybody happy New Year's now or after listener mail? Uh, no. Let's do it now. You know, OK, we say it every year that without you guys, we wouldn't even have jobs.

So it doesn't change over the years. It just gets better and better.

And we really, really value everyone that's listening to this right now in a big, big way. Yeah.

Thanks for listening to us, everybody. We hope that we've kind of helped you in some small measure through 2020 because you guys have helped us through twenty twenty eight, you guys. So thank you. OK, well, since I said thank you to all of you listening out there in podcast land, that means it's time for listener mail to call this pet turkey is from Steph.

Hey guys. Turkey podcast is my new favorite. We used to have a pair of white domestic turkeys that we kept as pets. They slept in my flower bed every night and look like yard ornaments. I can attest to their super hearing as the Tom could hear a bag of feed being opened from a mile away.

We kept the feed in a trash can and I had to use the lid as a shield Captain America style so it wouldn't happen to the can and take me with him. He was a jerk.

My the female, however, was actually really, really sweet and docile, docile. My special needs son was just learning to walk at the time and she would walk beside us ever so slowly and then sit down for him to pet her. I was so heartbroken when she died that I went out in the field and read a Bible verse over her body.

Oh, she says, don't judge me. We would never judge you for that. That's amazing. They're also wild turkeys in the area and often had to stop the car to let them cross the road. I love to stick my head out of the window and gobble at them because they would always raise their heads and gobble back.

And that is for me. That is a lady. Come on again to the guy. I love it.

That's from Stephanie. Thanks, Stephanie. Is it really Stephanie?

Well I mean stf hardstyle letter T, right.

But there is a joke, I mean the Turkey episode where like somebody was named Tom T like it was Tom Turkey.

Oh really. So maybe instead of Turkey she said she gobbles maybe.

Well if you're a turkey and you want to get in touch with us about our Turkey episode or for whatever reason you can send us an email, the STUFF podcast that I heart, radio dot com. And again, happy New Year, everybody.

Happy New Year. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows? Are you a music fan? Do you need more music talk in your life than you should be listening to record store Society of Music talk show podcast on the I Heart Radio Network.

Record Store Society is a virtual trip to your local record store hosted by me, Terry Davis and me, Sir Nicholas Johnson.

Every Friday you'll find Stephanie behind the counter at your favorite record store, dispensing recommendations, making lists and talking to our customers about anything and everything music related. So listen to record store society on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know the original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato? Did you know that all tequila's are mescal, but not all mescal? There's tequila. Did you know some goats climb trees? Did you know there really was a Jones family that everyone in New York was trying to keep up with or that Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy who could draw before he could talk?

You will stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things become the most interesting person you know. Now at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.