Stuff You Should Know - La Dame de Fer (Eiffel Tower)

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

The Eiffel Tower is one of the top destinations on Planet Earth. It turns out to be a pretty cool feat of engineering as well. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jacques Clark and there's Charles Brion and there's Jerry Roland out there and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right, the Eiffel Tower edition

at long last. Yeah, 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 glow noodles and dumb chochki's 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. 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 crazy. Oh wow. Yeah. Oh yeah, I've never been higher than that, but I've had fear of heights ever since then. Well, I think these days was your dad like, be a man. No, no, he was never like that. No, he just quietly judged me. Exactly. The first two floors I think are the only ones you can still walk up by staircase, but previously you could walk all the way to the tippy top.

In fact, you had to. 1710 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 to make it all the way up. Climbing stairs for an hour? No, I would lose my mind because I'd be up so high. I would just start crying. Yeah. 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, it would have been a lot for sure. And apparently during, 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 upon the Eiffel Tower, the first thing you're going to walk upon is what's known as the Esplanada, which is 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 15,000 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 have to be a real jerk, you know, like Costanza level jerk to go to the Eiffel Tower and not look up. But 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 in a single joint 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 post 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 that it was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever. But until I started researching it, I had no idea exactly what that meant. But it is a masterpiece of engineering, for sure. Yeah. And it's a lovely scene aside from all the trappings of tourism. There's a lot of green space around it. There are other monuments that'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 one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world. So it's like, you know, you can't go stand on 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 it. 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 Yumi and my brother and sister-in-law and niece who went and visited and didn't pay to go up. Most

recently, we just walked around it and kept walking. I've never been up. Oh, you haven't? You just walked out. I've been in that thing like 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 filmed it for you. You don't have to do anything. You don't 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 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 a third level. The third level is like almost 900 feet in the air. Yeah. It's about 300 meters. It's a little less than 300 meters that third platform. And at each of these platforms, there's stuff to do. It's not just like a steel platform that you step onto 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. 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 glow 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. 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 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 so good. It is pricey. Your seven course dinner tasting menu is going to run you about 275 bucks each. Bucks are euros. Dollars, buckaroos. Okay. Okay. And that's without,

it's 230 euros, I think. And that's without wine or anything like, I think it's without wine. Yeah, it definitely is without wine. It's anything about 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 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 you, yeah, you can just take an elevator straight to the Jules Verne restaurant. I'm sad because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too scared to go up. Yeah. I think you can go to another great restaurant and just pretend you're 300 feet off

the ground. Yeah. 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'd never been up there, is Gustav Eiffel built himself an apartment up top. Yeah. And this thing has not really been touched since then. I mean, 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, 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 to 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 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 Gustav Eiffel and then the leaders of Paris and France came along and said,

let's build this 300 meter 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 that to that point had been reserved only for the very wealthy, which again, I just keep seeing it referred to as a democratizing structure. All right, so let's talk about the man himself, right? Yeah, Gustav Eiffel, who is widely credited as the guy who created this structure, but it was definitely a collaboration. And I don't, 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. I'm a head cheese. So he was, I can never get over that word. That's terrible. He was born in 1832 and was an engineer by trade, went to engineering school at Caltech. No, I thought you were going to do that. Oh, you want me to say it? Okay, he went to the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. 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 it 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 this thing could have been all steel. Steel was around. Could he steal? But for something this big, he was like iron is what it has to be built out of. That's what he was like. That was his trade. He knew iron and had he moved into steel,

he would have been out of his depth. This was not a project where one should be out of their depth. But then also steel would have been prohibitively expensive. It was still a pretty new technology. So I saw that was another reason he didn't use steel. So it was iron and it's a specific kind of iron. It's puddled raw iron to where during the smelting process you actually swirl it, which keeps the impurities from crystallizing into the structure of the iron. So it's actual raw iron. That's what the Eiffel Tower is made out of. But if you put those two things together, that he's an engineer, not an artist, and his expertise is in iron, all of it kind of culminates into the Eiffel Tower. It makes total sense what you're looking at. 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 latticework of the Great Statue of Liberty and he also financed the Eiffel Tower largely. The Paris in France said, hey, let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair coming up in 1899 and we want a big, big tower. 89, 89. What did I say?

99. Yeah, 1889. And he got 1.5 million francs from the state as seed money, but it was going to cost about 6.5 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. He started in LLC, issued two kinds of shares and raised the other 5 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 this 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 business man that he managed to get all the proceeds from admission and concessions and all that stuff for 20 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 or swindle anybody. It was just a really good deal that he made for himself, but it required a lot of vision too. He put his own Tuggeson 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. 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 municipal pride in that project, especially with the proponents of the project. And 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 Eiffel 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 Jules Bourdais. And he wanted to make his 300 meter tower out of stone, which was total insanity. Would have killed everybody. It 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 Eiffel's iron and Bourdais stone in this kind of transition between modern and traditional and modern in the form of Eiffel's tower one out. That's right. I think we should take a break and talk about what happened there and delete up to 1889 right after this. Or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app

Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't

look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, Eiffel did not build it himself. He did not. He did not. It was designed by other people too. The initial design was by Emile Neugierre and Maurice Cochlin. And 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 Steven Savestri. I was going to say earlier you don't need me at all, but yeah, you do. Savestri? Sure. That inspires a lot of confidence. And he made it really frilly, 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 really amazing. And the fact that each group or each person or everyone involved, they all worked for Eiffel. The first two were his chief engineers. And we're just going to call him Sylvester was his chief architect, I believe. And then along with Eiffel himself, all of them kind of adding to and subtracting and like, I don't like that or I do like this. It came to fruition. And Eiffel purchased the designs from his employees so that he personally owned 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 the only thing I could find was from like seven years ago in 2013, the Eiffel brand at that time was worth like $430 billion euros. 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 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 rake 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 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's fairs. It's very rare for any structures to remain for very long, more than a couple of decades after a world's fair, because 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. 25 years later, it looks really kind of silly. Right. Well, the Sun Sphere is still around weirdly. Is it? Yes, as far as I know. When in Knoxville? 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 like countless money to preserve and keep from crumbling. Yeah. They just tore

them down after 20 years. There's one called the Gallery Day Machine. And some critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece of ironwork and modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself. They tore it down in 1910. Wow. 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 Gustave Eiffel never intended for his tower to be taken down. It was built to last. He built that 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. Yeah. Renault Tough. The Le Carr 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 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 it showing tunnels or was it just... I think it must have been bridges or something because I think we talked about the Brooklyn Bridge being built like this. Yeah. May have been it. Or maybe it was the New York Aqueducts. I don't know. But basically, they had to do sort of the same thing as they had to go under sea level. So they had to work in these compressed air chambers, 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. Sure. They did this in, you know, the 1880s and only lost one worker. Part of that was because Gustav Eiffel himself was well known for basically being an additional foreman on the job site. He was not one of these guys who went and smoked cigars and just hung out all day at the country club with his buddies. Like, he was hands-on on his most important projects. And the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects. So because of this dedication to safety and this level of oversight from the guy himself, that just one person, like the person didn't even have to die. They're like, no one will believe it if nobody died. So they pushed one guy off the top. Hey, Pierre, what's that over there? I know. Well,

you've been down and been down and pick it up for me. Poor Pierre. 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 off using a method of riveting. Bolts pretty good, rivets better. Way better. I mean, these rivets are the reason why I say like he did not mean for this thing to be taken apart in 20 years. So what they did was they used heated rivets. And 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 onsite. Like they had blacksmiths hammering this thing onsite, 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 cinches 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 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 the seal, I guess, then the seal was so tight because it

cooled and cinched them 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 job site. But they were created in the 1880s 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 into that level of precision. 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 and the tower itself supported itself from that point forward as they moved up. Right. And this is just so scary to me. But as they worked further and further up, they got steam cranes that they attached 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. Take a ride, Josh. This is the 1880s and you're in a steam crane attached to the Eiffel Tower that you're building hundreds of meters up. I can barely even say these words. You would have been the second guy that died

because your knees gave out. Exactly. I just, I can't even deal right now. So 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 1700 and 10 steps to the top. Like you mentioned earlier, it 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. That's right. So one of the things about the Eiffel Tower that I didn't know about was that there was a tremendous amount of protest when it was announced,

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 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. It's going to look like an industrial iron smokestack. And we don't want this to mar the beautiful landscape of Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And I mean, it was a substantial public outcry and like kind of a campaign against the Eiffel Tower that Eiffel and the Parisian exposition planners had to deal with.

But I guess ultimately the artists where 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 Eiffel. They said that they had 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 Guy de Messapante song? Rick Ant? No, he was one who never did. De Maupassant, he was a 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 where he didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower.

Yeah. So he wrote, and this became one of the sort of the most famous put down of 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 Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney. PS, I farted in its general direction. Nice. I didn't see that coming. And he was, you might not recognize his name, but I'll bet you'd recognize his pen name, Jackie Collins. Oh, interesting. That's because I made it up. So Eiffel 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 puttle iron. He was not. He said, and Elsa's sort of paraphrase here, he said, for my part, I believe that the tower will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature of the monument's four 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 a 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 as 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 it had it broken down by like loads and stresses and geometry and all that. But on 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 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 use 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 too. 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 when Eiffel 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 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, it's still standing today and wasn't torn down 20 years later, right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Eiffel built this thing to last, like we said. And during that 20-year period, as he was breaking in money from glow noodle sales, he decides 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 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 war's approaching, which they obviously didn't know that at the time. But they were sending messages overseas to London and thousands of kilometers away. And they said in 1910, all right, this is actually pretty valuable to us now. 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. Yep. And that was the end of the Eiffel Tower. I'll never forget that day. That was nine years old. Yeah. Do you remember how excited Reagan

was? Like really excited. It was very strange. What do you have against the Eiffel Tower, man? 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 in the world. No, 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'll probably be here forever. Yeah. Yeah. So it survived even Adolf Hitler, the big jerky. 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 Schulitz, just never got around to it. I guess he was kind of resisting. But speaking of resisting, one of the little pieces of World War II 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 sights, he had declined the 1700 and 10 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 all that? Yeah, I heard all that. Former Auburn football coach, now Senator-elect, has said a few times now that Paris was liberated

from the communist and the socialist. It's like, no, they were Nazis. Yeah. There's one other piece of World War II trivia I had not heard about with the Eiffel Tower. There was a dogfight that went under the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, people, that's the thing that planes want to try and do now as a sort of a dare slash stunt. You should not do that. No, no, no. 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 a German fighter ace and you've got an American P-51 Mustang on your tail, you're going to take some risks. Apparently, 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. I mean, they had a dogfight under the Eiffel Tower. That's astounding. Because this thing is made of iron, there's one big, big key to keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. It is strong. Iron is very strong. It's also malleable. 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've removed,

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 Zero Irony, I think, said it is often depicted as Simply Red. I didn't pick up on that. I think Ed probably doesn't even know that's a band. I think it's taster 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 Red. 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. 20,000 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 20,000 lights, so I'm going to go with that. All right, I'll go with that one, too. Stupid five billion light jobmates. That's a big disparity. But it's all lit up. They have the lights, and then they also have these projectors projecting light. Five billion projectors. 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 $1.1 million a year, which is not too bad. I guess it's more in line for 20,000 lights. I was like, that's pretty low for five billion lights. It's like Al Gore's electric bill. Wow. Hey, I try to take shots at both sides, right? There you go, man. Yeah, for sure. You're 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 the whole job is done. I think it's like 60 tons of new paint, right? Yes, that is so much paint. It's crazy. But the last time we were there, like three, two, three years ago, I remember being shocked that it was brown. I'd totally forgotten it. And anytime you see it, it's shadowed enough that

it looks black or maybe like a dark gray or something. It does not look like it does in person in pictures, right? But 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 paint it in the same color, but yeah, a graded shade to where the stuff at the top is the lightest shade and then toward the bottom it's the darkest shade so that the whole thing has a uniform color to it. Emily and I always have a running joke from that we got from Saturday Night Live. There was one sketch where one girl looked at the other and said, that is one severe ombre. So we say that now whenever we see a lady with an ombre hairstyle.

Man, when's the last time you saw somebody with an ombre? I don't know. Is that not a thing anymore? I don't see people. I don't think so. I don't see, I haven't seen people either. I guess I'm just assuming it died out because nobody's going to the hairdresser anymore. We should maybe do a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably a show into 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 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 had not heard that. That's a great fact, man. Yeah, and apparently a lot of the machinery is some of the original stuff from 1899 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 build one of the elevators. Oh, wow. Legendary company. 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 great their elevator was, Otis sent some representatives up to switch out 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. Holy cow. And they all crossed their fingers behind their backs. Yeah, exactly. But if you look at some of the original drawings, they were like sit down elevators with like pews basically, like you find in a church, like 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 costs 1.5 million to build. In 1889 dollars, I saw that elsewhere too. That sounds like confusion to me because they gave them 1.5 million francs and it really costs 6.5. I don't trust anything on this list now. Okay. 5 billion lights. Is that on the list that I sent you? Yeah. That was from Live

Science, not Business Insider. Well, the same exact list was on Business Insider? Yeah. That's what we should call them. So, yeah, Live Science is usually pretty, I'm guessing Business Insider copy pasted from Live Science. Live Science is usually pretty accurate. That's why I fell for the 5 billion. I was like, why would I fall for that from Business Insider? Now I understand. I fell for it from Live Science. 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, it definitely is 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 wish everybody happy New Year's now or after Listener Mail? No, let's do it now. You know? Okay. 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. 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 2020. Absolutely. We appreciate you guys. So, thank you. Okay. Well, since I said thank you to all of you listening out there and podcasting, that means it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Pet Turkey.

This is from Steph. Steph T. 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 looked 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 he wouldn't hop into the can and take me with him. He was a jerk. 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. She says, don't judge me. We would never judge you for that. That's amazing. There are also wild turkeys in the area and often had to stop the car to let them cross the road. I'd 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 from... Who's that lady coming again? She's in the gobble. Oh, I love it. That's from Steph T. Thanks, Steph T. Is it really Steph T? Well, I mean, S-T-E-F, hard stop, letter T. Right, but there was a joke I made in the turkey episode where somebody was named Tom T. It was Tom Turkey. Oh, really? So maybe this is Steph Turkey. She said she gobbles. Oh goodness. 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 to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. And again, happy new year, everybody. Happy new year. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different

hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.