What is the tower made from?
It is widely believed that the Eiffel Tower is made of steel, but this is incorrect. The Eiffel Tower is built of pure iron. Steel has existed for thousands of years, but methods for producing it in large quantities didn’t exist until the middle nineteenth century—only a few decades before the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Gustave Eiffel was an expert in the engineering use of structural iron and knew exactly what it could and could not do, whereas steel was still a bit newfangled for structural use. For a project as important and prestigious as the Eiffel Tower, he decided to take no chances, and so he built it of puddled iron, a type of traditional wrought iron, prepared in a special way in a special furnace, so that the iron is made very pure and strong. You can learn more about how puddled iron is made from this Wikipedia article. Puddled iron was common in Eiffel’s day, but it has been replaced by steel in modern times. The proof that Eiffel knew what he was doing is that the to
