December 31, 2020 • 48 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jacques Clark,
and there's Charles Brand and there's Jerry Roland out there,
and this is stuff you should know. That's right, The
(00:25):
Eiffel Tower Edition at Long Last. Yeah, you've been there, right, Yes,
I love the Eiffel Tower. 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 chot keys and stuff
like that. But block all that out in the Eiffel
(00:46):
Tower is an amazing, amazing thing to behold. It is amazing. Um,
it's also chuck. I don't know if you notice or not,
but it is where I developed my fear of heights. Really,
it happened on the Eiffel Tower. I was never, for ever, ever,
for a moment in my life afraid of heights until
I went up the Eiffel Tower. And it took me
(01:06):
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 seventeen. I was with
my dad and sister and you didn't take the elevator. No,
(01:27):
we walked up the first floor and we got to
the top and I looked down and it was just
like lights out that just from the first floor. You were, yeah,
oh yeah, I've never been higher than that, but I've
I've had a fear of heights ever since then. Well,
I think these days. Uh was your dad like man, No, No,
(01:47):
he was never like just kidding um now he just
quietly judged me exactly. The first two floors, I think
of the only ones you can still walk up, um
by staircase. But uh, previously you could. You could walk
all the way to the tippy top. In fact, you
said ten steps. Yeah. The first couple of weeks the
(02:08):
Eiffel Tower was open. If you wanted to go to
the top, you had to walk up, and that took
an hour for people to 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. Um And
(02:31):
apparently during well we'll talk about that later. There's a
little teaser for you. 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 gonna walk upon is
what's known as the Esplanada, which is that that whole
big ground level part of the Eiffel Tower with those
four massive, massive iron pillars at cardinal, north, southeast, and west. Yes,
(02:58):
it's pretty hard to miss, and they cover something like
four acres of footprint between them. I think they're like
fifteen thousand square feet or something like that. More than that. Um,
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. Up you
(03:20):
you have to be a real jerk, you know, like
Castanza level jerk to go to the Eiffel Tower and
not look up. But um, you would, you would see
that each of these four pillars go up, up, up,
and they come together, um a little further up, a
little above the second platform, and um they go all
the way up in a single joint tower from that
moment on. And it's really kind of neat if you
(03:42):
stop and think about what you're looking at, these four
for um posts kind of starting separately and then coming
together to form this this tower. Um. But it's also
just a marvel of engineering. Like I had always heard
that was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever. But and
so I researching, and I had no idea exactly with
that man, But it is an masterpiece of engineering for sure. Yeah.
(04:07):
And it's a you know, it's a lovely scene aside
from all the trappings of tourism. Uh. There's a lot
of green space around it, there are other monuments, it's
right there by the river. Uh. It's 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, Um, you
(04:28):
really get a different sort of experience. But it is
what it is. It's a 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. UM, so don't expect to just sort of
keep that in the back of your head. Sure, I
(04:49):
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 three million people have been there. But
that's just counting the paying customers. That's not including the
cheap skates like me and you, Me and my brother
and sister in law and niece who went and visited
(05:09):
and didn't pay to go up. Most recently, we just
walked around and kept walking. I've never been up. Oh
you haven't you just 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 onto YouTube
and people have filmed it before. You don't have to
don't have to do anything. You don't have to leave
(05:30):
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 basis
of the whole thing, like, you definitely get a feel
for it. And yeah, if you're afraid of heights, it's
all you need to do. Um. So, talking about this thing,
(05:51):
there's 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 and third levels like almost nine
feet in the air. It's about three a little less
than three ds that that third platform. And at each
of these platforms there's like stuff to do. It's not
(06:11):
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. Um. There's like a champagne bar. Um.
It's there's just a lot of really neat, little interesting
details that make the Eiffel Tower the Eiffel Tower. But
(06:31):
even more than that, even more than just this the
you know, the glow noodles that you can only get
there at the Eiffel Tower. Um, 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 um,
some of the things that have happened, Like it's it's
an iconic structure, and when that many people flock to
(06:54):
it every year for more than a century, Um, it's
going to have like a pretty rich history to you. Yeah,
I mean, um, you talked about the restaurants. If you
want to eat at the nicest restaurant, it'll be the
Jewels Urn And I was just kind of curious about
their menu. It looks very good. But it looks so good,
it is pricey. It is your your seven course dinner
(07:16):
tasting menu is gonna run you about two seventy five
bucks each euros dollars buck a Roogs. Uh. And that's
without its two thirty euros I think. And that's without
wine or anything like. I think it's without wine. It
didn't say anything about with a pairing, but um, it
only goes up from there. So I imagine it's quite
(07:36):
a dining experience. Maybe one day I'll save about 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 Jewels Burn restaurant. I'm sad
because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too
scared to go up. Yeah. OK, care she can go
(07:58):
to another great restaurant and just pretend you're 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 uh, and this is
something that I didn't know because I've never been up
there is uh, Gustav Eiffel built himself an apartment up top.
(08:18):
And this thing has not really been touched since then.
I mean they've they've kept it in order, but um,
I think ed said they had recreated it. But apparently
that's the real thing that has just sort of left untouched. Um.
It's got a living room with a table, couch, a piano,
grand piano, a few desks, kitchen, bathroom. There is no
bedroom and by all accounts he probably did not sleep there.
(08:41):
But back in the day in Paris, it became quite
the talk of the town and just made um rich.
Parisians just seethed 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
(09:03):
I keep running up against during research of the Eiffel
Towers 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 and so I mean that's
(09:24):
just the way it was until Gustave Eiffel and then
the the leaders of Paris and France came along as
it was to build this three tower um 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 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
(09:45):
again I just keep seeing it referred to as a
democratizing structure. All right, So let's talk about the man himself, right, Yeah,
Gustave eiffel Um, who is widely credit is the guy
who created this 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
(10:08):
on the whole thing. But he didn't create this whole
thing by himself. I think you mean the head brisk
I met head cheese cross, so he was. I can
never get over that word. Um, it's terrible. He was
born in eighteen thirty two and was an engineer by trade.
I went to engineering school at uh cal Tech. Now
(10:30):
I thought you were going to do that. You want
me to say it? Okay? He went to the Cole
Central des Arts manufacturers. That's right, and uh he was
well regarded as an engineer all over France and Europe.
Um had a consultancy firm, had his own workshop, had
his own construction company. And it should be noted that
(10:50):
he was an engineer first and foremost. He was not
an architect. He was obsessed with function um and mechanics
and strength of any structure he built, because he built
things like railroad bridges, where he really needed it to
be strong and maybe pretty. Second, um, he did like
things to look nice. It's not like that's all he
(11:10):
cared about. But he was very big into structure and
form and function. Uh. And was also a big believer
in iron as opposed to steal, which you know, this
one could have been all steel. So it was around
could he steal? But for something this big, he was like,
iron is what it has to be built out of. Well,
that's what he was like, you know, that was his trade,
(11:32):
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,
and it's a specific kind of iron, it's um puddled
(11:53):
raw iron to where during the the the smelting process
you actually swirl it would 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 his his
(12:13):
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. Um. 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
(12:36):
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 the Great
Statue of Liberty. Uh. And he also financed the Eiffel
Tower largely um. The Paris and France said hey, let's
let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair
(12:58):
coming up in eighteen nineteen nine and we want a big,
big tower. What did I say, eighty nine? And he Uh,
he got one point five million francs from the state
is seed money, but it was gonna cost about six
point five million. And this became one of the first
sort of Uh, what we look at now is how
(13:20):
you finance projects like this one of the first ones
to do it like this public private partnership. Well, yeah,
I mean he went out in and issued shares. Uh,
he started an LLC, issued two kinds of shares and
raised the other five million francs to build this thing,
and as a result had twenty years um to recoup
(13:43):
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
(14:04):
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. Um,
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 to like he you know,
(14:25):
he put his own his own took us in his
own reputation on the line. Um 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 kept.
I don't really know, because his shareholders made a lot
of money to like you, 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
(14:45):
I think there was a lot of a certain amount
of like um municipal pride in in that project, especially
with the proponents of the project UM and the whole
the whole design contest to to create an iconic structure
for the ten eighty nine World Fair in Paris. Um.
Apparently it was at first kind of vague, and I
even saw that it was um Uh. It was Eiffel
(15:08):
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. Um. The other
big competitor was a guy named um Jules Bourdet, and
he wanted to make his three D tower out of stone,
(15:29):
which was total insanity. Would have killed everybody it would
have It would have crumbled immediately. I don't know if
they ever would have even been able to successfully finish it.
Apparently the there there's a big push and pull intention
between Eiffel's iron and boot Boord Bourdet's stone in this side,
(15:50):
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, okay and talk
about what happened there in the lead up to nine
right after this. All right, so you mentioned that it
(16:38):
was a collaboration, uh, and not just in the building
of it obviously, which I think range from a hundred
and fifty to three hundred people at any given time,
right little know, In fact, Eiffel did not build it himself,
saying he did not, Uh, it was designed by other
people to The initial design was by Emil Boy new
(17:00):
Gear and Maurice Coclean. 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. Um.
It wasn't that great. It was four iron pillars that
met near the top like we're sort of familiar worth
and it was connected by grids, but it wasn't that hot.
(17:21):
They went back to the drawing board, sent it to
an architect named Stephen uh Sevestre. You, I was gonna
say earlier, you don't need me at all, but yeah
you do, Salvesta. Sure is that how you say it? Sure?
All right? That inspires a lot of confidence. Um. And
he made it really freely, added a lot of Victorian flourishes.
(17:47):
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, um, sort of a magical
little compromise on the final design. Yeah. It was, like
I said, a real collaboration. Um. And what came out
of that collaboration was just something something really amazing. UM.
(18:08):
And the fact that each each group or each person
or you know, each everyone involved, they all worked for Eiffel. Um.
The first two were his chief chief engineers, and uh,
where is 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
(18:30):
to fruition. UM, and he Eiffel purchased the designs from
his employees, so that he personally owned the design outright,
which allowed him to go, um, raise money himself and
uh take in all of the the admission and concession
fees that he was going to break in over the
next twenty years too. Yeah, man, I wonder, I don't know.
(18:54):
I looked up the brand worth and and the only
thing I could find was from like seven years ago.
In the Eiffel brand at that time was worth like
four hundred and thirty 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,
(19:15):
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 he was able to break that in for
just the first twenty years. And the reason why twenty
years is such a significant number, Chuck, I did not
know this, but the original part of that design competition
(19:36):
was that this this structure, the winning structure, was going
to only stand for twenty years and then it would
be disassembled to make way for something new, and that
was really in the tradition of World's fairs. Um, 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 just they're meant to be temporary. They're to
(20:00):
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
um built in their place. So the Eiffel Tower was
going to just live for twenty 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
(20:23):
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, um, And they
probably just don't want that reminder of you know, the
Knoxville World's Fair right years later. It looks really kind
of silly, right, Well, the Sun's Fear is still around, weird,
(20:44):
is it? Yes, as far as I know, Yeah, yeah,
it was Knoxville with the sun's fear. 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 Paras exposition in eighty nine, Um, these are
like major, huge buildings that today we would spend untold
(21:06):
number count like countless money to to preserve and keep
from crumbling. Um, they just torn down twenty years. There's
one called the Gallery Day Machine UM, and it some
critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece
of um iron work and modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself.
(21:28):
They tore it down into Yeah, so that's just kind
of how it was with the World Fare, 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 Um Gustav Eiffel
never intended for his tower to be taken down. He
built that thing Ford tough man. If you want to
(21:53):
make a French person's head spend, tell him that the
Eiffel Tower is built forward tough Oh my go I
was trying to think of a French car. Uh, what's
the one? Yeah, n all tough the tough. So they
start construction in January seven. Um. Obviously that's a pretty
(22:13):
tight timetable to pull something like this off before the
World's Fair, and it came down to the wire. But uh,
they started um building the tower itself in July seven.
They were building you know, that might not um make sense,
but they were doing those foundations. It took a long
time just to get the foundation work done. And he
(22:34):
had a manufacturing um 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 uh you know, land base in which to drill down.
(22:59):
And they ended up. Uh did we do a show
on tunnels or was it just 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
(23:21):
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 twenty one twenty
six months today would be impressive. So they did this
in you know, the eighteen eighties and only lost one worker.
(23:45):
Part of that was because Gustave Eifel himself, um, was
well known for basically being an additional foreman on the
job side. 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
hand is on on his his most important projects, and um,
the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects.
(24:07):
So because of this dedication to safety and this level
of oversight from the guy himself, uh that 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 they pushed one guy off the top. A Pierre,
what's that over there? I know, Well, you've been down
been down and pick it up for me. So the
(24:31):
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 uh, he was able to pull it off using
uh method of riveting, um bolts, pretty good rivets better,
(24:54):
way better. I mean, this is the These rivets are
the reason why I say, like, he did not mean
for this thing to be take in Ampart 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.
(25:15):
And this is on site, Like they 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 the 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.
(25:37):
Two thirds of the rib these ribbits were actually installed
on site 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 that this this seal like so was I guess
then the seal was was so tight because it cool
(26:00):
old and since some tighter together and then the actual
um 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 eighteen eighties
within a tenth of a millimeter precise. And if they
(26:22):
weren't a tenth of a millimeter precise, Uh, they were
sent back to the factory to be um 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, and that they you know,
(26:43):
you obviously you're building this thing from the ground up.
And they used 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 um, this is just so scary to me.
(27:05):
But the the as they worked further and further up,
they got steam cranes that they attached to what would
um eventually be the rails used by the lifts, the
very specific elevators of the U Eiffel Tower. And uh,
these steam cranes just climbed up and up and up.
It just worked their way up the tower. And just again,
(27:27):
this is eighteen eight the eighteen eighties, 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. Yeah,
because your knees gave out, exactly. I just I can't
even deal right now. So they they eventually finish. Um,
(27:51):
as the World's Fair approaches. Um, 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
(28:12):
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, UM. One
of the things about the Eiffel Tower, uh, that I
didn't know about, was that there was a tremendous amount
of protest when it was announced, when when the design
(28:33):
was unveiled or the plans for it were unveiled, um,
mostly by the French artistic community. There was a famous
petition again which I didn't know about, UM, called the
the the Petition of the three hundred, three hundred artists,
three hundred architects, UM, three hundred musicians. Basically anybody who
is anyone in the Parisian art and cultural scene at
(28:56):
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 smoke stack. And and we
don't want this to to mar the beautiful landscape of
Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And um,
I mean that was it was a substantial public outcry
and like kind of a campaign against the Eiffel Tower
(29:20):
that Eiffel and the Parisian Exposition um planners had to
deal with. But they, I guess ultimately the artists were there.
Their protests fell on deaf ears because the tower was made.
But one of the great things about it was Uh.
In the years after, some of those petition signers came
(29:41):
out and publicly apologized to Eiffel. They said that they
had they'd gotten it wrong, that 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 Rick can't No, he was one who ever
did uh de mapossan he uh. He was a very
(30:03):
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 this became one of the sort sort of
the most famous, uh, put down or the Eiffel Tower.
(30:23):
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 fart in its general direction. Nice, I didn't see
(30:45):
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 just know that 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 um,
(31:06):
he wasn't made of puddle eye. He was not, uh,
he said, uh announced just sort of paraphrase here. Um
he said. For my part, I believe that the tower
will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature
of the monuments 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
(31:27):
eyes of the observer, the boldness of the design as
a whole. 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
(31:49):
it with your little sculpture brain and try and look
at it as as that kind of art. Like you
got to rethink what art and architecture are. And I
think he's told right. I mean, it's 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 uh
(32:10):
they were wrong. Yeah, it's I saw a UM, I
guess an 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 um it was showing a graph of how
wind pressure increases with height, right, And when they traced
(32:35):
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 to have
(32:58):
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 and science and engineering um in in iron form.
I had no idea about that until I started researching this,
and it just made me appreciate this so much more. Um.
(33:21):
And it's also really really strong too, Like the thing
can hold four and a half times Uh, it's its
own weight. It's like it's never going to fall down.
And a lot of people were worried about that when
when Iffel was building it, and he publicly said, I
take personal responsibility if this thing ever collapses. Uh, he
just knew it wasn't going to because that's how precise
(33:41):
he was, and that's how smart he was with his
calculations and the people he was working with. Two. But
but it's it's just it's a it's masterful. It is
it's 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 stand today and wasn't torn down twenty years later
(34:02):
right after this. Alright, so Eiffel built this thing to last,
(34:39):
like we said, and uh, during that twenty year period,
as he was breaking in money from glow noodle sales,
he uh he decided to start trying to make it useful,
uh 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 in resistance experiments and those
(35:02):
were fine, those were all well and good, but it
was uh, it was radio that really is what saved
it when in 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,
(35:23):
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 kilometers away, and they said in nineteen ten, all right,
this is actually pretty valuable to us now the military
is involved, it's playing roles in our wars, so you
(35:47):
can keep it up for seventy more years. And they
then tore it down in Yeah, and that was the
end of the Eiffel Towel. Never forget that day. That was. Yeah.
Do you remember how excited Reagan was, like you have
against the Eiffel Tower man and Jimmy Carter descried quietly.
It was very sad. Yeah, I thought that was the
(36:08):
right reaction to that, you know, but that's the big split.
You know, there's two kinds of people in the world. Now.
They gave him seventy more years, and obviously in I
didn't even look it up, but I assume that's when
they said, and 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 um Paris for years, as the
(36:32):
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, a general Dietrich von
Scholitz just never got around to it. I guess he
was kind of resisting. But one of the speaking of resisting,
one of the um little pieces of World War two
(36:55):
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 sev 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
(37:18):
elect Tommy Tubberville. Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard
all that. Former Auburn football coach now Senator elect uh
said has said a few times now that Paris was
liberated from the Communist and the Socialist Like, no, they
were Nazis. Yeah, there's one other piece of World War
two trivia I had not heard about, what the Eiffel Tower.
(37:39):
There was a dog fight that went under under the
Eiffel Tower. 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,
you really you just really 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 plan period.
(38:01):
If you're if you're a German. Uh, if you're a
German fighter ace and you've got an American P fifty
one Mustang on your tail, you're gonna take some risks. Apparently,
the the dirty Nazi flying ace, I thought he was
gonna shake him by going under the Eiffel Tower, and
that P fifty one Mustang pilot went right after him
(38:21):
and shot him down over Paris. Amazing, and't it? I
mean that they had a dog fight under under the
Eiffel Tower. That's astounding. Uh. Because this thing is made
of iron, there's a very one, big, big key to
keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. Um. It
is strong, iron is very strong. It's also malleable. Um.
(38:44):
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 gotta have a really good paint job on there.
And I think it's been painted eighteen times times over
the years, and they're on a seven year cycle now,
which they started in eighteen nine nine. UM, And it
(39:07):
takes about eighteen months to remove what paint they remove.
And it's been various colors over the years. Um, 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.
I didn't pick up on that. I think it probably
(39:28):
doesn't even know that's a band. I think it's tastes
are a little harder than that, right, I don't know.
I think he's got a bunch of varied tastes. Like
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. Uh. And like
I said, now they call it since nineteen sixty eight
Eiffel Tower brown. But it's lit up at night. It's
(39:49):
marvelous to behold. Um, twenty thousand lightbulbs on this thing. No, No, no,
five billion light bulbs. I don't think that's right, dude.
I looked everywhere the only place I can find that
was in Business Insider. I've seen it a bunch of places,
but I guess it it got Yeah, I could see that. Man,
you're probably right. I mean on the Eiffel Tower website
(40:11):
it's just twenty lights. So I'm gonna go with that,
all right, I'll go with that one too, stupid five
that's a big disparity. But it's all lit up, like
they have the lights, and then they also have these
projectors projecting light and um, five billion projectors. It's brilliant
to look at at night, and uh, I suggest you
(40:31):
go at night. It's it's great during the day of
course as well, but at night is when it's really
really special. Right. Um. I've looked up their electric bill
and it's apparently about one point one million dollars a year,
which is too bad. I guess it's more in line
for twenty thousand lights. I was like, that's pretty low
for five billion lights. It's like al Gore's electric bill. Wow. Hey,
(40:57):
I try to take shots at both sides, right you can, man, Yeah,
for sure, you're a centrist. So, um, that repainting stuff
it takes eighteen months, did you say that? And they
take fifteen tons of the old paint off every time
when it's a when the whole job is done, I
think it's like sixty tons of new paint. Right, Yes,
(41:17):
that is so much pain, it's crazy. But um, the
last time we were there, like three to three years ago, Um,
I remember being shocked that it was brown. I had
totally forgotten it. And anytime you see it, it's 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 and pictures. Right, But they apparently there's
(41:40):
an optical illusion where the higher up in the sky
the Eiffel Tower is um, that part seems darker than
the stuff closer to the ground. So they actually do
kind of an ombre thing where they painted in this
the same color, but yeah, grated shade to where the
stuff at the top is the lightest shade and then
(42:01):
towards 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 to the other and said, that is one severe ambre.
So we say that now whenever we see you a
lady with an ombre hairstyle, Man, when's the last time
(42:24):
you saw somebody with an ombre? I don't know. Is
that not a thing anymore? I don't I don't see people,
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. Uh. We should maybe do
a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably
a show into itself, but um, I guess the easiest
way to say it is that these are not like
(42:47):
any elevators in the world, obviously because they go up
on a on a slope and then straightened out. So
they're built, obviously, um, 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 has greased
every day with beef fat no from the Jewels Verne restaurant. No,
(43:13):
I had not heard that. That's a great fact, man. Yeah,
And apparently a lot of the machinery is um 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 build one
(43:33):
of the elevators. Yeah. I think they actually build three
of the ones that are there now. But this is
for the ex exposition and to show off, to show
how 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
(43:55):
aloft changed out to rope. They cut it with hatchets
to show off how the emergency brake system worked. Yeah,
holy cal Yeah, and they all cross their fingers behind
their backs. Yeah, exactly exactly. But if you look at
some of the original um, the original drawings, they were
like sit down elevators with like pews basically like you
(44:17):
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 costs one point five million to build and in
in dollars. I saw that elsewhere too. M hmm. That
(44:38):
sounds like confusion to me, because they gave them one
point five million francs and it really costs six point
five I don't trust anything on this list. Now, five
billion lines? Is that on the list that I sent you?
That was from Live Science, not Business Insiders? Well, the
same exact list was on Business and Business Insider. Yeah,
that's what we should call them. So somebody science is
(45:01):
usually pretty Uh I'm guessing Business Insider copy pasted from
Live Science. Live Science 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 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, definitely,
It's worth worth traveling to Paris to see and then
(45:24):
just turn around and leave. Uh 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 we say it every
year that without you guys, we wouldn't even have jobs.
(45:45):
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 measures through because
you guys have helped us through. Appreciate you, guys, So
thank you. Okay, Well, since I said thank you to
(46:08):
all of you listening out there in podcast land, that
means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this
pet Turkey. This 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 look
like your yard ornaments. Um. I can attest to their superhering,
(46:32):
as the tom could hear a bag of feed being
open 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 duscile, uh docile. My special need son was just
(46:54):
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. They're
also wild turkeys in the area and often had to
stop the car to let them cross the road. I
(47:15):
love to stick my head out of the window and
gobble at them because they would always raise their heads
and gobble back. And here's a lady coming again into
the gobble. I love it. That's from Steph T. Thanks
Steph T. Is it really Steph T? Well? I mean
ste F hard Stuff letter T Right, But there was
(47:35):
a joke I made in the Tricky episode where like
somebody was named Tom T like it was Tom Turkey.
So maybe this is she said she gobbles. Maybe. Well,
if you're a Turkey and you want to get in
touch with this about her Turkey episode or for whatever reason,
you can send us an email. The Stuff podcast at
iHeart radio dot com and again, Happy do Year, everybody.
(47:59):
Have you know you here? Stuff You Should Know is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M hm
hm
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jacques Clark,
and there's Charles Brand and there's Jerry Roland out there,
and this is stuff you should know. That's right, The
(00:25):
Eiffel Tower Edition at Long Last. Yeah, you've been there, right, Yes,
I love the Eiffel Tower. 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 chot keys and stuff
like that. But block all that out in the Eiffel
(00:46):
Tower is an amazing, amazing thing to behold. It is amazing. Um,
it's also chuck. I don't know if you notice or not,
but it is where I developed my fear of heights. Really,
it happened on the Eiffel Tower. I was never, for ever, ever,
for a moment in my life afraid of heights until
I went up the Eiffel Tower. And it took me
(01:06):
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 seventeen. I was with
my dad and sister and you didn't take the elevator. No,
(01:27):
we walked up the first floor and we got to
the top and I looked down and it was just
like lights out that just from the first floor. You were, yeah,
oh yeah, I've never been higher than that, but I've
I've had a fear of heights ever since then. Well,
I think these days. Uh was your dad like man, No, No,
(01:47):
he was never like just kidding um now he just
quietly judged me exactly. The first two floors, I think
of the only ones you can still walk up, um
by staircase. But uh, previously you could. You could walk
all the way to the tippy top. In fact, you
said ten steps. Yeah. The first couple of weeks the
(02:08):
Eiffel Tower was open. If you wanted to go to
the top, you had to walk up, and that took
an hour for people to 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. Um And
(02:31):
apparently during well we'll talk about that later. There's a
little teaser for you. 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 gonna walk upon is
what's known as the Esplanada, which is that that whole
big ground level part of the Eiffel Tower with those
four massive, massive iron pillars at cardinal, north, southeast, and west. Yes,
(02:58):
it's pretty hard to miss, and they cover something like
four acres of footprint between them. I think they're like
fifteen thousand square feet or something like that. More than that. Um,
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. Up you
(03:20):
you have to be a real jerk, you know, like
Castanza level jerk to go to the Eiffel Tower and
not look up. But um, you would, you would see
that each of these four pillars go up, up, up,
and they come together, um a little further up, a
little above the second platform, and um they go all
the way up in a single joint tower from that
moment on. And it's really kind of neat if you
(03:42):
stop and think about what you're looking at, these four
for um posts kind of starting separately and then coming
together to form this this tower. Um. But it's also
just a marvel of engineering. Like I had always heard
that was like an engineering masterpiece or whatever. But and
so I researching, and I had no idea exactly with
that man, But it is an masterpiece of engineering for sure. Yeah.
(04:07):
And it's a you know, it's a lovely scene aside
from all the trappings of tourism. Uh. There's a lot
of green space around it, there are other monuments, it's
right there by the river. Uh. It's 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, Um, you
(04:28):
really get a different sort of experience. But it is
what it is. It's a 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. UM, so don't expect to just sort of
keep that in the back of your head. Sure, I
(04:49):
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 three million people have been there. But
that's just counting the paying customers. That's not including the
cheap skates like me and you, Me and my brother
and sister in law and niece who went and visited
(05:09):
and didn't pay to go up. Most recently, we just
walked around and kept walking. I've never been up. Oh
you haven't you just 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 onto YouTube
and people have filmed it before. You don't have to
don't have to do anything. You don't have to leave
(05:30):
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 basis
of the whole thing, like, you definitely get a feel
for it. And yeah, if you're afraid of heights, it's
all you need to do. Um. So, talking about this thing,
(05:51):
there's 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 and third levels like almost nine
feet in the air. It's about three a little less
than three ds that that third platform. And at each
of these platforms there's like stuff to do. It's not
(06:11):
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. Um. There's like a champagne bar. Um.
It's there's just a lot of really neat, little interesting
details that make the Eiffel Tower the Eiffel Tower. But
(06:31):
even more than that, even more than just this the
you know, the glow noodles that you can only get
there at the Eiffel Tower. Um, 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 um,
some of the things that have happened, Like it's it's
an iconic structure, and when that many people flock to
(06:54):
it every year for more than a century, Um, it's
going to have like a pretty rich history to you. Yeah,
I mean, um, you talked about the restaurants. If you
want to eat at the nicest restaurant, it'll be the
Jewels Urn And I was just kind of curious about
their menu. It looks very good. But it looks so good,
it is pricey. It is your your seven course dinner
(07:16):
tasting menu is gonna run you about two seventy five
bucks each euros dollars buck a Roogs. Uh. And that's
without its two thirty euros I think. And that's without
wine or anything like. I think it's without wine. It
didn't say anything about with a pairing, but um, it
only goes up from there. So I imagine it's quite
(07:36):
a dining experience. Maybe one day I'll save about 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 Jewels Burn restaurant. I'm sad
because I'll probably never eat there because I'll be too
scared to go up. Yeah. OK, care she can go
(07:58):
to another great restaurant and just pretend you're 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 uh, and this is
something that I didn't know because I've never been up
there is uh, Gustav Eiffel built himself an apartment up top.
(08:18):
And this thing has not really been touched since then.
I mean they've they've kept it in order, but um,
I think ed said they had recreated it. But apparently
that's the real thing that has just sort of left untouched. Um.
It's got a living room with a table, couch, a piano,
grand piano, a few desks, kitchen, bathroom. There is no
bedroom and by all accounts he probably did not sleep there.
(08:41):
But back in the day in Paris, it became quite
the talk of the town and just made um rich.
Parisians just seethed 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
(09:03):
I keep running up against during research of the Eiffel
Towers 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 and so I mean that's
(09:24):
just the way it was until Gustave Eiffel and then
the the leaders of Paris and France came along as
it was to build this three tower um 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 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
(09:45):
again I just keep seeing it referred to as a
democratizing structure. All right, So let's talk about the man himself, right, Yeah,
Gustave eiffel Um, who is widely credit is the guy
who created this 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
(10:08):
on the whole thing. But he didn't create this whole
thing by himself. I think you mean the head brisk
I met head cheese cross, so he was. I can
never get over that word. Um, it's terrible. He was
born in eighteen thirty two and was an engineer by trade.
I went to engineering school at uh cal Tech. Now
(10:30):
I thought you were going to do that. You want
me to say it? Okay? He went to the Cole
Central des Arts manufacturers. That's right, and uh he was
well regarded as an engineer all over France and Europe.
Um had a consultancy firm, had his own workshop, had
his own construction company. And it should be noted that
(10:50):
he was an engineer first and foremost. He was not
an architect. He was obsessed with function um and mechanics
and strength of any structure he built, because he built
things like railroad bridges, where he really needed it to
be strong and maybe pretty. Second, um, he did like
things to look nice. It's not like that's all he
(11:10):
cared about. But he was very big into structure and
form and function. Uh. And was also a big believer
in iron as opposed to steal, which you know, this
one could have been all steel. So it was around
could he steal? But for something this big, he was like,
iron is what it has to be built out of. Well,
that's what he was like, you know, that was his trade,
(11:32):
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,
and it's a specific kind of iron, it's um puddled
(11:53):
raw iron to where during the the the smelting process
you actually swirl it would 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 his his
(12:13):
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. Um. 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
(12:36):
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 the Great
Statue of Liberty. Uh. And he also financed the Eiffel
Tower largely um. The Paris and France said hey, let's
let's have this contest because we have a World's Fair
(12:58):
coming up in eighteen nineteen nine and we want a big,
big tower. What did I say, eighty nine? And he Uh,
he got one point five million francs from the state
is seed money, but it was gonna cost about six
point five million. And this became one of the first
sort of Uh, what we look at now is how
(13:20):
you finance projects like this one of the first ones
to do it like this public private partnership. Well, yeah,
I mean he went out in and issued shares. Uh,
he started an LLC, issued two kinds of shares and
raised the other five million francs to build this thing,
and as a result had twenty years um to recoup
(13:43):
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
(14:04):
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. Um,
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 to like he you know,
(14:25):
he put his own his own took us in his
own reputation on the line. Um 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 kept.
I don't really know, because his shareholders made a lot
of money to like you, 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
(14:45):
I think there was a lot of a certain amount
of like um municipal pride in in that project, especially
with the proponents of the project UM and the whole
the whole design contest to to create an iconic structure
for the ten eighty nine World Fair in Paris. Um.
Apparently it was at first kind of vague, and I
even saw that it was um Uh. It was Eiffel
(15:08):
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. Um. The other
big competitor was a guy named um Jules Bourdet, and
he wanted to make his three D tower out of stone,
(15:29):
which was total insanity. Would have killed everybody it would
have It would have crumbled immediately. I don't know if
they ever would have even been able to successfully finish it.
Apparently the there there's a big push and pull intention
between Eiffel's iron and boot Boord Bourdet's stone in this side,
(15:50):
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, okay and talk
about what happened there in the lead up to nine
right after this. All right, so you mentioned that it
(16:38):
was a collaboration, uh, and not just in the building
of it obviously, which I think range from a hundred
and fifty to three hundred people at any given time,
right little know, In fact, Eiffel did not build it himself,
saying he did not, Uh, it was designed by other
people to The initial design was by Emil Boy new
(17:00):
Gear and Maurice Coclean. 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. Um.
It wasn't that great. It was four iron pillars that
met near the top like we're sort of familiar worth
and it was connected by grids, but it wasn't that hot.
(17:21):
They went back to the drawing board, sent it to
an architect named Stephen uh Sevestre. You, I was gonna
say earlier, you don't need me at all, but yeah
you do, Salvesta. Sure is that how you say it? Sure?
All right? That inspires a lot of confidence. Um. And
he made it really freely, added a lot of Victorian flourishes.
(17:47):
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, um, sort of a magical
little compromise on the final design. Yeah. It was, like
I said, a real collaboration. Um. And what came out
of that collaboration was just something something really amazing. UM.
(18:08):
And the fact that each each group or each person
or you know, each everyone involved, they all worked for Eiffel. Um.
The first two were his chief chief engineers, and uh,
where is 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
(18:30):
to fruition. UM, and he Eiffel purchased the designs from
his employees, so that he personally owned the design outright,
which allowed him to go, um, raise money himself and
uh take in all of the the admission and concession
fees that he was going to break in over the
next twenty years too. Yeah, man, I wonder, I don't know.
(18:54):
I looked up the brand worth and and the only
thing I could find was from like seven years ago.
In the Eiffel brand at that time was worth like
four hundred and thirty 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,
(19:15):
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 he was able to break that in for
just the first twenty years. And the reason why twenty
years is such a significant number, Chuck, I did not
know this, but the original part of that design competition
(19:36):
was that this this structure, the winning structure, was going
to only stand for twenty years and then it would
be disassembled to make way for something new, and that
was really in the tradition of World's fairs. Um, 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 just they're meant to be temporary. They're to
(20:00):
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
um built in their place. So the Eiffel Tower was
going to just live for twenty 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
(20:23):
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, um, And they
probably just don't want that reminder of you know, the
Knoxville World's Fair right years later. It looks really kind
of silly, right, Well, the Sun's Fear is still around, weird,
(20:44):
is it? Yes, as far as I know, Yeah, yeah,
it was Knoxville with the sun's fear. 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 Paras exposition in eighty nine, Um, these are
like major, huge buildings that today we would spend untold
(21:06):
number count like countless money to to preserve and keep
from crumbling. Um, they just torn down twenty years. There's
one called the Gallery Day Machine UM, and it some
critics say that it was actually an even greater masterpiece
of um iron work and modernity than the Eiffel Tower itself.
(21:28):
They tore it down into Yeah, so that's just kind
of how it was with the World Fare, 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 Um Gustav Eiffel
never intended for his tower to be taken down. He
built that thing Ford tough man. If you want to
(21:53):
make a French person's head spend, tell him that the
Eiffel Tower is built forward tough Oh my go I
was trying to think of a French car. Uh, what's
the one? Yeah, n all tough the tough. So they
start construction in January seven. Um. Obviously that's a pretty
(22:13):
tight timetable to pull something like this off before the
World's Fair, and it came down to the wire. But uh,
they started um building the tower itself in July seven.
They were building you know, that might not um make sense,
but they were doing those foundations. It took a long
time just to get the foundation work done. And he
(22:34):
had a manufacturing um 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 uh you know, land base in which to drill down.
(22:59):
And they ended up. Uh did we do a show
on tunnels or was it just 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
(23:21):
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 twenty one twenty
six months today would be impressive. So they did this
in you know, the eighteen eighties and only lost one worker.
(23:45):
Part of that was because Gustave Eifel himself, um, was
well known for basically being an additional foreman on the
job side. 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
hand is on on his his most important projects, and um,
the Eiffel Tower was definitely one of those most important projects.
(24:07):
So because of this dedication to safety and this level
of oversight from the guy himself, uh that 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 they pushed one guy off the top. A Pierre,
what's that over there? I know, Well, you've been down
been down and pick it up for me. So the
(24:31):
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 uh, he was able to pull it off using
uh method of riveting, um bolts, pretty good rivets better,
(24:54):
way better. I mean, this is the These rivets are
the reason why I say, like, he did not mean
for this thing to be take in Ampart 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.
(25:15):
And this is on site, Like they 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 the 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.
(25:37):
Two thirds of the rib these ribbits were actually installed
on site 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 that this this seal like so was I guess
then the seal was was so tight because it cool
(26:00):
old and since some tighter together and then the actual
um 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 eighteen eighties
within a tenth of a millimeter precise. And if they
(26:22):
weren't a tenth of a millimeter precise, Uh, they were
sent back to the factory to be um 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, and that they you know,
(26:43):
you obviously you're building this thing from the ground up.
And they used 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 um, this is just so scary to me.
(27:05):
But the the as they worked further and further up,
they got steam cranes that they attached to what would
um eventually be the rails used by the lifts, the
very specific elevators of the U Eiffel Tower. And uh,
these steam cranes just climbed up and up and up.
It just worked their way up the tower. And just again,
(27:27):
this is eighteen eight the eighteen eighties, 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. Yeah,
because your knees gave out, exactly. I just I can't
even deal right now. So they they eventually finish. Um,
(27:51):
as the World's Fair approaches. Um, 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
(28:12):
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, UM. One
of the things about the Eiffel Tower, uh, that I
didn't know about, was that there was a tremendous amount
of protest when it was announced, when when the design
(28:33):
was unveiled or the plans for it were unveiled, um,
mostly by the French artistic community. There was a famous
petition again which I didn't know about, UM, called the
the the Petition of the three hundred, three hundred artists,
three hundred architects, UM, three hundred musicians. Basically anybody who
is anyone in the Parisian art and cultural scene at
(28:56):
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 smoke stack. And and we
don't want this to to mar the beautiful landscape of
Paris that has been put together over the centuries. And um,
I mean that was it was a substantial public outcry
and like kind of a campaign against the Eiffel Tower
(29:20):
that Eiffel and the Parisian Exposition um planners had to
deal with. But they, I guess ultimately the artists were there.
Their protests fell on deaf ears because the tower was made.
But one of the great things about it was Uh.
In the years after, some of those petition signers came
(29:41):
out and publicly apologized to Eiffel. They said that they
had they'd gotten it wrong, that 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 Rick can't No, he was one who ever
did uh de mapossan he uh. He was a very
(30:03):
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 this became one of the sort sort of
the most famous, uh, put down or the Eiffel Tower.
(30:23):
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 fart in its general direction. Nice, I didn't see
(30:45):
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 just know that 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 um,
(31:06):
he wasn't made of puddle eye. He was not, uh,
he said, uh announced just sort of paraphrase here. Um
he said. For my part, I believe that the tower
will possess its own beauty. I hold that the curvature
of the monuments 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
(31:27):
eyes of the observer, the boldness of the design as
a whole. 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
(31:49):
it with your little sculpture brain and try and look
at it as as that kind of art. Like you
got to rethink what art and architecture are. And I
think he's told right. I mean, it's 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 uh
(32:10):
they were wrong. Yeah, it's I saw a UM, I
guess an 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 um it was showing a graph of how
wind pressure increases with height, right, And when they traced
(32:35):
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 to have
(32:58):
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 and science and engineering um in in iron form.
I had no idea about that until I started researching this,
and it just made me appreciate this so much more. Um.
(33:21):
And it's also really really strong too, Like the thing
can hold four and a half times Uh, it's its
own weight. It's like it's never going to fall down.
And a lot of people were worried about that when
when Iffel was building it, and he publicly said, I
take personal responsibility if this thing ever collapses. Uh, he
just knew it wasn't going to because that's how precise
(33:41):
he was, and that's how smart he was with his
calculations and the people he was working with. Two. But
but it's it's just it's a it's masterful. It is
it's 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 stand today and wasn't torn down twenty years later
(34:02):
right after this. Alright, so Eiffel built this thing to last,
(34:39):
like we said, and uh, during that twenty year period,
as he was breaking in money from glow noodle sales,
he uh he decided to start trying to make it useful,
uh 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 in resistance experiments and those
(35:02):
were fine, those were all well and good, but it
was uh, it was radio that really is what saved
it when in 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,
(35:23):
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 kilometers away, and they said in nineteen ten, all right,
this is actually pretty valuable to us now the military
is involved, it's playing roles in our wars, so you
(35:47):
can keep it up for seventy more years. And they
then tore it down in Yeah, and that was the
end of the Eiffel Towel. Never forget that day. That was. Yeah.
Do you remember how excited Reagan was, like you have
against the Eiffel Tower man and Jimmy Carter descried quietly.
It was very sad. Yeah, I thought that was the
(36:08):
right reaction to that, you know, but that's the big split.
You know, there's two kinds of people in the world. Now.
They gave him seventy more years, and obviously in I
didn't even look it up, but I assume that's when
they said, and 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 um Paris for years, as the
(36:32):
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, a general Dietrich von
Scholitz just never got around to it. I guess he
was kind of resisting. But one of the speaking of resisting,
one of the um little pieces of World War two
(36:55):
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 sev 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
(37:18):
elect Tommy Tubberville. Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard
all that. Former Auburn football coach now Senator elect uh
said has said a few times now that Paris was
liberated from the Communist and the Socialist Like, no, they
were Nazis. Yeah, there's one other piece of World War
two trivia I had not heard about, what the Eiffel Tower.
(37:39):
There was a dog fight that went under under the
Eiffel Tower. 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,
you really you just really 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 plan period.
(38:01):
If you're if you're a German. Uh, if you're a
German fighter ace and you've got an American P fifty
one Mustang on your tail, you're gonna take some risks. Apparently,
the the dirty Nazi flying ace, I thought he was
gonna shake him by going under the Eiffel Tower, and
that P fifty one Mustang pilot went right after him
(38:21):
and shot him down over Paris. Amazing, and't it? I
mean that they had a dog fight under under the
Eiffel Tower. That's astounding. Uh. Because this thing is made
of iron, there's a very one, big, big key to
keeping this thing durable, and that is paint. Um. It
is strong, iron is very strong. It's also malleable. Um.
(38:44):
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 gotta have a really good paint job on there.
And I think it's been painted eighteen times times over
the years, and they're on a seven year cycle now,
which they started in eighteen nine nine. UM, And it
(39:07):
takes about eighteen months to remove what paint they remove.
And it's been various colors over the years. Um, 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.
I didn't pick up on that. I think it probably
(39:28):
doesn't even know that's a band. I think it's tastes
are a little harder than that, right, I don't know.
I think he's got a bunch of varied tastes. Like
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. Uh. And like
I said, now they call it since nineteen sixty eight
Eiffel Tower brown. But it's lit up at night. It's
(39:49):
marvelous to behold. Um, twenty thousand lightbulbs on this thing. No, No, no,
five billion light bulbs. I don't think that's right, dude.
I looked everywhere the only place I can find that
was in Business Insider. I've seen it a bunch of places,
but I guess it it got Yeah, I could see that. Man,
you're probably right. I mean on the Eiffel Tower website
(40:11):
it's just twenty lights. So I'm gonna go with that,
all right, I'll go with that one too, stupid five
that's a big disparity. But it's all lit up, like
they have the lights, and then they also have these
projectors projecting light and um, five billion projectors. It's brilliant
to look at at night, and uh, I suggest you
(40:31):
go at night. It's it's great during the day of
course as well, but at night is when it's really
really special. Right. Um. I've looked up their electric bill
and it's apparently about one point one million dollars a year,
which is too bad. I guess it's more in line
for twenty thousand lights. I was like, that's pretty low
for five billion lights. It's like al Gore's electric bill. Wow. Hey,
(40:57):
I try to take shots at both sides, right you can, man, Yeah,
for sure, you're a centrist. So, um, that repainting stuff
it takes eighteen months, did you say that? And they
take fifteen tons of the old paint off every time
when it's a when the whole job is done, I
think it's like sixty tons of new paint. Right, Yes,
(41:17):
that is so much pain, it's crazy. But um, the
last time we were there, like three to three years ago, Um,
I remember being shocked that it was brown. I had
totally forgotten it. And anytime you see it, it's 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 and pictures. Right, But they apparently there's
(41:40):
an optical illusion where the higher up in the sky
the Eiffel Tower is um, that part seems darker than
the stuff closer to the ground. So they actually do
kind of an ombre thing where they painted in this
the same color, but yeah, grated shade to where the
stuff at the top is the lightest shade and then
(42:01):
towards 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 to the other and said, that is one severe ambre.
So we say that now whenever we see you a
lady with an ombre hairstyle, Man, when's the last time
(42:24):
you saw somebody with an ombre? I don't know. Is
that not a thing anymore? I don't I don't see people,
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. Uh. We should maybe do
a short stuff on the elevators themselves. It is probably
a show into itself, but um, I guess the easiest
way to say it is that these are not like
(42:47):
any elevators in the world, obviously because they go up
on a on a slope and then straightened out. So
they're built, obviously, um, 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 has greased
every day with beef fat no from the Jewels Verne restaurant. No,
(43:13):
I had not heard that. That's a great fact, man. Yeah,
And apparently a lot of the machinery is um 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 build one
(43:33):
of the elevators. Yeah. I think they actually build three
of the ones that are there now. But this is
for the ex exposition and to show off, to show
how 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
(43:55):
aloft changed out to rope. They cut it with hatchets
to show off how the emergency brake system worked. Yeah,
holy cal Yeah, and they all cross their fingers behind
their backs. Yeah, exactly exactly. But if you look at
some of the original um, the original drawings, they were
like sit down elevators with like pews basically like you
(44:17):
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 costs one point five million to build and in
in dollars. I saw that elsewhere too. M hmm. That
(44:38):
sounds like confusion to me, because they gave them one
point five million francs and it really costs six point
five I don't trust anything on this list. Now, five
billion lines? Is that on the list that I sent you?
That was from Live Science, not Business Insiders? Well, the
same exact list was on Business and Business Insider. Yeah,
that's what we should call them. So somebody science is
(45:01):
usually pretty Uh I'm guessing Business Insider copy pasted from
Live Science. Live Science 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 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, definitely,
It's worth worth traveling to Paris to see and then
(45:24):
just turn around and leave. Uh 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 we say it every
year that without you guys, we wouldn't even have jobs.
(45:45):
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 measures through because
you guys have helped us through. Appreciate you, guys, So
thank you. Okay, Well, since I said thank you to
(46:08):
all of you listening out there in podcast land, that
means it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this
pet Turkey. This 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 look
like your yard ornaments. Um. I can attest to their superhering,
(46:32):
as the tom could hear a bag of feed being
open 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 duscile, uh docile. My special need son was just
(46:54):
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. They're
also wild turkeys in the area and often had to
stop the car to let them cross the road. I
(47:15):
love to stick my head out of the window and
gobble at them because they would always raise their heads
and gobble back. And here's a lady coming again into
the gobble. I love it. That's from Steph T. Thanks
Steph T. Is it really Steph T? Well? I mean
ste F hard Stuff letter T Right, But there was
(47:35):
a joke I made in the Tricky episode where like
somebody was named Tom T like it was Tom Turkey.
So maybe this is she said she gobbles. Maybe. Well,
if you're a Turkey and you want to get in
touch with this about her Turkey episode or for whatever reason,
you can send us an email. The Stuff podcast at
iHeart radio dot com and again, Happy do Year, everybody.
(47:59):
Have you know you here? Stuff You Should Know is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M hm
hm
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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