Almost every big city in the world has its trademark symbol. New York has the Statue of Liberty, London has Big Ben and Sydney has its opera house.

But few of these symbols can beat the Eiffel Tower in Paris in terms of recognition.  As soon as you see the tower’s profile, you can almost smell the Gauloise cigarettes and taste the pastries.

Designed for the World’s Fair of 1889, the Eiffel Tower stirred debate and controversy before the assembly started on July 1, 1887.  A public protest “against the tower of Monsieur Eiffel,” was published in the newspaper Le Temps, signed by such big names from literature and the arts as Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas Jr.

But once construction work on the tower was finished, on March 31, 1889, the tower was greeted with enormous popular acclaim and the critics were silenced.

All the elements of the tower were prepared in a factory on the outskirts of Paris, where Gustave Eiffel’s company was situated. All of the tower’s 18,000 pieces (each about 5 metres in length) were designed, calculated and drawn to an accuracy of a 10th of a millimetre before being manufactured and assembled.

The completed Eiffel Tower stretched 300 metres above the ground – the highest monument in the world until the construction of New York’s Chrysler Building in 1930.

The tower was an instant draw. It received 2 million visitors during the 1889 World’s Fair and today, 115 years later, hundreds of millions more have admired the sights of Paris from the tower’s vantage.

For those reluctant to use the stairs, the Eiffel Tower offers a system of elevators that have been modernized during the years. As recently as 2003 a team from SKF Reliability Systems mounted new bearings on the elevator of the restaurant on the first floor.

So, after enjoying your meal and the view of the Seine and the Trocadéro, you can journey back to ground level safe in the knowledge that you’re in good hands.