The Eiffel Tower wasn't just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn't a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn't even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications-that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches-but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous. Many
( Bill Bryson )
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