Interesting facts about the Eiffel Tower you might not have known

(Patria) - The Parisian Eiffel Tower is named after its designer, engineer Alexander Gustave Eiffel, who was born in Dijon on December 15, 1832.

Work on this iconic structure was officially completed on March 31, 1889, writes Punkufer.

Gustave Eiffel then climbed the 1,710 steps to the top to plant the French flag.

The Iron Lady (La dame de fer), as Parisians affectionately call it, attracts as many as 15 to 25 thousand visitors daily.

The Eiffel Tower has the shape of a slender pyramid with four lattice supports, rising 324 meters high.

Metal expands in the sun, so the tower grows up to 15 centimeters taller in the warmer months and shrinks during the colder months.

The tower consists of three sections; the first section is at a height of 57 meters, the second is at 115 meters, and the third is at 276 meters.

If the Eiffel Tower were compared to an average building, it would have 75 floors, not including the 21-meter-high antenna at its top.

Its construction took two years, two months, and five days, with a team of 300 workers.

More than 1,600 steps lead to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but only those to the second floor are open for climbing.

18,000 metal parts weighing more than 10,000 tons were used in its construction.

There are about fifty replicas of this beautiful architectural edifice around the world, with the most impressive copies located in Las Vegas, Tokyo, and the Chinese city of Shenzhen.