Random Famous Landmark Generator

How this random landmark generator works

Press Generate and you get a landmark and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

The Great Wall. The Statue of Liberty. The Taj Mahal. The Colosseum. Angkor Wat. The Sydney Opera House. Alcatraz. The Anne Frank House.

And the Eiffel Tower, which was supposed to be scrap metal by 1910.

The Eiffel Tower had an expiry date

The Eiffel Tower was built as the entrance arch to the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world's fair marking a century since the French Revolution. Gustave Eiffel did not own the land. The City of Paris granted him a concession of twenty years, expiring on 1 January 1910, after which the tower was to be taken down.

This was not an afterthought. The rules of the original competition specified that the tower had to be easy to dismantle. It was designed, from the drawing board, to come apart.

And Paris wanted it gone. A famous letter from artists and writers called it useless and monstrous. Charles Garnier, who built the Paris Opera, is reported to have dismissed it as not architecture at all.

Eiffel understood the arithmetic from the beginning. As early as 1886 he had argued that only a scientific purpose could protect his tower, and he listed what it could do: meteorology, astronomy, aerodynamics, and the study of the air itself.

The building that actually did get demolished

Here is why Eiffel's case mattered, and it is a fact almost nobody knows.

The 1889 fair had another masterpiece. The Galerie des Machines, the Gallery of Machines, was at the time the largest building in the world: an enormous iron and glass hall spanning its floor with no interior columns at all.

In 1906 the City of Paris decided to destroy it, because it had not found a use for it.

Read that again, then look at the Eiffel Tower. The precedent was set three years before the Tower's concession ran out, and it was set on a structure that was more technically remarkable than the Tower and is now remembered by almost nobody.

A tower saved by being a good aerial

What saved the Eiffel Tower was that it was three hundred metres of iron standing in the middle of a capital city at exactly the moment somebody invented radio.

On 5 November 1898, Eugène Ducretet sent the first wireless telegraphy signal in Morse code from the Tower to the Panthéon, four kilometres away. In 1899, signals reached London. The military began to pay attention.

In 1903, with six years left on the concession, Eiffel offered the Tower to Captain Gustave Ferrié, who was studying military wireless, and paid for the antenna himself. Ferrié worked out of a wooden hut at the base. By 1908 the Tower's range was around six thousand kilometres.

In 1909, a permanent military radiotelegraphy station was built underground beneath the Champ de Mars. By then, demolishing the Tower would have meant demolishing part of France's communications infrastructure.

On 1 January 1910, when the twenty years expired, the City of Paris extended Eiffel's concession. Not by another twenty. By seventy.

And then it found cosmic rays

Eiffel had promised his tower would be useful to science. In 1910 it delivered, in a way he had not predicted.

The physicist Theodor Wulf carried an electrometer to the top and measured the ionising radiation there against the radiation at the bottom.

Everybody assumed such radiation came out of the ground, from radioactive minerals in the rock and soil. If that were true, three hundred metres of air should have absorbed most of it, and Wulf should have found almost nothing at the summit.

He found far more than he should have. The reading at the top was too high.

Within a few years, balloon experiments confirmed what the Tower had hinted at. The radiation was not coming up from the earth. It was coming down from space. The Eiffel Tower, built to be an arch for a fair and condemned as monstrous, had returned an early piece of evidence for cosmic rays.

Landmarks are survivors, not winners

Generate ten and you will feel that you are looking at the greatest things humans have built. You are not. You are looking at the ones that made it.

Something protected each of them at the moment it was most vulnerable. Usually it was usefulness. Sometimes it was religion, or a war that ended before the order was carried out, or an owner who ran out of money before the demolition crew arrived.

The Eiffel Tower survives because it was a good aerial and the army noticed in time. That is not a metaphor and it is not a nice story. It is the documented reason, from the tower's own archives.

A list of famous landmarks is not a list of the best buildings. It is a list of the lucky ones, and the Gallery of Machines is nowhere on it.

Ways people actually use this

• Travel shortlists. The famous twenty are only the famous twenty.
• Quizzes. Show the landmark, ask for the city. Then ask when it nearly got knocked down, because most of them did.
• Design prompts. Generate one and ask what it was originally for. The answer is almost never "to be looked at".
• Teaching survivorship bias. There is no better worked example than a landmark list and the building that is nowhere on it.
• Worldbuilding. Every landmark needs a reason somebody did not tear it down.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "Name, Country", so Contains works as a country filter. Try France, India, USA, China.
• Type Tower, Temple, Bridge or Cathedral to sort by what kind of object it is.
• Starts with and Ends with take a single character, not a word. One letter.
• Generate twenty and count how many are buildings and how many are ruins. The ratio is not what you expect.

Questions people ask

Was the Eiffel Tower really going to be demolished?

Yes. Gustave Eiffel held a twenty-year concession on the land, expiring on 1 January 1910, and the tower was designed to be easy to dismantle. Its use as a military radio antenna made demolition unthinkable in time.

How did radio save it?

Wireless telegraphy tests began from the tower in 1898. Eiffel funded Captain Gustave Ferrié's military experiments from 1903. By 1908 the tower had a range of six thousand kilometres, and in 1909 a permanent military station was built beneath it.

What was the Gallery of Machines?

The other great structure of the 1889 Paris fair, and at the time the largest building in the world. The city decided to demolish it in 1906 because no permanent use had been found for it.

What is the difference between a landmark and a historical site?

A landmark is conspicuous. A historical site is significant. The two overlap heavily, because a great many conspicuous things are also old, but neither word implies the other.

Which is the most visited landmark?

It depends entirely on whether you count paying visitors, people who walk past, or people inside a surrounding site. Every published ranking uses a different rule, and none of them says which.

References

1. Why was the Eiffel Tower kept?
2. The Eiffel Tower and science
3. How the Eiffel Tower survived