Eiffel Tower was never meant to last forever. Paris nearly tore down its most famous landmark just two decades after it went up, and the one thing that stopped the wrecking crews wasn't beauty or nostalgia. It was radio. Every year, close to seven million people climb the Eiffel Tower, making it the most-visited paid monument on the planet. Millions more photograph it from the Champ de Mars below. It is, by any measure, the symbol of Paris. But for a few tense years in the early 1900s, the "Iron Lady" came within a signature of the scrapyard.
