The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was built to be temporary. I am still here.
Artists signed an open letter calling me a useless monstrosity.
I grow about fifteen centimetres taller in summer.
Seven million people come to look at me every year, in one city.
Iron lattice, three hundred metres, Paris.
Eiffel Tower
Eiffel built himself a private apartment at the very top and never rented it out. Edison was invited up. Almost nobody else was.
Eiffel's company won the competition for the 1889 world's fair with a design meant to stand for twenty years. What saved it was not affection but antennas: the tower proved ideal for the new science of wireless telegraphy, and by the First World War it was intercepting German transmissions. It is built from around eighteen thousand iron pieces and two and a half million rivets, each hole drilled in the workshop rather than on site. It sways only a few centimetres in high wind — less than it grows on a hot afternoon, when the iron expands and lifts the summit.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #6 · today's mystery · the vault
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