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