6. The Tower Was Supposed to Be Torn Down After 20 Years

Like many architectural gems built for World’s Fairs, the Eiffel Tower wasn’t intended to be a permanent structure. A plaque in the military bunker states that since Eiffel knew he needed to attach functional uses to the tower, he allowed it to be used for many experimental, scientific purposes. Wireless transmission turned out to be the key, and the Eiffel Tower became the site of the first radiotelegraph broadcasts.

5. There’s An Apartment in the Eiffel Tower

Within a year of the completion of the Eiffel Tower, it was reported by writer Henri Girard that Gustav Eiffel “the object of general envy.” But it wasn’t for his engineering and design feat, it was for an apartment he had at the third-to-highest level of the Eiffel Tower (285 meters above the ground, on the fourth level). Girard wrote that the famous apartment was “furnished in the simple style dear to scientists.

Eiffel used mostly for meeting important guests like Thomas Edison, who visited in September 1889, rather than for debaucherous parties. The apartment embodied many of the philosophical dreams of 19th century thinkers. Today it also contains mannequins of Eiffel and Edison.

4.  There Are Names on the Eiffel Tower

Thanks to restoration on the Eiffel Tower, the engraved names of 72 French scientists and engineers from the original design are visible again. Most of the scientists were active during the French Revolution and the early 19th century.  The engravings were covered over in the early 20th century and restored for the first time in 1986-1987, and again last in 2010.

3. Cafe La Bonbonnière de Marie

This little outdoor cafe with red and white checkered table cloths is a Parisian “secret.” Grab a leisurely drink, crepe or ice cream, or pizza and salads for lunch.  There’s a carousel, playground and sandbox just near by so it has the pleasant air of happy children.

2. There’s a Military Bunker Underneath the Eiffel Tower

Below the South Pillar is a former military bunker! It connects to existing military tunnels, but the bunker itself today is used as a mini museum open to small tour groups.

1. There Was a Post Office in the Eiffel Tower

Visitors used to be able to send a postcard from La Poste and get it stamped with an Eiffel Tower postmark! Sadly, the post office closed in 2016.

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One long-standing mystery of the painting is why Mona Lisa features very faint eyebrows and apparently does not have any eyelashes. In October 2007, Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, says he discovered with a high-definition camera that Leonardo da Vinci originally did paint eyebrows and eyelashes. Creating an ultra-high resolution close-up that magnified Mona Lisa‘s face 24 times, Cotte says he found a single brushstroke of a single hair above the left eye. “One day I say, if I can find only one hair, only one hair of the eyebrow, I will have definitively the proof that originally Leonardo da Vinci had painted eyelash and eyebrow,” said Cotte. The engineer claims that other eyebrow hairs that potentially could have appeared on the painting may have faded or been inadvertently erased by a poor attempt to clean the painting. In addition, Cotte says his work uncovered proof that her hands were originally painted in a slightly different position than in the final portrait.

Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of Artists describes the painting as having thick eyebrows; however, while this may mean that the eyebrows and lashes were accidentally removed, it could also mean that Vasari did not have first-hand knowledge of the work.

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Mona Lisa’s smile has repeatedly been a subject of many—greatly varying—interpretations. Many researchers have tried to explain why the smile is seen so differently by people. The explanations range from scientific theories about human vision to curious supposition about Mona Lisa’s identity and feelings.

Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University has argued that the smile is mostly drawn in low spatial frequencies, and so can best be seen from a distance or with one’s peripheral vision. Thus, for example, the smile appears more striking when looking at the portrait’s eyes than when looking at the mouth itself. Christopher Tyler and Leonid Kontsevich of the Smith Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco believe that the changing nature of the smile is caused by variable levels of random noise in the human visual system. Dina Goldin, Adjunct Professor at Brown University, has argued that the secret is in the dynamic position of Mona Lisa’s facial muscles, where our mind’s eye unconsciously extends her smile; the result is an unusual dynamicity to the face that invokes subtle yet strong emotions in the viewer of the painting.

In late 2005, Dutch researchers from the University of Amsterdam ran the painting’s image through “emotion recognition” computer software developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The technology demonstration found the smile to be 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and 0% surprised.

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