"The Eiffel Tower wasn't just the largest thing that
anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest
completely useless thing. . . . 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."
—Bill Bryson, At Home
