Summarize Written Text — practice #swt-006

When the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889 for the Paris World's Fair, it was widely regarded as an eyesore that disgraced the elegant skyline of the French capital. A group of prominent artists and writers published an angry protest denouncing the iron structure as useless, monstrous, and an insult to French taste. The tower was, in fact, intended as a temporary exhibit, scheduled to be dismantled after twenty years once its permit expired. Its designer, the engineer Gustave Eiffel, understood that public opinion alone might not save his creation, so he searched for a practical justification to keep it standing. The answer lay in the emerging science of radio. Eiffel offered the summit of the tower as a platform for antennas, recognizing that its great height made it ideal for transmitting and receiving signals over long distances. The military soon found these capabilities invaluable, using the tower to intercept enemy communications during the First World War. This scientific usefulness gave authorities a compelling reason to preserve the structure long after its original permit would have expired. Over the following decades, attitudes shifted dramatically. The very features once mocked as ugly came to be celebrated as bold and modern, and the tower gradually transformed into the beloved symbol of Paris recognized around the world today. Its story illustrates how the fate of a monument can depend less on beauty than on usefulness, and how public taste can reverse itself entirely within a generation. What began as a despised temporary curiosity survived precisely because it proved practically valuable, and only later did it earn the affection that now seems to have been inevitable from the start.