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It took eight years to create this matchstick Eiffel Tower replica. It just won a Guinness World Record.
It took 50 engineers and draftsmen, 150 metal factory workers, and 250 construction workers just over two years to build the 984-foot-tall Eiffel Tower using 18,000 metal parts. Ta. But for Richard Proud, it took eight years, 706,900 matches and 50 pounds of glue to complete his 23-foot-tall replica. On January 7, his landmark model won a Guinness World Record as the world’s tallest matchstick sculpture in Sojons, France, but the victory wasn’t easy.
Despite Mr Proud’s 4,200 hours of dedicated work since December 2015, the structure was initially disqualified by Guinness World Records (GWR) for being made from sawn matches. I did. Early in the project, Proud bought matches, ripped off their heads, and built a tower using only the stems. To alleviate the tedious task before him, he contacted a match manufacturer and requested headless matches, receiving dozens of pounds worth of matches.
Because of this detail, his masterpiece was immediately disqualified by the GWR committee for not using commercially available matches. His matches were said to be distorted beyond recognition. This sentence was handed down without the judge ever seeing the tower.
Devastated, Ms Proud took to social media to vent her frustrations, writing a scathing post on Instagram calling the decision a “huge disappointment”. The next day, the committee reviewed the case and reversed the disqualification. They admitted to being “high-handed” in applying the rules and gave the coveted title to the sculptor and his work. Mr Proud expressed great relief at the change in decision and now has his sights set on displaying the tower at the Olympics in Paris this July.
Proud completed the project on December 27, 2023, the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the actual tower’s chief engineer. The former world record holder is Toufik Daher of Lebanon, who built a replica of the Eiffel Tower in 2009. The tower was two feet high.
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