Paris mismatch: 24ft model of Eiffel Tower denied record
A FRENCH council worker who spent eight years building a 24ft matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower has been denied a world record because he used the wrong type of matches.
Richard Plaud started making his replica of the famed Paris landmark in 2015 and hoped to secure a place in the Guinness World Records (GWR) for the tallest matchstick sculpture.
However, the organisation has ruled that most of the 706,900 matchsticks he used are ineligible for an official record because they were not commercially available and have been altered significantly from their original form.
“It ’s disappointing, frustrating, incomprehensible and not very fair play,” Mr Plaud told The Times.
In a social media post, he added: “Tell me how 706,900 sticks stuck one by one are not matches. My matchstick tower still stands and will be 7.19metres (23.6ft) for a long time.”
He said officials from GWR, which describes itself as “the global authority on all things record-breaking”, made its decision without visiting his model.
Mr Plaud, 47, who works in the artworks and bridges department of the Charente-maritime council in western France, finally completed his project on Dec 27, the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the original tower’s engineer.
Mr Plaud began by buying matches in supermarkets and cut off the heads. “But it was very fastidious,” he said in a recent interview. In a bid to ease the process, the model maker subsequently persuaded Flam’up, a French manufacturer, to supply him with boxes of matches without heads.
Mr Plaud said GWR told him the match heads had to be scratched off for his attempt to be valid.
The current record is held by Lebanese craftsman Toufic Daher, who created a 21ft (6.53m) model of the Eiffel Tower using six million matches.