Man constructs Eiffel Tower model with 700,000 matchsticks; took 8 years

LONDON — It took nearly a decade for a man in France to build the Eiffel Tower, who used hundreds of thousands of matchsticks to build the Paris landmark.

However, the Guinness Book of World Records said he did not qualify for the world record.

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Richard Plaud, 47, used more than 700,000 matches to create the tallest structure in the world, Sky News reported. It took him about eight years and more than 4,000 hours to do so.

The record is 6 million matches by Toufic Daher, NBC News reported. His Eiffel Tower was about 21.4 feet high. The record was previously set in 2009.

Plaud finished his masterpiece a couple of days after last Christmas and went ahead with submitting it to the Guinness World Records. His years of hard work was rejected.

“The Guinness Book judges have delivered their verdict, without actually seeing my tower in real life,” Plaud said on Facebook, according to NBC News.

The Guinness Book of World Records said Plaud used the wrong kind of matchsticks. They said that the type of matchsticks used needs to be commercially available. The kind Plaud used was not.

They also said that the matchsticks cannot be cut or used in a way that would make them unrecognizable, NBC News reported.

Plaud claimed that when he started his construction with matches he bought in-store but eventually made a deal with a retailer that sold him 33-pound boxes that contained headless matches, the news outlet reported.

“It’s the job of our records management team to be thorough and fastidious in reviewing evidence to make sure the playing field is level for everyone attempting a Guinness World Records title, however, it does appear we might have been a little heavy-handed with this application,” Mark McKinley, the director of Guinness’ central records services, told NBC News.

“We will make contact with the record holder again as well as review rules for similar records as a priority, to see what can be done,” McKinley said.

“Having a world record was a childhood dream. I always had that in the back of my mind,” Plaud told Le Parisien, according to NBC News.

The date that Plaud finished his structure held significance - it was the 100th anniversary of the French civil engineer of the tower, NBC News reported. The tower was actually named after him as his name was Gustave Eiffel.

Plaud said that he was hoping to share the structure at the upcoming Paris Olympics, Sky News reported. However, the organizers of the Olympics reportedly told him “there was no room high enough to accommodate it”.

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