After the success of the first radio signals broadcast to the Pantheon by Eugène Ducretet in 1898, Eiffel approached the military authorities in 1901 with a view to making the Tower into a long-distance radio antenna.

In 1903 a radio connection was made with the military bases around Paris, and then a year later with the East of France. A permanent radio station was installed in the Tower in 1906, thus ensuring its continuing survival.

Eiffel lived long enough to hear the first European public radio broadcast from an aerial on the Tower in 1921.

The top of the Tower originally consisted of two lattice work arches, supporting the lamp of a beacon visible from beyond the horizon. The narrow open-air platform which crowned this top level was at a height of exactly three hundred metres above ground level. This was itself topped by a lightning conductor with three branches, connected to two large metal tubes buried in the ground.

The top of the Tower has since been completely transformed, and today it accommodates several tens of antennae of all kinds, including a television mast whose peak is at a height of 324 metres. The first television trials to use the Tower date back to 1921, and the first regular broadcasts started in 1935. .