A Frenchman who spent the last 8 years assembling over 700,000 matchsticks into a 23-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower has been denied the Guinness World Record because he didn’t use commercially available matchsticks.
Imagine putting your heart and soul into a project for almost a decade only to have your dream shattered at the very end due to a detail that never crossed your mind. That’s what 47-year-old Richard Plaud went through when he was denied the chance to have his name mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records after building the world’s tallest matchstick Eiffel Tower. He started working on the complex model in 2015 and poured roughly 4,200 hours of work into it over the last 8 years, painstakingly gluing 706,900 matchsticks into 402 panels that he then assembled into the impressive structure. But last year, as he was getting ready to complete the project, Plaud learned that his Eiffel Tower model wasn’t eligible for a Guinness Record.
