The Statue of Liberty sits on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. Lady Liberty was a gift to the United States by France for America's 100th birthday. The real name of the statue is "Liberty Enlightening the World," and it has become a symbol of freedom and opportunity around the world.
Edouard de Laboulaye suggested the idea in 1865 and began raising funds from the French people. Frederic August Bartholdi began the design on his own in 1870, thinking to honor the Franco-American alliance in 1778. Bartholdi collaborated with Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (the architect of the famous tower in Paris) to construct Lady Liberty. Before building the full size statue, they built smaller scale models. You can see two of them around Paris: a 15-foot version in the Paris Luxembourg Gardens and a 35-foot version on an island in the Seine River.
Building began in France in 1875, and lasted until June 1884. The US Patent Office issued the design patent on February 18, 1879 and the designers took the statue apart and shipped it to New York in June 1885. It took nearly four months to rebuild the Statue of Liberty at its new location. The statue is more than 305 feet high on its pedestal and weighs about 225 tons. On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the completed statue and its pedestal.
While Bartholdi designed the sculpture, Eiffel's expertise lets it stand erect. The skeleton is 250,000 pounds of puddled iron. The spine is a double-helix (the same shape as DNA) stairwell inside a large pylon. The pylon has four supporting legs connected by nine levels of diagonal cross braces and horizontal struts.
On top of the skeleton, there is a secondary iron structure to shape the outside of the statue. This armature is made of more than 1300 puddled-iron bars, each two inches wide and 5/8 inches thick, weighing about 20 lbs. That is more than a mile of bars.
The workers cut 80 tons of copper into 300 sheets and hammered until they were only 3/32 inches thick. This copper skin attaches to the armature using 1500 U-shaped copper saddles and 300,000 copper rivets. The saddle design was an ingenious way to allow the different metals to expand and contract without destroying the statue. The design called for a barrier between the two metals to protect from corrosion. The Americans solved the problem; they isolated the junctions between copper and iron with a layer of shellac impregnated asbestos cloth to protect the metals.
The statue's copper skin attained a beautiful green patina over the last 100 years of sea winds, driving rain and sun. If you could get close enough, you would see that only 5/1000 inches of the original copper has oxidized or weathered. On Lady Liberty's centennial, most elements needed repair or rebuilding, but not the copper skin. Only the torch needed a new skin, and the builders patinated the copper before putting it up to preserve the green color of the rest of the statue.
