In 1885, June 17 a gift from France arrived in New York Harbor after about one month being shipped across the Atlantic. The idea was to symbolize the friendship of the peoples of the United States and France.
The Statue consists of 31 tons of copper that was hammered by hand and assembled over a framework of iron and steel supports. Then they had to disassemble it into 350 pieces in order to ship it.
Some sources mentioned that the main inspiration started after a French sculptor called Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, visit to Egypt in 1855. His idea was to build a statue that would serve as a lighthouse in the form of a woman at the entrance of the Suez Canal. But the Egyptian government didn’t accept his idea.
The first sketches that were made by Bartholdi showed a female figure holding a torch and a tablet with the date of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). With seven rays on her crown representing the seven continents and seas.
French people provided much of the Funds, and work began in France in 1875.
Bartholdi collaborated with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and, after his death, with the engineer Gustave Eiffel, who designed the internal support system. Eiffel’s solution to protect the statue was adding a central iron pylon with a secondary support structure of flexible iron. That allowed the copper plates of the statue to move with the wind and expand or contract with temperature changes without cracking.
The work was presented to the American minister to France Levi Morton (later vice president) in a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884. In 1885 the work was complete, disassembled and shipped to New York City.
The statue was supposed to be finished by 1876 at the 100th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, but it took longer than expected. After being reassembled, the statue was officially opened on October 28, 1886, by President Cleveland, who said, “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.” The site where the status is, Liberty Island in New York Harbor, was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1984.
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