Liberty as Engineering

On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. A gift from France, designed by sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and engineered by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel -- the same Eiffel who would later build the tower in Paris. The statue was a collaboration between two nations, an art project that required cutting-edge structural engineering to exist at all.

Liberty stands 151 feet tall, with a copper skin only 3/32 of an inch thick -- about two stacked pennies. That skin would collapse under its own weight without Eiffel's iron framework inside. The design uses a curtain-wall system, where the outer surface is supported by an internal skeleton rather than bearing its own load. This was innovative in 1886. Today it is how most skyscrapers are built. The Statue of Liberty was a structural prototype disguised as a symbol.

the statue of liberty, dedicated on october 28, 1886, new york harbor. source: wikimedia commons

Getting it built required solving problems on both sides of the Atlantic. France built the statue; America had to build the pedestal. Funding stalled until Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper campaign shamed New Yorkers into donating. Over 120,000 people contributed, many giving less than a dollar. The pedestal was crowdfunded before the word existed.

The statue's meaning has shifted over time. Originally a symbol of Franco-American alliance and republican government, it became associated with immigration after Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" was affixed to the pedestal in 1903. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." The statue did not change. The story we told about it did. October 28, 1886, is the day engineering made liberty visible. A copper shell three pennies thick, held up by iron, standing in a harbor, meaning whatever we need it to mean.