Statue of Liberty history and meaning: the French gift, Bartholdi and Eiffel, the copper skin, the pedestal nobody would pay for, and what the torch, crown and chains mean

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Statue of Liberty, "Liberty Enlightening the World", was a gift from the people of France to the United States, conceived in 1865, sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, built on an iron skeleton designed by Gustave Eiffel, shipped in 350 crates and dedicated on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor on 28 October 1886; she is 151 feet (46 m) of hammered copper on a pedestal of 154 feet, 305 feet from the ground to the torch, and was the tallest structure in New York when she arrived. France paid for the statue and America, after years of failing to raise the money, for the pedestal, through a newspaper campaign that collected 100,000 dollars in nickels and dimes. She carries a torch for enlightenment, a tablet dated 4 July 1776, a crown of seven rays for the seven continents and seas, and at her feet a broken chain for the end of slavery; the poem on the pedestal, with its "huddled masses", was added in 1903 and made her the symbol of immigration. Below: the idea, the people, how she was built, the pedestal crisis, the dedication and after, the meaning of each part, the numbers, visiting, and the stories, with the age's other iron in how the Eiffel Tower was built.

The idea, 1865–1875

At a dinner at his house near Versailles in 1865, the French jurist and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye, an admirer of the United States that had just ended slavery and the Civil War, proposed that France should give America a monument for the centenary of independence in 1876, as a joint work of the two peoples, and, in the France of Napoleon III, as a rebuke to the empire and a statement of what liberty looked like. Among the guests was the sculptor Bartholdi, from Colmar in Alsace, who had already designed a colossal lighthouse in the form of a robed woman with a torch for the Suez Canal, rejected by the khedive of Egypt; he took up Laboulaye's idea, visited America in 1871, chose Bedloe's Island in the harbour on the first day when his ship came in, and by 1875, after the fall of the empire and the loss of his own Alsace to Germany, had a design and a committee, the Franco-American Union, to raise money. Statue of Liberty.

The sculptor and the engineer

Bartholdi's statue is a Roman goddess, Libertas, in classical robes, stepping forward with her right foot, a torch raised in her right hand, a tablet in her left, and a crown of rays on her head; her face, stern and calm, is said to be his mother's, Charlotte, and the model for the body a young woman he later married. He made it at 4 feet, then at 9, then at 36 feet, with each version divided into sections and enlarged by measurement to full size in plaster in the Paris workshop of Gaget, Gauthier & Cie, whose name, in the souvenirs they sold, may be the origin of "gadget". For the structure, Bartholdi first asked the architect Viollet-le-Duc, who proposed filling the statue with sand in compartments, and who died in 1879; he then turned to Gustave Eiffel, then a builder of railway bridges, who designed a central iron pylon of four columns, 96 feet high, with a secondary framework of iron bars from which the copper skin hangs on flexible iron straps, so that the skin can expand in heat and move in wind without cracking, an idea that is the curtain wall of the skyscraper ten years early. The torch arm was made first, and shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and then in Madison Square, where people paid to climb it; the head was shown at the Paris exposition of 1878.

How the statue was made

• Copper. About 62,000 pounds (31 tons) of copper, in 300 sheets hammered to 3/32 of an inch (2.4 mm) thick, the thickness of two pennies, from a mine in Norway, it is thought; the sheets were shaped by repoussé, hammered from the inside into wooden moulds taken from the plaster full-size model, in sections a few feet across.
• Iron. Eiffel's pylon and the 1,800 armature bars, 250,000 pounds of iron, riveted; the copper and iron were separated by asbestos and shellac to slow the corrosion where they touched, which failed over a century.
• Assembly in Paris. The statue was put together outside the workshop in the rue de Chazelles between 1881 and 1884, rising above the roofs of the 17th arrondissement, and formally handed to the American ambassador on 4 July 1884; Parisians visited it for a year.
• Shipping. In 1885 she was taken apart into 350 pieces in 214 crates and carried by the French Navy frigate Isère, which nearly sank in a storm and arrived in New York on 17 June 1885 to a fleet of boats and a parade.
• Reassembly. The crates waited a year on the island while the pedestal was finished; from April 1886 the statue was riveted together on the pedestal in four months by a crew that worked without scaffolding, hanging from ropes, and without a death; the torch was placed on 28 October 1886.

The pedestal nobody would pay for

The deal was that France would pay for the statue and America for the pedestal, and while French subscriptions, lotteries and a Gounod cantata raised the statue's 400,000 dollars by 1880, the American Committee under William Evarts could not raise the pedestal's 250,000: New York's rich thought the statue a French folly, Congress refused money, and the states of Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco offered to take the statue instead. The architect Richard Morris Hunt designed the pedestal, an 89-foot block of granite-faced concrete on the star-shaped Fort Wood, and the engineer Charles Stone began it in 1883 on the largest concrete mass yet poured in America; work stopped in 1884 for lack of money. Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World, then ran a campaign in March 1885 promising to print the name of every donor, however small; 120,000 people gave 102,000 dollars in five months, most of it less than a dollar, from schoolchildren, workmen and a kindergarten class, and the pedestal was finished in April 1886. The poet Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" in 1883 for an auction to raise pedestal money, and it was forgotten until her friend had it cast in bronze inside the pedestal in 1903: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".

Dedication and after

President Grover Cleveland dedicated the statue on 28 October 1886 in fog and rain, after a parade through Manhattan in which office boys threw ticker tape from the windows, the first ticker-tape parade; Bartholdi pulled the flag from the face at the wrong moment, and the only women present were on a boat, the suffragists having been refused places on the island. The statue was run as a lighthouse by the Lighthouse Board until 1902, when it was found that the torch could not be seen from the harbour mouth; the War Department took it, and from 1933 the National Park Service. Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island from 1892 passed her at the harbour entrance, and the poem and the statue became one thing by the 1900s. The torch was closed to visitors in 1916 after the Black Tom munitions explosion damaged the arm; the 1916 torch of glass by Gutzon Borglum leaked and was replaced in the restoration of 1984–86, which also replaced the 1,800 corroded iron armature bars with stainless steel, cleaned the interior, and gave the new torch a gold-leaf flame; the original is in the museum on the island, opened in 2019. The statue was closed after 11 September 2001 and reopened in stages to 2009, with the crown open on a limited ticket.

What the parts mean

• The torch. Enlightenment: liberty as light for the world, the statue's full name being "Liberty Enlightening the World"; the flame is gold leaf since 1986.
• The crown. Seven rays for the seven continents and the seven seas, or the sun's rays as a halo; 25 windows in it, reached by 162 steps up a spiral stair inside the body.
• The tablet. The law, in the Roman manner, inscribed "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI", the date of the Declaration of Independence; a tabula ansata, with handles, as on Roman monuments.
• The broken chain and shackle. At her feet, under the robe, half-hidden: the end of slavery and tyranny, Laboulaye's abolitionist meaning, which Bartholdi had first put in her hand and then moved to her feet so as not to frighten the Americans of 1876.
• The stepping foot. She is walking forward, out of the chain, toward the sea; from the front the stride is invisible.
• The robe. The stola and palla of a Roman matron; the figure is the Roman goddess Libertas, on the model of the seated Liberty on American coins and the standing figure on the Capitol dome.
• The face. Bartholdi's mother, by his own account; some see the widow of his friend Isaac Singer, whom he knew. Stern on purpose: liberty was a serious matter to the men of 1875.

The numbers and visiting

• Height. 151 feet 1 inch (46 m) from heel to torch; 305 feet 1 inch (93 m) from the ground; the pedestal and foundation 154 feet.
• Weight. 225 tons: 31 tons of copper, 125 of iron and steel, the rest concrete in the pedestal base within the statue; the copper skin is 2.4 mm thick.
• Face. 8 feet from chin to crown; the nose 4 feet 6 inches; the mouth 3 feet; the index finger 8 feet; the waist 35 feet around; a sandal size of 879.
• Steps. 354 from the ground to the crown, 162 of them inside the statue; 192 to the top of the pedestal.
• Cost. About 400,000 dollars for the statue in France and 270,000 for the pedestal; 87 million for the 1986 restoration.
• Colour. Copper brown in 1886, green by about 1920 as the copper weathered to a patina of copper carbonate and sulphate, which protects it; a 1906 proposal to paint her was defeated by public outcry.
• Visiting. By Statue City Cruises ferry from Battery Park or Liberty State Park in New Jersey, about 4 million visitors a year; the grounds and museum need a ferry ticket, the pedestal a pedestal ticket, and the crown a crown ticket booked months ahead, with a climb of 162 narrow steps and no bags; Ellis Island is on the same ferry. Sunrise and the first boat give the emptiest island.

Versions and theories

• The statue was meant for Egypt. Bartholdi's Suez lighthouse, "Egypt Bringing Light to Asia", was a fellah woman with a torch, and he denied that Liberty was a reuse; the drawings show the same idea and a different figure. Both are true.
• She was originally a Black woman. A claim from the 1990s that the first design showed a freed slave, which the Park Service investigated and found no evidence for; the abolitionist meaning is real and is in the broken chain.
• The face is Bartholdi's mother. His own statement; contemporaries who met her agreed.
• Eiffel designed the statue. He designed the skeleton; Bartholdi the figure; the copper and the assembly were the workshop's. Eiffel's tower followed three years later on the same principle of iron carrying a skin.
• She was a lighthouse. Officially, from 1886 to 1902, and useless as one: the torch's light was too dim and too high.
• The 1986 torch is gold. Gold leaf over copper, 24 carat, lit by floodlights; the 1886 torch, with its later glass windows, is inside the museum.

Open the sections: buildings by style, ancient temples of the world, all articles.