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Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island), New York Harbor, USA
140 years ago

October 28, 1886, was wet and foggy in New York. Even so, perhaps a million people lined the route of a parade down Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and as it passed the financial district, office boys threw ticker tape out of the windows, inventing a New York tradition. In the harbor, some three hundred vessels crowded around a small island where President Grover Cleveland and a party of French and American dignitaries sat at the foot of a copper figure 151 feet tall, its face veiled by an enormous French flag.

The sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, waited inside the crown for a signal to pull the rope. A boy on the ground was to wave when the main speech ended. The orator paused for breath, the boy waved, and Bartholdi unveiled the face in the middle of the speech, to a deafening chorus of steam whistles, cannon, and brass bands that drowned out the rest. Cleveland then accepted the statue on behalf of the United States. Almost no women had been allowed on the island. A group of suffragists chartered a boat, circled as close as they could, and pointed out through a megaphone the irony of representing liberty as a woman in a country where women could not vote.

The idea is traditionally traced to a dinner in 1865 at the home of Edouard de Laboulaye, a French law professor and admirer of the United States, who suggested a joint monument to mark the centennial of American independence and to nudge France itself toward republican liberty. Bartholdi, a young sculptor from Colmar with a taste for the colossal, took up the project. His attachment to the theme deepened after 1871, when Germany annexed his native Alsace. He traveled to America, chose the island site himself, and returned to Paris to begin work. The statue holds a torch aloft and a tablet inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals. At her feet, hard to see from the ground, lies a broken chain.

The engineering was as bold as the sculpture. The skin is copper sheet only about two and a half millimeters thick, hammered into shape over wooden molds. To hold it up, Bartholdi turned to Gustave Eiffel, who designed an iron skeleton with a flexible system of bars that lets the skin expand in the heat and sway in the wind without cracking. It was a forerunner of the curtain wall used in modern skyscrapers, and Eiffel completed it several years before his tower. The finished statue stood above the rooftops of Paris for months before it was taken apart, packed into more than two hundred crates, and shipped across the Atlantic aboard the French naval vessel Isere, arriving in June 1885.

There was nowhere to put it. France had paid for the statue by public subscription, and the Americans were to supply the pedestal, but fundraising had stalled and Congress and the state of New York had declined to help. The publisher Joseph Pulitzer stepped in. His newspaper, the World, attacked the rich for their stinginess and promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift. More than 120,000 people responded, most giving less than a dollar, many of them children and recent immigrants. They raised about one hundred thousand dollars in five months. The sonnet by Emma Lazarus that gave the statue its voice as a welcomer of immigrants was written for a pedestal fund auction in 1883, and was fixed to the base on a bronze plaque only in 1903. By about 1920, weather had turned the shining copper to the green the world knows.

On October 28, 1886, in rain and fog, an Alsatian sculptor pulled a flag off a copper face a little too early and nobody minded. The French had paid for the statue and ordinary Americans, a dime at a time, had paid for the pedestal. One hundred and forty years later she is still holding up the torch at the entrance to New York Harbor.

How much do you know about the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi and Eiffel, the voyage from France, Joseph Pulitzer's pedestal campaign, and the dedication ceremony of 1886?