The Statue of Liberty: The Process of its Construction and Journey to America

The sculpture was commissioned to the French artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. The design of the internal metal structure was assigned to the engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, who in turn commissioned this work to the structural engineer Maurice Koechlin.
The casting work was carried out in the workshop of Gaget, Gauthier et Cie, located on the rue de Chazelles in Paris. The material used was copper for its outer layer and iron for its internal structure. The “skin” of the statue is made up of 300 copper panels of 2.37 mm thickness. The pieces were donated by Pierre-Eugene Secrétan. The complete casting of the statue was completed in France in July 1884.

During the World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, the torch of the statue was displayed. If you paid 50 cents you were allowed to climb onto the balcony of the torch. It was a way of raising funds for the construction of the monument’s pedestal.

In June 1878, during the Paris World’s Fair, the head of the statue was shown to the public in the Champ de Mars gardens, where visitors could enter the head and climb up to the crown using a 43-metre ladder.

In July 1884, the statue was fully assembled in Paris, to check that the pieces fit together correctly. As the pedestal had not yet been completed in New York due to lack of funds, it remained in the French capital until 1885.

The transfer to New York
On 21 May 1885, the frigate Isere left the port of Rouen, arriving in the port of New York on 17 June of the same year. The monument travelled across the Atlantic in 350 pieces distributed in 214 crates, thirty-six of which contained the nuts, rivets and bolts for assembly. The torch arm was already in America. The boxes were transported from Paris to Rouen by train. The pedestal was completed in April 1886.