Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (22 page)

Liberty was then deconstructed and shipped over to America in crates. Here, her face—the resemblance to Bartholdi’s brother Charles can be seen—awaits the moment it will be hoisted into place on Bedloe’s Island.

Credit: Statue of Liberty National Monument, National Park Service

Joseph Pulitzer, who rallied American donations through his newspaper the
World.

Credit: Statue of Liberty National Monument, National Park Service

Gustave Eiffel designed the statue’s latticed inner support.

Credit: Creator: Félix Nadar

General Charles P. Stone, shown with his daughter, oversaw pedestal construction in America.

Credit: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpb-04444

Bartholdi (right) pictured with his most loyal American supporter, Richard Butler, a rubber magnate.

Credit: Musée Bartholdi, Colmar, reprod. C. Kempf

The inaugural of “Liberty Enlightening the World” on October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor.

Credit: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-04491

9
Eiffel Props the Giantess

On February 27, 1881, Paris celebrated Victor Hugo’s seventy-ninth birthday with a citywide parade. The government gave him a Sèvres vase—an honor usually granted only to royalty or high clergy. In keeping with his image as a man of the people, Hugo did not watch the masses marching from a grandstand, but waved from his house window as his comrades surged past.

This event stood in stark contrast to the dearth of enthusiasm Bartholdi continued to experience in America for his poetic venture. Perhaps it was because Americans simply did not appreciate art as the French did; Bartholdi had suspected as much on his first American visit. But perhaps it was because Bartholdi’s nature did not inspire adoration: the public preferred artists like Hugo, brash men unafraid to make themselves part of their work. Bartholdi’s personality had always tended toward the private—he liked to disguise his whereabouts and itineraries, he painted under pseudonyms, and he hid the details about his marriage. This private nature made his tendency toward epic sculpture an odd choice. A man so sly could not ignite a common feeling in the way Hugo, with his spectacle of a life, could. Epic work might require a spokesperson of epic lusts and angers, sorrows and revolutionary beliefs.

Whatever the reason, the Americans had barely responded to Bartholdi’s reports of progress. For almost a year, the American Committee had failed to even acknowledge a letter from the Franco-American Union that funding had been secured for construction and Liberty would be shipped to America in 1883.

When the Paris correspondent for the
Commercial Advertiser
visited the Gaget studio in July 1881 to check on Bartholdi’s current work, he found Liberty’s head back in its home. On the warehouse floor, the workmen had marked the vast outlines for the remaining slices of statue and were hammering together the wooden-lathe framework inside the outline. The forms, when put together this way, looked like enormous latticed huts. Because the workmen drew Liberty’s form in short lines of wood, the framework resembled the black hatching of etchings, only on a gigantic scale. Where the frame had been finished, the craftsmen slathered plaster.

Once the plaster was dry, the workmen measured out lengths on the model and then calculated the equivalent stretch—four times as long—in the plaster. They would then sand down the contours to match the model’s angles and curves, double-checking their work using the plumb lines strung from roof to floor, and patiently trying and retrying their calculations until they had achieved an exact copy. Then another wood form, exactly matching the plaster, would be made to withstand the hammering of the copper. Each section would require three hundred primary measurement marks, as well as more than twelve hundred secondary marks. Each point marked on the model and its corresponding nail head in the structure had to be measured six times and verified as often. In total, some ninety thousand measurements were made over the carcass of the whole work.

In this way, too, Bartholdi’s work differed from that of most artists. What other work of art required an army of men clocking in every morning and working a full day, for months, years, to get the piece built? Only bridges or buildings demanded this kind of commitment.

Bartholdi bustled about, advising, correcting. The slices appeared impressive at ground level, but he still needed a way to support them when they were stacked overhead.

Bartholdi needed an engineering genius to save him. If he did not find that savior, a full 151-foot sculpture would become, unsupported, a Verne-like monster, a bone-crushing copper carcass that could take down ships in its collapse. Never before had a man faced this particular engineering challenge. He had but one hope.

Forty-nine-year-old Gustave Eiffel was the world’s foremost maker of bridges. Eiffel had started his engineering career at a young age, having inherited a project for a bridge in Bordeaux at age twenty-six when his boss suddenly retired. The boyish novice had astounded observers by finishing that major construction on time and on budget.

Eiffel had gone on to further successes, including an ingenious bridge over the fast-flowing, sixty-five-foot deep River Douro in Portugal. The Paris exposition of 1878 had showcased a huge amount of his work. In addition to an exhibition of two decades of his drawings and models, he had also contributed several of the park’s major structures. Now he marketed prefabricated bridges, which he sold around the world, particularly to China. That knowledge of prefabrication would be useful in designing a support for a statue sent across the Atlantic.

Bartholdi approached Eiffel by employing a bit of his characteristic subterfuge. He acted as if Eiffel were the first engineer chosen for the project, saying his past studies of wind resistance for metal structures made him “the obvious person to construct the iron carcass.”

Perhaps Bartholdi took this approach because he had been forewarned that Eiffel liked to be flattered. Flushed with success, Eiffel did not rush to join this relatively minor project. More interested in scientific matters than flamboyant artistic gestures, Eiffel agreed to help Bartholdi only under “the conditions of strict economy which circumstances imposed.” Eiffel knew funds were limited and he was not going to waste a great deal of his time
.

Despite this, Liberty presented challenges that would have interested and occupied Eiffel. In his mansion on rue de Prony, not far from the Gaget workshop, Eiffel liked to pace his quiet library, ruminating on engineering problems, his mind running through the potential challenges and the calculations required. He would wander on his carpet, then stop in front of his mantel, where a lovely female bust was displayed, flanked on either side by a handsome Venetian mirror. There he would lose himself in thought.

Eiffel had three major issues to consider. First, he needed to invent a support that would be strong enough for towering Liberty, who, with her four thousand square feet of solid copper, would act like a sail when buffeted by the wind. His bridges were constructed of latticed pylons that offered less resistance. This sculpture would need to bear the same force as the steeple of Trinity Church, the tallest structure in Manhattan at the time, yet she was not protected by a block of other structures. She would stand isolated on a small island.

The 1881 annual report of the United States Signal Corps included the fact that Mssrs. Gaget, Gauthier & Compagnie had on April 4 been given data on the highest velocity of wind in New York City from January 1877 to March 1881, and the corresponding pressure per square foot. Clearly the possibility that the statue could be lifted into the sea was a terrifying thought.

Second, the structure had to withstand the extreme temperature changes of New York’s bay. As one reporter noted: “The heat of the sun would expand the metal and pull it out of shape, precisely as it does pull the Brooklyn Bridge out of shape every day.” In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was at that time still under construction, the designers had planned the span in four parts, which could slide together or farther apart depending on the temperature and tides. Liberty needed to be made similarly adaptable to heat and cold.

Third, the statue itself was copper, but its bracing would need to be iron to provide appropriate strength. Liberty would be buffeted continuously by sea air. Eiffel was aware that salt spray in suspension could concoct such a strong current when in contact with iron and copper that Liberty might become a “gigantic battery of unknown potential.”

In late November 1881, the American Committee, which had fizzled into a group that spoke of meeting but never did meet, gathered at the Union League Club to finally try to devise a plan of attack for fundraising. The letters from the Franco-American Union complaining about the lack of response to news of its readying Liberty had made their point.