Building the Statue of Liberty
The French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty as a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Over 300 thin sheets of copper, most of it from a copper mine in Karmoy, Norway, fit together to form the Statue’s outer skin. Each copper sheet is 3/32 of an inch thick, about the thickness of two coins. The sheets were shaped in France using the ancient repoussé method in which the metal is hammered and shaped within large wooden and plaster molds. The finished pieces were then shipped to the United States where they were assembled and supported on an ingenious iron framework of armature bars and girders designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel.
Courtesy hmdb.org
