Thomas Edison revolutionized the audio world in 1878 when he obtained a patent for his latest invention, the phonograph. The audio player was designed for at-home use, but Edison also had larger-than-life plans for the product, in a very literal sense: He aspired to install a massive phonograph inside the Statue of Liberty to make Lady Liberty capable of speech. Edison revealed his intent to design a “monster disc” to produce audible messages, to make it sound as if the statue were uttering the words herself. He informed reporters that the phonograph could not only be used to alert ships during heavy fog, but also, if amplified properly, create a loud enough sound to produce words that could be heard as far as northern Manhattan and across New York Harbor. Despite Edison’s optimistic and ambitious ideas, the project never came to fruition, and the statue remained silent.
While Edison failed in making Lady Liberty talk, he succeeded on a much smaller scale by creating the first talking doll toy. In April 1890, Edison’s factory produced a set of 22-inch-tall dolls with miniature phonographs embedded in the torso. Some 500 were sold. Unfortunately, the dolls were returned in droves, as their fragile voice boxes were easily destroyed upon being played with. What’s more, the dolls sang songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” but the sound was eerie and distorted due to the rudimentary phonographic technology. The toy was a massive flop for Edison, though it inspired future generations of successful talking dolls.
Its torch was displayed in Philadelphia and the rest of the statue almost ended up there
The torch was exhibited at the 1876 world’s fair in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia and the visitors could buy tickets to climb a ladder in the statue’s arm up to the torch. With the funds raised from that exhibit, Bartholdi finally had enough money to build the statue’s head. He was so satisfied with Philadelphia’s reception to the statue that for a time he considered giving it to them instead of New York.
It originally was supposed to be a lighthouse
Everyone is familiar with the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of the promise of America, but few are probably aware that, for a few years early in its existence, it was also officially a lighthouse operated under the authority of the Lighthouse Board. The lighted torch in Lady Liberty’s right hand had, and still has, great symbolic significance, but at its beginning, it was also used as a navigational aid for ships entering New York Harbor. However, the engineers were never able to successfully light it enough to serve that purpose. The light cast from the Statue was very poor and deemed too dim to be effective. Over time, it became clear that Liberty Island was too far inland to be a good position for a lighthouse in the first place.
Edison’s plans to make the statue talk
Thomas Edison proposed a colossal phonograph inside Liberty to make her “talk.” When Edison introduced the phonograph to the public in 1878, he told the newspapers that he had plans to install a primitive stereo system that would allow the statue to play speeches that could be heard up to the northern part of Manhattan and across the bay.
The torch was switched
The original torch of the Statue of Liberty was changed between 1982 and 1986 when the statue underwent renovations. The original torch had been damaged by corrosion, caused by water and snow seeping in through windows installed during earlier restoration works in 1916. Parts of the copper on the statue’s flame were cut off, and new glass windows were installed. The new torch was made to look exactly like the old torch. It was constructed by French craftsmen who used an embossing method called repousse. It involves beating the underside of the copper with a hammer until it forms the desired shape. The repousse method is the same method sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi used to construct the entire Statue of Liberty, including its torch. While other parts of the new torch were covered with copper, the flame was covered with gold leaf. The old torch can be found at the Statue of Liberty’s museum.
It was originally designed for the Suez Canal in Egypt
Bartholdi, the French sculptor who designed the statue, did not craft the basic design of Liberty specifically for America. As a young man, he fell in love with the Middle East. In 1867, at Paris world’s fair, Bartholdi met with the Khedive, the leader of Egypt, and proposed creating a work as wondrous as the pyramids. Two year later he returned to Egypt with the blueprint of giant statue of a woman that would double as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The Egypt deal fell through, so Bartholdi arrived in the United States with his Statue of Liberty proposition in 1871 but it wasn’t until 1886 that the completed statue was officially unveiled in its current New York location.
Suffragettes protested its unveiling
When it was unveiled in October 1886, women’s rights groups lamented that an enormous female figure would stand in New York harbor representing liberty, when most American women had no liberty to vote. Only two women attended the actual unveiling on what is now known as Liberty Island: Bartholdi’s wife, and the 13-year-old daughter of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who had designed the Suez Canal. The wives of the American Committee members were forced to watch the proceedings from a navy vessel off the island. Suffragettes chartered a boat to circle the island during the unveiling. They blasted protest speeches, but those could not be heard over the din of steam whistles and cannon blasts in the harbor.
Fort Wood was home to military families
The star-shaped Fort Wood, which now serves as part of the statue’s pedestal, was home to military families from 1818 until the mid-1930s. These military families often included young children who remembered a Fourth of July where G.I.s bounced bottle rockets off of Lady Liberty’s posterior. A man named James Hill, recalled that he and his younger sister would drop baseballs from Liberty’s crown to see how high they would bounce. Other Liberty Island kids said they climbed to the torch tower and made it rock back and forth.
It wasn’t always green
When French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi completed work on the Statue of Liberty in 1885, its copper exterior glimmered a lustrous brown color. However, after Lady Liberty’s arrival in New York Harbor, the statue was left exposed to the elements, and over the decades it evolved to its current seafoam green hue. This drastic physical transformation was due to copper corrosion, which happens to any copper material that’s exposed to weather over time. The copper reacted with oxygen, sulfuric acid, chloride, and other components of the surrounding air and water to undergo a gradual visual erosion that left it with the greenish color we recognize today. In 1906, newspapers ran stories about proposed projects to repaint the statue, though the idea led to public outcry among those who preferred the green hue. Fortunately for them, chemists believe the current color has stabilized, and the green patina even protects the statue’s metal against the surrounding elements.
Bartholdi planned to have it covered with gold
Bartholdi proposed that Americans raise the money to gild the statue, in order to make her visible after dark. However, given how hard and arduous a task it had been to gather even enough money to place the statue in New York harbor, no one followed through on paying the enormous cost of covering the massive statue in gold.
It originally was Liberty Enlightening the World
The Statue of Liberty,” is, in fact, a nickname. In 1875, Bartholdi and his associates formed the Franco-American Union as the fundraising arm for the project, dubbed “Liberty Enlightening the World.”
Σχόλια