The statue was built as a gift from France to America to strengthen relations and to celebrate the end of the Civil War in the United States.
In a ceremony held in Paris on this day, July 4, 1884, the officially and definitively completed Statue of Liberty was unveiled. To celebrate the alliance and friendship between France and the United States of America, and to celebrate the end of the American Civil War.
The idea for the statue was confronted for the first time in 1865 when French historian Edouard de Laboulaye proposed designing a monument to celebrate the centenary of US independence scheduled for 1876 after it was to be erected in Egypt.
By 1870, the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi had developed sketches of a gigantic statue in the form of a loosely dressed woman holding a torch in her right hand. His idea was the recycling of a similar statue proposed by the French historian to celebrate the opening of the Egyptian Suez Canal, then under the English tutelage.
Giant construction details
The Statue of Liberty, or what was initially known as “The Liberty Enlightening the World,” is a huge statue erected on Liberty Island in the upper New York Bay in the United States of America, and it was built to commemorate the friendship between the peoples of the United States and France.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Statue of Liberty stands at a height of 305 feet (93 meters) including its lower base, and represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right hand, while a tablet bearing the date of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776 in her left arm.
The torch, which measures 29 feet (8.8 m) from the tip of the flame to the bottom of the handle, can be accessed via an internal service staircase 42 feet (12.8 m) inside the arm and was open to the public from 1886 to 1916.
The Statue of Liberty’s relationship with the Egyptian Suez Canal
The statue “Egypt Carrying Light to Asia,” also known as “The Rising Light Toward Asia,” was an early plan to design a monumental sculpture in the neoclassical style.
According to the Arab American History website, the idea of the project was designed and drawn in the late 1860s by the French sculptor and historian Bartholdi. The project was a statue of an Egyptian peasant woman or a popular woman wearing a loose dress and holding a torch in her hand to illuminate the surrounding area; It was to be placed at the entrance to the Suez Canal in the Egyptian city of Port Said.
The statue, which was supposed to stand at a height of 86 feet and a base to rise to 48 feet, was rejected by the Khedive of Egypt at the time, Khedive Ismail, due to the high cost of its construction. In 1869, the Port Said Lighthouse, designed by François Kennet and a group of European workers, was built on the order of De Lesseps and placed on the same site.
An idea inspired by ancient pharaonic history
The idea of placing the Statue of Liberty at the mouth of the new Suez Canal at the time was inspired by Bartholdi’s influence on the giant ancient pharaonic statues he had seen in the Abu Simbel temple.
Bartholdi then researched further and drew inspiration from the Colossus of Rhodes – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which was 33 meters high for the Greek (what was called) sun-god Helios at the entrance to the main port of Rhodes – and came up with the design of the loosely robed peasant woman. He later developed it to look the same in the end.
In 1892, the US government opened a federal immigration station on Ellis Island, near Bedlow Island in New York’s Upper Bay where the Statue of Liberty is located.
Between 1892 and 1954, about 12 million immigrants were received on Ellis Island before they were granted permission to enter the United States, and this statue was the first landmark in their reception.
Until 1901, the American Council of Lighthouses was responsible for operating the Statue of Liberty, with the statue’s torch as a means of navigation for sailors.
After that date, it was placed under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of War due to the status of Fort Wood as a military site still in operation.
In 1924, the federal government made the statue a national monument, and it was transferred into the care of the National Park Service in 1933.
In 1956 Bodelo Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965, more than a decade after it was closed as a federal immigration station, Ellis Island became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument
