Ask who designed the Statue of Liberty and most people say Gustave Eiffel.
That’s wrong twice over: Eiffel didn’t design a single visible inch of her, and he wasn’t even the first engineer hired for the job. He only got the position because the original engineer died with the problem unsolved, according to the National Park Service.
The man who actually designed how she looks was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a sculptor from Colmar, France, who’d already given his country the Lion of Belfort and a reputation for working enormous.
But Bartholdi only handled half the job. He sculpted a 151-foot woman out of hammered copper; it took a completely different person to work out how to keep her from tearing herself apart in the harbor wind.
She’s basically a copper shell, and nobody agrees on whose face she has
Bartholdi started small and worked his way up. He built a tiny terracotta figurine first, back in 1870, then kept scaling the design up in stages, four feet, then nine, then a 36-foot version, checking his measurements carefully at every step before going bigger again, a process the Museum of the City of New York has documented through two of Bartholdi’s own surviving early models. By the time he reached full size, the statue existed as roughly 300 separate plaster pieces.
Then came the copper. Bartholdi used an old hammering technique where sheet metal gets pounded from behind to push a shape out on the front, kind of like embossing on a massive scale. Workers at a Paris workshop built a wooden mold for every single plaster piece and beat copper sheets into shape by hand.
Around 300 sheets went into her final skin, each one so thin the National Park Service likes to compare it to two pennies stacked together. That’s really all she is on the outside: a very large, very thin metal shell.
Nobody actually knows whose face she’s wearing, either, and the two places that should know don’t agree.
Some versions of the story say Bartholdi modeled her face on his own mother, a claim the Linda Hall Library’s history of science program notes Bartholdi himself seems to have acknowledged at points.
But researchers and historical authors like Nathalie Salmon push back hard on that, calling it a myth and insisting the face was either modeled after her ancestor Sarah Salmon, or designed to look universal rather than like any one specific woman.
New Yorkers actually met her in pieces years before she was finished. Just her arm and torch went on display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, then sat in Madison Square Park for six years, where fifty cents got you a climb up a ladder to a little balcony wrapped around the flame.
The engineer everyone remembers was actually the backup plan
The first person hired to figure out how to keep the statue standing was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who happened to be Bartholdi’s own mentor.
His plan was simple, if unglamorous: pack the inside with sand-filled compartments so she’d be too heavy to tip over. He died suddenly in 1879 before working out the details, so Bartholdi turned to Gustave Eiffel instead, who scrapped the sand idea completely.
Eiffel’s fix was a tall iron tower running up through her center, anchored into the pedestal, with a web of iron bars branching off it to fill out her curvy, draped shape. Think of it like an umbrella skeleton built to match a very specific, very lopsided umbrella.
The clever part is how the copper skin actually attaches to all that iron: it doesn’t. The copper sheets hang loosely on small metal loops instead of being bolted tight, so the whole skin can shift and breathe a little as it heats, cools, and gets pushed around by wind. That flexibility matters because copper and iron expand at different rates. Lock them together rigidly and the metal would eventually tear itself apart at every seam.
That same idea, a light frame holding up a skin that’s free to move, is one of the reasons people consider her an early ancestor of the glass skyscrapers all over Manhattan today. You can actually walk through this design yourself: Statue of Liberty crown tickets take you up 377 steps on a spiral staircase that runs straight through the middle of Eiffel’s ironwork, the same structure that’s been quietly holding her together since the 1880s.
6 September 2026 09:00 + more dates
Standing where Eiffel’s ironwork still is
Nearly 150 years after Bartholdi’s first tiny model, both halves of this design, the copper shape and the iron skeleton holding it up, are still there for anyone to walk through. C
rown access is the only way to climb all the way to the top, right past the ironwork that keeps her standing through every harbor storm, and it also comes bundled with pedestal access, the museum, and round-trip ferry service to both Liberty Island and Ellis Island.
Only a few hundred people get up there each day, and it books out months in advance, so if this story has you wanting to see it in person, reserving your Statue of Liberty tickets early is worth doing sooner rather than later.