Statue of Liberty Facts

The Statue of Liberty was a gift of friendship resulting from the diplomatic relationship between the United States and France.

The Statue of Liberty has US women's shoe size 879.

The Statue of Liberty is made out of copper. When originally built, it looked like a shiny new penny!

The Statue of Liberty's torch arm sits 18 inches from where it was designed to be. Before her 100th birthday, engineers found it swaying in strong winds, with a spike of her crown threatening to pierce it. Crews turned the spike away and swapped almost every iron bar holding her copper skin while she stood. They never moved the arm, or her head, which still sits 2 feet off-center.

The Statue of Liberty's torch has been closed since July 30, 1916 - and will never reopen. German saboteurs detonated roughly 2 million pounds of explosives at a New Jersey depot. The blast hit like an earthquake up to magnitude 5.5, lodging shrapnel in the copper skin and cracking the torch arm's iron frame. Only a handful of NPS staff have been up there since.

The Statue of Liberty once had no body. For six years, just her arm and torch stood in Madison Square Park. France paid for the statue - Americans had to fund the pedestal. Visitors paid 50 cents to climb inside the arm. Wealthy New Yorkers living right beside it refused to donate. Pulitzer shamed them publicly, and the full statue arrived in 214 crates.

Eighteen thousand soldiers stood on a parade ground at Camp Dodge, Iowa in 1918 and became the Statue of Liberty when two photographers shot them from an 80 foot tower. 12,000 men filled the flame of the torch alone, while the whole body and head took only 2,000. Many fainted in wool uniforms as the heat neared 105 degrees.