Why is statue of liberty green

Remember Me Forgot Password? Most people are acquainted with the Statue of Liberty which really is a gift from the individuals of France to the individuals of the United States. The Statue of Liberty represents Libertas, the Roman goddess. She holds a torch above her head, and in her left arm possesses tablet inscribed "July 4, ", the date of the American Declaration of Independence.

Then after the statue became an icon symbol for freedom of the United States and was a welcoming sight to immigrants arriving from abroad.

The Statue of Liberty is feet and 1 inch from the bottom to the tip of the flame, which can be the exact same height as a story building. When the statue was originally assembled, it was a dreary brown colour, reflecting the natural colour of its copper plates. Over the next 30 years, it slowly looked to the iconic blue-green colour.

The Statue of Liberty is coated with a slim layer of copper, which can be turned into a blue-green with age due to chemical reactions between metal and water. This process is known as patination.

Why architects use patina? Architects sometimes request a specific patina colour at installation the projects. Factory-applied chemically induced pre-patination systems could make a wide range of coloured finishes much like natural patination.

Pre-patinated copper is especially useful for repairs if you have a need to supply close colour matches to old copper roofs. Patination process. Most people know copper reacts with air to create verdigris, nevertheless, the Statue of Liberty is its own special colour because of its unique environmental conditions.

It's not a simple single reaction between copper and oxygen to generate a green oxide, like you may think. John Robbins, the historical architect who was a leader of the crew that restored the Statue between and , and who now is in charge of construction, personnel, and security at the National Gallery, told me by phone that different degrees of patination cause the dark patches that people have noticed on her, especially on her face.

Weather hammers her, too. Not to mention the snow and hail and hurricanes. Robbins said that the French artisans who made the torch were rumored to have saved buckets of their urine to patinate it, Gallic pee being thought the best for that task.

If they did, it appeared to have had no effect, he added. And what about the color? By her feet, the broken shackles, which are concealed from viewers on the ground, could be stand-alone works of art. The patina is an organic part of its handmade quality. The copper, which is quite pure, is almost all still the original, after all this time.

The patina has been growing for a hundred and thirty years. On September 29, , Wilbur Wright took off from Governors Island in his canvas biplane, flew to the Statue of Liberty, and circled it while hundreds of thousands of spectators in boats and along the shore looked on.

He then returned to Governors Island, after less than five minutes in the air. No American had ever flown in a plane over water before. New York City itself lacked a colorful flag at the time. In , the Art Commission associates of the City of New York created a new flag, also using orange, blue, and white.

Like the designers of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration flag, the associates chose the colors because they were the flag of the Netherlands when the city was founded, in For a change, the associates arranged the stripes vertically rather than horizontally, with the blue closest to the flagpole, the white in the middle, and the orange next. The flag the associates designed has now been flying over New York for a hundred and one years. Sometimes the Empire State Building is lit up with these colors in honor of sporting events or anniversaries in local history.

Orange, white, and blue are the colors of the New York baseball Mets and basketball Knicks, and of the hockey Islanders, in from the suburbs. The blue, which is almost indigo, makes the orange jump out at you, and vice versa, while the white assists them both. As colors go, these could not be louder, and in combination they shout. The colors of the city flag imply history, politics, religion, and civic weal. The Statue of Liberty, by contrast, has a kinship with the color of money.

Its outward and visible part almost is money, to the extent that pennies still have value today. The Statue is always described as the gift of the French people to the people of the United States, because the French raised the money to pay for the sculpture by their private donations, and their government was not involved. Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World , led a fund-raising campaign in his newspaper, and it succeeded spectacularly, producing a hundred and two thousand dollars in donations between March and August of Pulitzer said that he would publish the name of every donor, no matter the amount donated.

Names in small type, all jammed together, took up page after page in the paper. Sometimes the donations were only a few cents. The Statue owes its existence to French and American spare change. Nothing shakes money loose like the Statue. Advertisements employing the Statue have been around since before she stood in the harbor. Liberty Tax Service, the national tax-return preparers, sends temps in Statue costumes to pass out handbills every April; you come upon these Statues leafletting and smoking cigarettes at choke points around town.

Year round, in Times Square and by the ferry dock in Battery Park, tall Statue impersonators, with their robes and torches and crowns, pose for tourists and accept gratuities while networks of tiny cracks appear in their pale-green face paint. The stuff is waxy and pasty, the color of a hospital wall. If immigrants who came by ship had heard that the streets of America were paved with gold, seeing a huge copper statue in the harbor when they arrived probably seemed about right.

Why would a democracy need streets of gold? Copper, like the penny, is for everybody, and probably just as good for paving. Now it is called the Public Design Commission, or P. Established by city charter, the commission oversees the design aspects of structures, parks, streetscapes, and works of art on and over city property. Log in. The Statue of Liberty in New York is one of the world's most famous landmarks, but it hasn't always had its iconic green color.

Chemical reactions always involve two or more substances — reacting together to produce new substances. So it's thanks to a chemical reaction that the once golden Statue of Liberty now has a green skin of copper carbonate.

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