We Almost Lost the Statue of Liberty, and Other Misadventures in Maintenance
Reviewing Stewart Brand’s ‘Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One’
The Statue of Liberty almost fell apart. The 150-foot statue, designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, was composed of a 62,000-pound copper shell draped over a massive wrought-iron skeleton. Gustave Eiffel, who engineered the structure, recognized the danger: iron can’t touch copper without corroding.
The best solution he could conceive i…
