Recently discovered drawings for Statue of Liberty hint at a last-minute change (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Recently discovered drawings for Statue of Liberty hint at a last-minute change (2020)

smithsonianmag.com

91 pointslisper52 comments

Amazingly cool that they understood they had to make the statue handle winds in the harbor. Kind of neat to have a piece that's so emotionally powerful, aesthetically pleasing, and so beautifully engineered.

The quite new museum on Liberty Island (opened in 2019) is surprisingly interesting and well executed.

The decade-long campaign to raise money in both France and US was an impressive feat of crowdfunding. And the sculptor himself had terrific business acumen, selling tickets to tour his workshop and exhibiting full-scale parts of the statue in Paris to large crowds to keep up interest while it was still years away from completion.

If you get the opportunity, there is a Bartholdi museum in a small town on the French German border called Colmar that was originally his home. It’s interesting the evolution of the artist over the decades leading up to the Statue of Liberty

Conversely the fact that it was such a late change means it was poorly engineered. engineering as a discipline means understanding your problem space and creating a well formed solution to it, if you have last minute changes that means you did not understand your problem space well enough.

Perfectly understandable in this case, that construction technique was really cutting edge, and the change has been born out by the real acid test of engineering, it has stood for this long.

TFA suggests Bartholdi may have made the changes after Eiffel left the project to fit more with his own artistic vision. That's not poor engineering, just maybe change of leadership and direction of the project.

That is extremely poor engineering, an inherent problem with good engineering is that any change tends to provoke a need to reevaluate much of the design. this is expensive and slow. So the design change gets pushed without the rest of the engineering processes that should have accompanied it and now you have critical sections that are poorly engineered. In the software world we call this "technical dept"

Your comment is not inaccurate. According to the almighty wikipedia, during a 1986 survey of the statue..

[1] Careful study had revealed that the right arm had been improperly attached to the main structure. It was swaying more and more when strong winds blew and there was a significant risk of structural failure. In addition, the head had been installed 2 feet (0.61 m) off center, and one of the rays was wearing a hole in the right arm when the statue moved in the wind. The armature structure was badly corroded, and about two percent of the exterior plates needed to be replaced.[138] Although problems with the armature had been recognized as early as 1936, when cast iron replacements for some of the bars had been installed, much of the corrosion had been hidden by layers of paint applied over the years.[139]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty (Renovation and rededication 1982–2000)

There is also the Black Tom explosion by German spy in 1917 how have badly damaged the right arm because of the earthquake it had created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion

The really beautiful art in engineering is not how capable of crunching numbers you are, but how much you can decrease the complexity required. In this example, the numbers are calculated using pencil and paper. Which modern engineer is able to do that and build something which will stand a century?

Sucks we never got to see the copper version. I assume they knew it was eventually going to turn green?

Yep. People have been making copper statues for 5000+ years so that particular thing's been figured out for a while.

They knew a copper statue would be stripped by NJ tweekers on a foggy tuesday night

Answer to click-bait headline:

> Berenson thinks the drawings may nail down something that historians have long suspected but not been able to prove: that Bartholdi disregarded Eiffel's engineering plans when it came to the statue's upraised arm, electing to make it thinner and tilted outward for dramatic and aesthetic appeal. Several drawings appear to depict a bulkier shoulder and more vertical arm—a more structurally sound arrangement. But one of these sketches (below) was marked up by an unidentified hand with red ink that tilts the arm outward, as Bartholdi wanted.

"They" is a gender neutral pronoun, used out of respect when you don't know the gender pronoun someone goes by, and don't wish to be presumptive.

Colloquially and in context, "they" means "people back then" and nothing more. Calm down.

> Calm down.

What about my comment made you think telling me to 'calm down' was warranted?

Yes that’s what I meant! Thanks

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31786562.

Can't wait for the day the anti gender neural start referring to mixed groups as "hers and hims", they will be the flat-earthers of language.

The comment was worded poorly, since it was not clear if "they" was gender neutral, singular or plural, which could have referred to Gustave Eiffel and the sculptor. Either would have fit in that situation.

However, it is even more acceptable to refer to someone by their name, in this case Gustave Eiffel, instead of only using pronouns. Furthermore, "the architect" can be used, since it singularly denotes a specific person. There are many constructions that are better than using the imprecise "they".

They probably refers to the people who had say in the design process :/

> The comment was worded poorly, since it was not clear if "they" was gender neutral, singular or plural, which could have referred to Gustave Eiffel and the sculptor. Either would have fit in that situation.

Does it matter? Sometimes you want an imprecise "they".

It matters when the writer wishes for the reader to understand the written words as intended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com