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Recently discovered drawings for Statue of Liberty hint at a last-minute change (2020)
- tomcam 4y agoAmazingly 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.
- pavlov 4y agoThe 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.
- technologia 4y agoIf 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
- IncRnd 4y ago
- sp332 4y agoCurtain wall construction had only been invented less than 20 years earlier, and this was the tallest such structure at the time.
- IncRnd 4y ago> Curtain wall construction had only been invented less than 20 years earlier The comment was about understanding that the statue needed to handle winds in the harbor - not about curtain wall construction. > and this was the tallest such structure at the time. The wind load acting on lighthouses and chimneys was formulated in France by L. Fresnel in 1825. One of the Seven Wonders of The Ancient World was also a lighthouse, Egypt’s Pharos of Alexandria. As the first known lighthouse it stood 450' or 145' taller than today's Statue of Liberty.
- yunohn 4y ago
- IncRnd 4y agoI was simply replying to those who commented to me. There was no political stance against the use of "they" in my comments. There was a bias in people who replied to me, but I ignored those biased statements. I literally don't care either way as to how people live.
- somat 4y agoConversely 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.
- sacrosancty 4y agoTFA 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.
- somat 4y agoThat 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"
- NickRandom 4y agoYour 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty (Renovation and rededication 1982–2000)
- 4oh9do 4y ago"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.
- b112 4y ago[flagged]
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- shwoopdiwoop 4y agoYou are confidently incorrect.
- b112 4y agoOr mayhap I know what difference lay, between it and they?
- ojkelly 4y ago> The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
- IncRnd 4y agoYes, but the first sentence of that article reads, "Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed." According to your article, because the name of the actual person, Gustave Eiffel, is known the correct form of address is "Gustave Eiffel". Otherwise, no reader really knows who or how many people "they" references.
- mikebonnell 4y ago
- pwg 4y agoWith uBlock Origin in default "deny all javascript" mode I was able to read the whole article and did not see a single ad.
- jessriedel 4y agoAnswer 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.
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- xwdv 4y agoSucks we never got to see the copper version. I assume they knew it was eventually going to turn green?
- pvg 4y agoYep. People have been making copper statues for 5000+ years so that particular thing's been figured out for a while.
- speed_spread 4y agoThey knew a copper statue would be stripped by NJ tweekers on a foggy tuesday night
- marcodiego 4y agoThe 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?