Anyone who says one person can’t make a difference has never heard the story of the Statue of Liberty.

Statue of Liberty (Image Credit: auer1816 [Flickr])

A stunning photo of the Statue of Liberty at sunset (Image Credit: Grufnik [Flickr])

BIRTHDAY GIRL
In 1865 a young French sculptor named Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi [wiki] went to a banquet near the town of Versailles, where he struck up a conversation with Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent historian.

De Laboulaye, a great admirer of the United States, observed that the country’s centennial was approaching in 1876. He thought it would be a good idea for France to present America with a gift to commemorate the occasion. But what? Bartholdi proposed a giant statue of some kind … and thought about it for the next six years.

COMING TO AMERICA
By 1871, Bartholdi had most of the details worked out in his mind: The American monument would be a colossal statue of a woman called "Liberty Enlightening the World." It would be paid for by the French people, and the pedestal that it stood on would be financed and built by the Americans.

Illustration from U.S. Patent D11023, Filed Jan 2, 1870 by Bartholdi.

The idea excited him so much that he booked a passage on a ship and sailed to New York to drum up support for it. As he entered New York Harbor, Bartholdi noticed a small, 12-acre piece of land near Ellis Island, called Bedloe’s Island. He decided it was the perfect spot for his statue.

Bartholdi spent the next five months traveling around the U.S. and getting support for the statue. Then he went back to France, where the government of Emperor Napoléon III (Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew) was openly hostile to the democratic and republican ideals celebrated by the Statue of Liberty. They would have jailed him if he’d spoken of the project openly - so Bartholdi kept a low profile until 1874, when the Third Republic was proclaimed after Napoléon III’s defeat in the Franco-Russian Prussian War.

Bartholdi went back to work. He founded a group called the Franco-American Union, comprised of French and American supporters, to help raise money for the statue. He also recruited Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, soon to become famous for the Eiffel Tower, to design the steel and iron framework to hold the statue up.

A WOMAN IN A HURRY
By now the centennial was only two years away. It was obvious that the huge statue couldn’t be designed, financed, built, shipped, and installed on Bedloe’s Island in time for the big celebration. But Bartholdi kept going anyway.

Raising the $400,000 he estimated was needed to build the statue in France wasn’t easy. Work stopped frequently when cash ran out, and Bartholdi and his craftspeople missed deadline after deadline. Then in 1880 the Franco-American Union came up with the idea of holding a "Liberty" lottery to raise funds. That did the trick.

Construction of Lady Liberty’s left hand holding the tablet (Image Credit: Album des Travaux de Construction de la Statue Colossale de la Liberte destinee au Port de New-York, 1883 at Statue of Liberty National Monument)

Statue of Liberty being built in Bartholdi’s studio (left, source: NYC Architecture). Head of the Statue of Liberty, exhibited at the 1878 Paris Exposition (right, source: Statue of Liberty Head).

In the United States, things were harder. There was some enthusiasm, but not as much as in France. It was, after all, a French statue … and not everyone was sure the country needed a French statue, even for free. The U.S. Congress did vote unanimously to accept the gift from France … but it didn’t provide any funding for the pedestal, and neither did the city of New York. Neither did the state.

By now, the Statue of Liberty’s right hand and torch were finished, so Bartholdi shipped it to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and had it put on display. For a fee of 50¢, visitors could climb a 30-foot steel ladder up the side of the hand and stand on the balcony surrounding the torch. Two years later the statue’s head was displayed in a similar fashion in Paris, giving people a chance to climb up into the head and peek out from the windows in the crown. But while events like these generated a lot of enthusiasm, they didn’t raise as much money as Bartholdi hoped for.

LADY’S MAN
In 1883 the U.S. Congress voted down a fresh attempt to provide $100,000 toward the cost of the pedestal; the vote so outraged Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, that he launched a campaign in the pages of his newspaper to raise the money.

"The Bartholdi statue will soon be on its way to enlighten the world," he told his readers, "more appropriate would be the gift of a statue of parsimony than a statue of liberty, if this is the appreciation we show of a friendly nation’s sentiment and generosity." After two months of non-stop haranguing, he managed to raise exactly $135.75 of the $200,000 needed to build the pedestal.

NOTHING TO STAND ON
In June of 1884, work on the statue itself was finished. Bartholdi had erected it in a courtyard next to his studio in Paris. The original plan had been to dismantle it as soon as it was completed, pack it into shipping crates, and send it to the United States, where it would be installed atop the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island …

But the pedestal wasn’t even close to being finished. So Bartholdi left the statue standing in the courtyard.

In September 1884 work on the pedestal ground to a halt when the project ran out of money. An estimated $100,000 was still needed. When it appeared that New York was coming up empty-handed, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco began to compete to have the Statue of Liberty built in their cities.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED …
Furious, Joseph Pulitzer decided to try again. In the two years since his first campaign, his newspaper’s circulation had grown from a few thousand readers to more than 100,000. He hoped that now his paper was big enough to make a difference. For more than five months, beginning on March 16, 1885, Pulitzer beseeched his readers day after day to send in what they could. No reader was too humble, no donation too small; every person who contributed would receive a mention in the newspaper. "The statue is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America," he told readers, "but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America. Take this appeal to yourself personally."

This time, the campaign began to get results: By March 27, 2,535 people had contributed $2,359.67. Then on April 1, Pulitzer announced that the ship containing the crated parts of the statue would leave France aboard the French warship Isere on May 8th. The excitement began to build, prompting a new wave of giving. By April 15, he’d raised $25,000, and a month later another $25,000 - enough money to restart work on the pedestal.

At this point, the makers of Castoria laxative stepped forward to help. They offered to chip in $25,000, "provided that for the period of one year, you permit us to place across the top of the pedestal the word ‘Castoria.,’" they wrote. "Thus art and science, the symbol of liberty to man, and of health to his children, would more closely enshrined in the hearts of our people." The offer of a laxative for Miss Liberty was politely declined; Castoria kept its money.

ON A ROLL
By now the race to fund the pedestal had captivated the entire country, and money really began to pour in. People sent in pennies, nickels and dimes … and they also began buying copies of the World each day to keep track of the race; by the time the dust settled, the World’s circulation had exploded to the point that it was the most widely-read newspaper in the entire Western hemisphere.

On June 19, the fundraising passed the $75,000 mark; on July 22, the Isere arrived in New York Harbor and began unloading its cargo; bringing the excitement - and the giving - to its peak.

Finally on August 11, Pulitzer’s goal was met. "ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! TRIUMPHANT COMPLETION OF THE WORLD‘S FUND FOR THE LIBERTY PEDESTAL." More than 120,000 people had contributed to the effort, for an average donation of about 83¢ per person.

Work on the pedestal now moved at a steady clip; by April 1886 it was finished, and the pieces of the statue itself were put into place. The internal steel and iron framework structure went up first; then the pieces of the statue’s outer skin were attached one by one. Finally on October 28, 1886, at a ceremony headed by President Grover Cleveland, the statue was opened to the public … more than ten years after the original July 4, 1876 deadline.

The statue was late - very late. But better late than never.

The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (1886) by Edward Moran.

1. Magnitogorsk

In Magnitogorsk, fishermen often sell their catch from the polluted Ural River to market rather than consume it themselves (Image Credit: Gerd Ludwig Photography)

Whether it was for guns, tanks, ships, railroads, or bridges, Stalin, whose name means "Man of Steel," knew he needed one thing above all else for his 1920s Soviet Union: steel. He also knew that to the east, in the southern Ural Mountains, there was a unique geologic oddity named Magnitka - an entire mountain of pure iron ore, the key ingredient for steel. In 1929, Stalin decreed that a city, "Magnitogorsk" [wiki] (see what he did there?), be built from scratch around said mountain to mine the ore and turn it into steel.

So began one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken. With expertise provided by Communist sympathizer from the West, a ready-made city for 450,000 inhabitants was constructed in about five years. Of course, Stalin saved on labor costs by having the heavy lifting done by political prisoners. In fact, 30,000 people died in the effort. Steel production began in 1934, but shortly after World War II the iron ore ran out and the city’s economy collapsed.

2. The Baltic - White Sea Canal

Political prisoners from the gulags digging for the canal.

(Image Credit: Memorial Italia)

Though forced, workers at the canal was serenaded by an orchestra.

(Image Credit: Alexander Rodchenko [Wikipedia])

Ever the optimist, this time Stalin wanted connect the Baltic Sea, with its key port of Leningrad, to the White Sea’s port of Archangelsk. The idea was that he could move the Soviet navy back and forth. So Stalin had more political prisoners sent to work on the canal - there was a seemingly endless supply from the gulags - and after a few brutal years it was completed in 1933. Disease, poor nutrition, and brutal conditions took a huge toll, though, with as many as 250,000 of the slave laborers dead by the end of it.

Portions of canal is too shallow for anything larger than a small barge.

(Image Credit: Thomasz Kizny, Forced Labor Camps)

The icing on the cake? The canal was completely useless when finished. For most of its length it was too shallow to admit anything larger than a small barge. Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot.

3. The World’s Largest Hydrofoil

Ekranoplan [wiki], named the Caspian Sea Monster by CIA analysts

(Image Credit: Wikipedia)

The world’s largest hydrofoil wasn’t really a hydrofoil at all. In fact, it was one of a series of unique machines called "ground effect" vehicles [wiki] built by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s.

The Soviets had a monopoly on this fascinating technology, relying on a little-known principle of physics - the "ground effect" - in which a dense cushion of air hugging the ground can provide more lift to a vehicle than air at higher altitudes.

Hovering about 3 - 12 feet above the ground, these vehicles resemble Luke Skywalker’s levitating craft from Star Wars, and far more fuel-efficient than airplanes, helicopters, hydrofoil, or cars. And at 58 feet, the largest of these, the "Caspian Sea Monster" was given its distinctive name after CIA analyst saw it at the Caspian port of Baku in photos taken by spy satellites. The craft traveled at speeds of up to 240 mph, had a swiveling nose cone for cargo loading, and could carry up to as many as 150 passengers.

4. Avant-garde Design for a Funkier Parliament

Tatlin’s Monument (Image Credit: Plates from the A.V. Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture, in Cooke, C. et al (1990) Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde [Wikipedia])

Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (1885 - 1953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International [wiki] was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller assembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance.

Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party’s executives. The third level - a sphere rotating once daily - would house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built.

5. A Palace for the People

In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered that the largest Orthodox Christian cathedral in the world - 335 feet high, the product of 44 years of backbreaking labor by Russian peasants - be dynamited so he could build an enormous "Palace of the Soviets [wiki]," to celebrate the Communist Party.

Palace of the Soviets, a 1934 concept by Iofan, Schuko, and Gelreikh

Stalin wished to replace the church with a new structure taller than the Empire State Building, and capped with a gilded statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty, but the "Man of Steel’s" mad scheme never came to fruition.

Although the first phase was completed (the dynamiting was the easy bit), the construction never took place as necessary resources were diverted to fighting World War II. After Stalin died, his successor - Nikita Khrushchev - ordered a large swimming pool built where the cathedral had stood. Old women who remembered the original cathedral could be seen standing at the edge of the swimming pool, praying to forgotten icons.

Recently Yury Luzhkov, Moscow’s autocratic mayor, tried to make up for Stalin’s mess by ordering the construction of a tacky reproduction of the original cathedral using precast concrete.

6. The World’s Largest Hydrogen Bomb

Tsar Bomba-type casing on display.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, so it’s no wonder that Stanley Kubrick’s absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove is actually premised on fact. The strange truth here was that Nikita Khrushchev and company had actually been plotting to build a "doomsday" device. The plan called for a large cargo ship anchored off the Soviet Union’s east coast to be loaded with hundreds of hydrogen bombs. If at any point the radiation detectors aboard the ship measured a certain amount of atmospheric radiation, indicating that the Soviet Union had been attacked, the bombs would detonate.

Mushroom cloud of the Tsar Bomba test detonation.

Soviet scientists persuaded Khrushchev to drop this mad scheme. He did, however, order the construction of the world’s largest nuclear bomb in 1961, the so-called "Tsar Bomba [wiki]" ("King of Bombs"), which weighed in at about 100 megatons - equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. The largest nuclear test involved a smaller version of "Tsar Bomba" that measured somewhere between 50 and 57 megatons - the Soviets weren’t sure themselves.

7. World’s Largest Icebreaker, the Yamal

And it’s the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker at that! Confronted with the world’s largest piece of ice - the Arctic Ocean - the Soviet had no intention of letting nature stand in their way. So, they came up with a simple solution: the world’s largest icebreakers.

The first included the Lenin and Arktika class of nuclear-powered icebreakers, introduced in 1959 and 1975, respectively. The arktika icebreakers had not one but two nuclear reactors, powering 75,000-horsepower engines.

Yamal, world’s largest icebreaker (Image Credit: ikzm-d.de)

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