Which country gave the Statue of Liberty to the USA?

France, as a gift marking the centenary of American independence and, rather more pointedly, as a piece of domestic French politics - the campaigners behind it were republicans arguing against their own monarchists, and a monument to liberty in America was a safe way to make the case at home.

The engineering is more interesting than the sculpture. The skin is copper barely two and a half millimetres thick - about the thickness of two pennies - hammered into shape and hung on an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel, three years before his tower. It is essentially a curtain-wall building: the skin carries no load and is attached by flexible saddles so it can move independently, which lets the whole statue sway in wind and expand in heat without tearing.

It arrived in 350 pieces in 214 crates, and the Americans had not built the pedestal, having failed to raise the money. Joseph Pulitzer ran a campaign in his newspaper printing the name of every donor however small, and 120,000 people gave, mostly less than a dollar. The copper was originally the colour of a new penny and took about thirty years to weather to green - which was debated at the time, with some arguing it should be painted.