Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia Bartholdi designed and built "Liberty Enlightening the World", which became known as the Statue of Liberty, and placed it in New York Harbor in the United States. Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, also known as Progress Carrying the Light to Asia or pedestal committee; was a plan for a colossal neoclassical sculpture. Designed in the late 1860s by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, the project was to be a statue of a robed female figure bearing a torch at the entryway of the Suez Canal in Port Said, Egypt. Both the khedive
Statue of Liberty the Eiffel factory in the nearby Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret. The change in structural material from masonry to iron allowed Bartholdi to change his plans for the statue's assembly. He had originally expected to assemble the skin on-site as the masonry pier was built; instead he decided to build the statue in France and have it disassembled and transported to the United States for reassembly in place on Bedloe's Island. In a symbolic act, the first rivet placed into the skin, fixing a copper plate onto the statue's big toe, was driven by United States Ambassador to France Levi P.