Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi Rochambeau, Oscar Gilbert Lafayette, François Charles Lorraine, and Louis François Lorraine. Bartholdi broached the idea of a massive statue. Bartholdi's design approved on, the Union Franco-Americaine raised more than 1 million francs throughout France for the building of the statue. In 1879, Bartholdi was awarded design patent for the Statue of Liberty. On 4 July 1880, the statue was formally delivered to the American minister in Paris, the event being celebrated by a great banquet. In October 1886, the structure was officially presented as the joint gift of the French and American people, and installed on Bedloe's Island in New
Conservation-restoration of the Statue of Liberty the statue had also been misaligned. The cause(s) of the misalignments are undetermined, but a few hypotheses have been suggested. The first hypothesis proposed was that Viollet le Duc—the engineer who initially worked on the project with Bartholdi and who designed the structural reinforcement of the arm and the head (displayed in 1876 at the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia) had died after having completed those two sections—and had employed engineering methods that differed significantly from those of the better-known bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, who had finished the remainder of the work on the statue, and who is generally credited for