A little wonder, every day

Liberty’s copper and Christ the Redeemer’s weight

Statue of Liberty, New York; source/photographer National Park Service; U.S. federal-government work, public domain in the United States. Original Commons page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statueofliberty_nps.jpg. Credit National Park Service; no edits. Downloaded 2026-10-28 at 960 × 1,439 px.

Christ the Redeemer in Rio; photograph by Carlos Esteban Oviedo, 2016; CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit Carlos Esteban Oviedo, Wikimedia Commons; link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0; no edits. Original Commons page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rio_de_Janeiro_Cristo_Redentor.jpg. Downloaded 2026-10-28 at 960 × 1,280 px.

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Statue of Liberty, New York; source/photographer National Park Service; U.S. federal-government work, public domain in the United States. Original Commons page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statueofliberty_nps.jpg. Credit National Park Service; no edits. Downloaded 2026-10-28 at 960 × 1,439 px.

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The Statue of Liberty was created by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi; engineer Gustave Eiffel designed its internal metal support. The U.S. National Park Service estimates the statue’s total weight at about 254 metric tons, of which roughly 81 metric tons are copper. So 225 metric tons of copper is an overstatement. For Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, sources give different weights: 635 metric tons from Otis and 1,145 metric tons from Brazil’s Ministry of Tourism; those sources do not explain the difference.