Norway Copper Mine Stone - New York City, NY
N 40° 41.439 W 074° 02.719
18T E 580665 N 4504855
This copper mine stone is located on Liberty Island near the Statue of Liberty in New York City, New York, USA.
Waymark Code: WM9A80
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 07/21/2010
Views: 28
A plaque on the stone reads as follows:
This stone from the mine that produced the copper in the Statue of Liberty was brought with the sailing ship "Sorlandet" as a gift to the United States of America from the citizens of Karmoy, Norway. July 4, 1986.
From Wikipedia:
Historical records make no mention of the source of the copper used in the Statue of Liberty. In the village of Visnes in the municipality of Karmøy, Norway, tradition holds that the copper came from the French-owned Visnes Mine. Ore from this mine, refined in France and Belgium, was a significant source of European copper in the late nineteenth century. In 1985, Bell Labs used emission spectrography to compare samples of copper from the Visnes Mines and from the Statue of Liberty, found the spectrum of impurities to be very similar, and concluded that the evidence argued strongly for a Norwegian origin of the copper. Other sources say that the copper was mined in Nizhny Tagil. The copper sheets were created in the workshops of the Gaget-Gauthier company, and shaped in the Ateliers Mesureur in the west of Paris in 1878. Funding for the copper was provided by Pierre-Eugène Secrétan.