The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was a gift, and the two countries involved argued at length about who was paying for what.
I arrived in three hundred and fifty pieces, packed into two hundred and fourteen crates.
I used to be the colour of a new penny.
The engineer behind my inner frame also built a rather famous tower.
Green, on an island, holding up a torch.
Statue Of Liberty
The copper skin is barely two millimetres thick — about two coins — and it took roughly thirty years of weather to turn it from bright metal to green.
France paid for the statue by public subscription and the United States was to pay for the pedestal, which promptly stalled for lack of funds until Joseph Pulitzer ran a newspaper campaign and raised the money from a hundred and twenty thousand small donations. It arrived in 1885 in 350 pieces packed into 214 crates. The copper skin is barely two millimetres thick and hangs on an iron framework engineered by Gustave Eiffel, designed to flex rather than resist the wind. It was the colour of a new penny for its first three decades before oxidising to green.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #55 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #54. Next: mystery #56. Or try #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13.