A living light sculpture
CDG
48˚ 51’ 32” N | 2˚ 17’ 40” E
CDGE10037*
In the final scenes of 1968’s dystopian Planet of the Apes, viewers learn the ‘planet’ is Earth after human civilization has disappeared. The proof? The Statue of Liberty’s raised torch above a fragment of the monument in coastal surf. It remains a seminal moment in science fiction cinema. © Vast Compass, 2025.
Keepers of the Flame and a monumental chandelier
Light was an essential component of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty from the beginning, symbolically as well as literally. When the colossus was conceived as Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia spotlights were meant to stream from oculi between her headscarf and hair. With Libertas, the light source moved to the torch, and the band between the statue’s hair and crown became a row of 25 openings, now glazed windows.
In Emma Lazarus’ dedicatory poem, The New Colossus, now inscribed in bronze on the statue’s pedestal, light is mentioned multiple times.
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning
…
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome
…
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
—Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus
La Flamme de la Liberté
CDGE10036*
The Flame of Liberty is a scale replica from atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty, displayed on the right bank at Place d’Alma. It was created and gifted to the city in 1987 to commemorate the International Herald Tribune’s 100th year of publishing its English-language newspaper in Paris. 10 years later the flame became an unofficial memorial to Princess Diana of Wales after her death in the traffic tunnel near Pont d’Alma in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. In 2013 The New York Times purchased the International Herald Tribune. Three years later the Paris offices were closed, bringing to an end a romantic and storied era in international publishing. In 2018 a portion of Place d’Alma was renamed Place Diana Princesse de Galles in memory of the globally beloved ‘Princess of the People’.
A replica, gleaming in the darkness
The torch gleaming above New York Harbor today is a replica because openings in the original’s base allowed rain and snow to degrade its structural integrity. A replacement with its flame gilt in 24K gold was raised in1984. Flying into La Guardia airport at night sometimes affords a glimpse of the golden torch gleaming in the darkness—it’s a sight I always hope to glimpse.
By the 1980s the original torch was deteriorating due its design which exposed it to the elements. Photo credit: Ellis Island Foundation.
Beginning in 2019, the original torch has been on display in the Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island. Photo credit: Cynthia Shirk, iStock.
National Park Service employees who oversee upkeep of the new torch are affectionately known as Keepers of the Flame. Photo credit: Milos Krivokapic, iStock.
Copyrighted incandescence
Wired with electricity from its installation in 1886, the Statue of Liberty’s torch initially was intended to do double duty as a lighthouse headlamp, but its utility was limited and the system was taken offline in 1902. A new high-wattage array of 16 floodlights was installed in 1986 for the monument’s centenary. Alas, even with illumination, very few notice the detail of snapped chains and broken shackles on Libertas’ right foot as she steps toward freedom and out of slavery and oppression.
Having built the iron framework for the Statue of Liberty, Gustave Eiffel was certainly aware of Bartholdi’s plans to install electric light atop the colossus. And Edison’s incandescent bulb was set to play an enormous role illuminating the 1889 world’s fair. But electric grids at the time were small, expensive, and temperamental, which is why Eiffel lit his Tower 10,000 gaslights placed along its trusses and platforms. And electric blue, white, and red beacon did shine at the top—it highest-wattage array in the world.
Then, as now, Eiffel Tower at night is a beguiling site. It’s even reason enough for a photographer to schlep a tripod to the edge of the Trocadero for timed exposures of the glowing, sparkling monument. Something I’ve done multiple times at midnight, alone, while the rest of my party headed to bed! It’s always worth it, even though I can’t legally share those photos here.
Pierre Bideau, the designer of the Eiffel Tower’s modern lighting scheme called the landmark, “a monumental chandelier.” Put another way, c’est magnifique!
CDGE10037*—336 gold-hued sodium-vapor lights installed inside the structure follow a copyrighted scheme engineered by Pierre Bideau in 1985, at which time 1,290 floodlamps lighting the structure were retired—the re-design makes the monument itself a source of light in the City of Light.
CDGE10028*—More than 120 pyramid-shaped bulbs serve as the Tower’s beloved array of 20,000 ‘sparkles’, first activated at the start of the new Millennium in 1999.
CDGE13312*—Beginning at nightfall, 20,000 light bulbs sparkle for five minutes at the beginning of each hour after sunset, creating a dazzling display. A double crossbeam of light at the summit activates at the same time.
CDGE13318*—The ‘sparkles’ required more than 25 miles of wiring during installation. 300-400 bulbs are replaced every year.
A timeline of lighting the Eiffel Tower
1889
10,000 gas lights accentuate the tower’s silhouette while spotlights on the ground shine upward and a beacon burns in a glass rotunda at the summit and two mobile electric spotlights travel on rails that encircle the aerie.
1900
5,000 electric bulbs replace the gaslights to trace the Tower’s edges in ight.
1925-1936
Three sides of the Tower are emblazoned with sponsor Andre Citroen’s name in giant, luminous letters comprised of 250,000 colored lightbulbs (the ‘e’ is replaced with a clock in 1933).
1937
Six miles of fluorescent tubes installed under the first floor create a pattern of white lacework for the 1937 World’s Fair (the projects from 1925-1937 were the work of architect André Granet who married one of Gustave Eiffel’s granddaughters). Thirty marine-grade spotlights shine upward to illuminate the exterior.
1958
1,290 spotlights in trenches on all four sides of the tower light up the monument at night.
1997
The Tower hosts a Christmas tree with 30,000 lights, and then becomes a ‘countdown clock’ displaying the final 1,000 days until the new Millennium.
1999
The Tower’s beacon is updated with a cross-shaped double beam pivoting 360°. The computer-piloted system features 6000W xenon bulbs that are visible for fifty miles.
A sparkling millennium
20,000 low-power 6W bulbs are added to Pierre Bideau’s 1985 design. The sparkles activate at the beginning of each hour starting from nightfall, and light up randomly for five minutes in short bursts giving the monument a twinkly façade until 1am. If King Louis XIV and his massive collection of diamonds (nearly 6,000!) comes to mind as you watch the glittering spectacle, you’re not alone.
A canvas for commemoration
Today the Tower changes its livery for special points across the calendar—flooded in red for Chinese New Year; striped in rainbow hues to celebrate LGBTQ pride, or to commemorate acts of homophobic violence like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando; washed in blue and gold to honor of the European Union; or turned blue, white and red for Bastille Day. The Tower is a canvas for commemoration and remembering, a living light sculpture, reflecting our every day.
Celebrating Bastille Day with Victor Hugo
Allen and I certainly will never forget our evening on the Champ de Mars, celebrating Bastille Day in 2002. The theme of the evening centered on the bicentennial of author Victor Hugo’s birth and featured hot air balloons along the length of the Champ de Mars, the fabric spheres glowing with projections of the author’s words. The Tower itself was not only lighted in swaths of the tricolor, after dark it became the source of fireworks along with fusillades of sparks launched from the Trocadéro Gardens.
Victor Hugo died in 1885, even as the framework for the Statue of Liberty was being created by Gustave Eiffel’s workshop, and his engineers and architects were finalizing blueprints for the Eiffel Tower. A quote from Hugo’s seminal Les Misérables encapsulates the lifework of Gustave Eiffel particularly well.
There is nothing like a dream
to create the future.
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Victor Hugo, fascinated by photography and interested in curating a public image to his liking, sat in 1894 for photographer Étienne Carjat. He enlisted Goupil & Cie as his gallerist. Photo credit: traveler1116, iStock.
CDGE12004*—Maison de Victor Hugo is now a museum. Hugo lived in an apartment facing the elegant Place des Vosges from 1832-1848. During that time he wrote a significant portion of his novel, Les Misérables.
The marquee for Les Misérables outside the Sondheim Theatre in London’s West End, March 2023. Photo credit: Nigel Harris, iStock.
A flame that never dies
Light is among the most powerful metaphor that creators have at their disposal. In Les Mis, Hugo has Bishop Myriel give his purloined silver candlesticks to the very thief who stole them, Jean Valjean. The light of compassion and hope becomes the hero’s steady guide across the remainder of his life. In the musical’s finale, the chorus sings, “For the wretched of the earth there is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise.”
And to stay with the longest-running musical in the world for just a moment more, when theatre personalities of note die, marquee lights on the West End and Broadway (The Great Bright Way) are dimmed in tribute. Light’s absence has a powerful presence.
Which is why Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s female colossus was meant—in both its current incarnation as Liberty Enlightening the World, and its original conception as Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia—to serve as a beacon of light and hope, guiding us into the future. Inspired by that notion, Gustave Eiffel’s design for his eponymous monument likewise had headlamps atop the Tower from the very beginning.
Could the sculptor or engineer ever have dreamt that all these decades later their works would be known and loved for their ethereal beauty in the dark night as much as in the bright day?
Recommended
From Amazon
”The Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable monuments in the world, a powerful symbol of freedom and the American dream. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi not only forged this 151-foot-tall colossus in a workshop in Paris and transported her across the ocean, but battled to raise money for the statue and make her a reality.”
Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty
From Amazon
“Inspired by descriptions of the Colossus of Rhodes, the young Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi first envisioned building a monumental statue of a slave woman holding a lamp that would serve as a lighthouse for Ferdinand de Lesseps’s proposed Suez Canal. But after he failed to win this commission, and in the chaotic wake of the Franco-Prussian War, Bartholdi set off for America, where he saw the perfect site for his statue: Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.”