“So the National Parks Service called upon Bell Labs to help.”
In 1986 the statue’s 31 tons of copper skin was corroding through, and new copper would have stood out bright brown against the green. Bell Labs peeled the patina-covered roof off its 1941 Murray Hill building and sent it over. Scrapings from the old roof became a spray concealer, and Bell got statue plates to study how its own copper network corroded. The phone company had the most copper in the country, so it got the call.