The historical evidence is scant, but the belief is that the Egyptians and Romans moved obelisks using the standard Egyptian method of slinging the bare stone obelisk between two pontoons which were then towed by a ship or trireme under sail and oar.
 
Millennia later other more fanciful methods were used after Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Wāli and self-proclaimed Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, offered ancient Egyptian obelisks as gifts to Britain, France and the U.S.A.
 
The gift to Britain was made in 1819 in commemoration of the victories of Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and Sir Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Although the British government welcomed the gesture, it declined to fund the expense of transporting it to London.
 
Then a pair of Alexandrian obelisks was offered to France by in 1829, one of which was shipped on a large barge, which seemed to be towed uneventfully across the Mediterranean and Atlantic around to Cherbourg by the paddle steamer Sphinx. The needle was then transported to Paris where is was erected in the Place de la Concorde in 1833. The other obelisk of the pair was left in Egypt, and in 1990 President Mitterand officially declined the gift.
 
The British obelisk remained in Alexandria until 1877 when Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a distinguished anatomist and dermatologist, sponsored its transportation to London at a cost of some £10,000 (a very considerable sum in those days). It was dug out of the sand in which it had been buried for nearly 2,000 years and was encased in a great iron cylinder, 92 feet (28 m) long and 16 feet (4.9 m) in diameter, designed by the engineer John Dixon and dubbed Cleopatra, to be commanded by Captain Carter. It had a vertical stem and stern, a rudder, two bilge keels, a mast for balancing sails, and a deck house. This acted as a floating pontoon which was to be towed to London by the ship Olga, commanded by Captain Booth.
 
On 14 October 1877, in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, the Cleopatra began wildly rolling, and the Olga sent out a rescue boat with six volunteers, but the boat capsized and all six crew were lost - named today on a bronze plaque attached to the foot of the needle's mounting stone. Captain Booth on the Olga eventually managed to get his ship next to the Cleopatra, to rescue Captain Carter and the five crew members aboard Cleopatra.
 
Captain Booth reported the Cleopatra "abandoned and sinking," but instead she drifted in the Bay until four days later she was found by Spanish trawlers, and then rescued by the Glasgow steamer Fitzmaurice and taken to Ferrol in Spain for repairs. The Master of the Fitzmaurice lodged a salvage claim of £5,000 which was negotiated down to £2,000. The William Watkins Ltd paddle tug Anglia under the command of Captain David Glue was then commissioned to tow the Cleopatra back to the Thames and she arrived on 21 January 1878 and was erected on the Victoria Embankment on 12 September. A time capsule was buried which apparently contained a set of 12 photographs of the best looking English women of the day, a box of hairpins, a box of cigars, several tobacco pipes, a set of imperial weights, a baby's bottle, some children's toys, a shilling razor, a hydraulic jack and some samples of the cable used in erection, a 3' bronze model of the monument, a complete set of British coins, a rupee, a portrait of Queen Victoria, a written history of the strange tale of the transport of the monument, plans on vellum, a translation of the inscriptions, copies of the bible in several languages, a copy of Whitaker's Almanack, a Bradshaw Railway Guide, a map of London and copies of 10 daily newspapers.
 
Two year's later when Henry Honychurch Gorringe shipped Cleopatra's Needle, an obelisk weighing 240 tons made from a 70ft single shaft of granite, from Egypt to New York City he cut a 12 feet square (3.7 m) hole in the starboard bow of the 1,367 ton cargo ship, SS Dessoug. Cannon balls were used as bearings to move the obelisk inside. She set sail on 12 June 1880 for the United States. During the voyage her propeller shaft broke and was replaced using a spare while she was under sail power 1,300 miles (2,100 km) from shore. It took 32 horses hitched in pairs to bring it from the banks of the Hudson River to Central Park, finally arriving on July 20th, 1880. Jesse B. Anthony, Grand Master of Masons in the State of New York, presided as the cornerstone for the obelisk was laid in place with full Masonic ceremony on October 2. Over nine thousand Masons paraded up Fifth Avenue from 14th Street to 82nd Street and it was estimated that over fifty thousand spectators lined the parade route. The benediction was presented by Louis C. Gerstein.