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The Golden Gate Bridge Was Built In 1933, Its Engineer Installed A Genius Life-Saving Feature.

Jul 7, 2021

Image: Worker on Golden Gate Bridge - Labor Archives & Research Center, San Francisco State University
 
Up on the soaring heights of the Golden Gate Bridge, a workman is crossing the girders according to this article from totalpast.com. His profession is a dangerous one what with the ever-present danger of falling into the churning waters below. But the man works for an engineer who puts safety first, and one innovation in particular will keep this worker – and many others – alive.
 
The worker and his mates are used to the danger. It’s become the fashion for them to show off how unafraid they are. But Joseph Strauss, head engineer of the new bridge, wants to put paid to the idea that working on bridges needs to be a risky business. So the man tiptoes across the span of steel secure in the knowledge that Strauss has thought of everything.
 
It’s a glorious job, working on the Golden Gate Bridge. When the bridge’s completed, it’ll be renowned for its beauty. And there’ll truly be no other like it, with that graceful build and shining color setting it apart aesthetically. Beyond that, it’s a wonder of construction, a tribute to Strauss and the men who made it.
 
The mile of water that connects San Francisco Bay and the Pacific forms a formidable barrier to traffic from the north of the bay to the city of San Francisco. And it’s no surprise that someone came up with the notion of spanning it with a bridge. It wasn’t likely that that someone would be listened to, though. No, that’s because he was Joshua Norton, a clinically insane man who claimed to be emperor of the U.S.A.
 
But not too long after Norton’s 1869 idea first surfaced, it actually got some real backing. This came from Charles Crocker, a rail tycoon. And he didn’t just have some whimsical idea. No, he had a proper scheme, with figures and designs. Still, no one really wanted to listen, and the bridge remained a dream.
 
The idea didn’t really gain steam before the new century, and in 1916 civic engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy saw a proposal that tickled his fancy. Three years later, the city bigwigs said yes to at least looking into the practicalities of a bridge, and O’Shaughnessy got to work on it.
 
Though a bridge did seem like a great idea, there was the question of cost. Engineers who looked at it said it couldn’t be done for less than a cool hundred million. That was a lot of money in those days, so prospects started to fade. Until Joseph Baermann Strauss stepped up, that is. He’d do it, he claimed, at a cost of no more than $30 million.
 
Strauss was a native of Cincinnati, and he’s spent his youth in a house with a view of what’s now the John A. Roebling Bridge, the 1,000-foot span from Covington, Kentucky, to Cincinnati. It’d once been the world’s biggest bridge, unsurpassed for its suspension length. And it’s fair to say that Strauss had been inspired.
 
The future engineer didn’t grow to be as towering as his bridge, though. No, he only just scaled 5 feet. But that didn’t stop him from trying out for varsity football, which proved a painful experience. It’s said that it put him in hospital, where he lay looking at the familiar bridge and dreaming.
 
Strauss would go on to be responsible for hundreds of bridges. They were sited not just in North America but also across the world. In the space of just a year, for example, he’d built San Francisco’s Fourth Street Bridge and a bridge over the River Neva in St. Petersburg, Russia. Both were of the “bascule” type with roadways that can be raised to allow water craft to pass.
 
So there was no doubt that Strauss knew how to build a bridge. And when he showed his plans to O’Shaughnessy in 1921, alongside a budget of $27 million, the project soon had the green light. The initial idea looked very different from the finished bridge, though, taking the form of a mix of suspension and cantilever.
 
But when the press saw the plans in 1922, reporters weren’t impressed. Strauss had spent the time between the project okay and the release of the design wisely, though. He went around the municipalities of Northern California, gathering support from local politicians. So despite the design being unattractive, the authorities didn’t block it.
 
Strauss threw himself into promoting the bridge, though to be honest, the need for it had become obvious. The region’s populace had swelled, and ferries just couldn’t cut it anymore. Seething drivers waited way too long in traffic jams at the docks. So another way to get across the strait was clearly required.
 
But while the idea of the bridge had plenty of local support, the state and national governments wouldn’t back it. What federal money there was had already been spent on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. But even that wasn’t going to stop Strauss and the team working on the Golden Gate Bridge.
 
Strauss pressed on – and with a new design replacing his own. A local man, Irving Morrow, came up with the plan for a suspension bridge. When Strauss received feedback on Morrow’s proposal from the engineers he was consulting, he decided to switch. And it was Morrow’s idea to paint it orange.
 
But construction still couldn’t begin. The U.S. was gripped by the Great Depression, and technical issues and political wrangling also stalled the project. The people were by now firmly behind the idea, though. And so they voted for a $35 million bond to pay for it. That’s more than half a billion in modern money.
 
The project could at last break ground. And one of the first considerations for Strauss was safety. He planned for a strict code to protect the workers, backed by the newest advances in technology – and an innovation of his own that was genius. But it wasn’t just the people building the bridge who needed to be safe. The completed structure could also turn out to be dangerous.
 
Suspension bridges can be quite alarming if the wind gets up. They’re made to give when under pressure, and they’ll move. This is because the roads are slung from thick cables that can swing and stretch. And shortly after the Golden Gate Bridge was completed, this swinging on another U.S. bridge ran completely out of control and caused it to collapse.
 
That bridge spanned the Tacoma Narrows in Washington. The crossing had only been open for a few months before it fell down in November 1940. Winds there were blowing at about 40 mph. The span went into what are called “torsional oscillations” – in other words, it started twisting like a demented rubber band. This shook girders loose until the bridge could no longer stand.
 
So though the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t so expensive in relative terms, it had to be very well made. Building started early in 1933. And when ground was broken at Crissy Field a few weeks later, the jubilation was intense. Revelers – more than 100,000 of them – partied, and the excitement was infectious.
 
But there were a few naysayers, as a local newspaper noted. The report read, “Two hundred and fifty carrier pigeons, provided by the San Francisco Racing Pigeon Club to carry the message of groundbreaking to every corner of California, were so frightened by the surging human mass that small boys had to crawl into their compartments in the bridge replica to shoo them out with sticks.”
 
It was a huge undertaking. The cables that suspend the roadway are more than 7,600 feet long. And they’re constructed of wires not thicker than a pencil wound together into 3-feet ropes. The whole thing took up steel wire that if laid out in a line would stretch in excess of 80,000 miles. You could wrap our planet with that three times over.
 
The bridge’s site made construction difficult as well. Strong gusts and dangerous currents menaced workers. And it was huge, with a record-breaking span. The construction crew had to brave the water to create anchorages for the bridge. So danger lurked at every corner for the men who put the crossing together.
 
And danger was what the men may well have expected. Bridge-building was a tough guy’s profession, and you truly risked life and limb to do it. For every million bucks a bridge cost, builders expected to lose one life. But for Strauss, that was a price that he wasn’t willing to pay.
 
Strauss explained in a 1937 article for The Saturday Evening Post, “On the Golden Gate Bridge, we had the idea we could cheat death by providing every known safety device for workers. To the annoyance of the daredevils who loved to stunt at the end of the cables, far out in space, we fired any man we caught stunting on the job.”
 
In his book Spanning the Gate, Stephen Cassady underlined the strictness of Strauss’s safety regime, writing, “The Golden Gate was not the first big job to feature hard hats and safety lines as some have claimed. But it was the first to enforce their use with the threat of dismissal.”
 
The list of safety features was impressive. Workers donned special hard hats, designed by a local man, Edward W. Bullard. Respirators kept riveters from breathing in toxic gases. Goggles protected the men’s eyes from water glare, and there was cream to safeguard employees’ skin from the roaring winds. And if needed, a field hospital even stood ready.
 
Strauss even took care of what the men ate and drank. They had special diets to lessen the vertigo that working at heights might cause. And for those who’d overindulged the night before, there was a delicious remedy for the ensuing hangover: sauerkraut juice. The men probably didn’t get drunk too often.
 
But Strauss went beyond these measures with his own special innovation. At great cost – $130,000, which some thought way too much – he had a safety mesh slung under the span. It was “made of manila rope, 3/8 in. diameter and 6 in. square mesh” and stuck out 10 feet beyond the trusses that stiffened the roadway.
 
And the net came in more than handy. As they built the trusses, 19 of the workers fell off the bridge. Their lives were saved by the netting. After that, they formed a club among themselves – entry restricted to those who’d been saved – and called it the “Halfway-to-Hell Club.” The men might’ve resented the strict safety code, but they surely welcomed the net.
 
With the construction staff able to work quickly, unafraid of a plummet into the strait, it didn’t take too long before the bridge rose. Strauss noted, “It took two decades and 200 million words to convince the people that the bridge was feasible, then only four years and $35 million to put the concrete and steel together.”
 
The people of San Francisco were delighted with their new bridge. When the public were first allowed to use it in May 1937, for a “pedestrian day,” they flocked to walk over the strait. Perhaps 200,000 turned up to make the journey. Some competed for a series of firsts: first baby carriage over the bridge, first roller-skater, first runner.
 
And it’s true to say that the bridge was safely constructed, though there was a scare some 50 years later. The crowd of 300,000 who turned up to celebrate the structure’s golden anniversary were jammed on the bridge. And the mass of revelers made the roadway dip seven feet in the center. But while this must’ve been alarming, it wasn’t totally unexpected.
 
Bridges as big as the Golden Gate can typically experience “deflections” – or dips – as big as 10 feet. A spokeswoman for the bridge district told local paper The Mercury News in 2012 that it’d been constructed to safely shift 27 feet horizontally and 16 feet up and down.
 
Tipping under weight isn’t the only hazard the bridge has presented, though. Back in the 1930s, it wasn’t fully known how dangerous lead is to humans and the wider world. This is why it ended up forming most of the content of the bridge’s paintwork. And it took 30 years to rid the Golden Gate of its lead paint. Today, it’s covered in paint with a zinc base.
 
The bridge’s a massive piece of work, with the main span of 4,200 feet setting a world record in its day – and one that lasted until 1981. Today’s longest bridge is the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, which is a 105-mile railway viaduct in Jiangsu, China. That’s a bit longer than the Golden Gate’s 1.7 miles!
 



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