By 9:20 on the morning of February 17th, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was 70 days from completion. On a narrow scaffold near the North Tower, a crew of iron workers was stripping wooden concrete forms from the underside of the deck, a routine task on a project that had already earned a reputation for defying the odds. The scaffold, a 5-ton traveling platform on wheels, had been built to carry men and equipment across the bridge’s underside. One set of its wheels had slipped off its support rail.

The unbalanced weight released the other two sets. The hooks and bolts that held the platform together had been undersized. That same morning, a state safety inspector had condemned the identical platform on the San Francisco side for exactly that defect. The warning never reached the crew working at the north end.

The scaffold broke loose. Tom Casey lunged for a bridge beam and caught it, dangling in midair with his pipe still clamped between his teeth. A painter named Albert Ted watched from nearby and saw the timbers and the scaffold plummet, and one red-haired man swinging from a beam bracket, the pipe still clenched in his mouth. Steelworker William Dowell lowered a rope.

Casey got his leg into the loop and was hauled up to safety. Only then did he take the pipe out of his mouth. Two other men also grabbed onto solid structure and were pulled clear. The 5-ton scaffold crashed into the safety net suspended below the bridge.

The net had been designed for human bodies, not multi-ton equipment. It held for a moment. Then it tore, with a sound witnesses compared to the crack of a machine gun, or the splintering of a picket fence. A section 2,100 feet long peeled away.

Twelve men plunged roughly 220 feet into the frigid water, entangled with the scaffold debris and the net itself. Only two survived. One was Slim Lambert, a 26-year-old championship swimmer and former cowboy and lumberjack who made about $10 a day on the bridge. Struck on the head by lumber during the fall, his only thought was survival.

He knew he had to hit the water feet first. His legs tangled in the sinking net, dragging him so deep that his ears bled. He fought free, surfaced, and was rescued by a crab fisherman whose boat happened to be near. Lambert broke his shoulder, his ribs, vertebrae in his neck, and both ankles.

He returned to work one month later, against his doctor’s orders. The other survivor, Oscar Anderson, a 51-year-old carpenter, was pulled from the water with a fractured hip, a broken leg, and massive internal injuries. Ten men died. Most of their bodies were never recovered, believed entangled in the net and swept out to sea by the tide.

The dead were Owa Anderson, Chris Anderson, William Bass, Odes Bear, Fred Demartson, Terrence Hallinan, Eldridge Hillen, Charles Lindros, Jack Norman, and Lewis Russell. Their families received no compensation beyond standard workers’ insurance. A replacement net was installed on March 3rd, and construction continued on schedule. Of the project’s 11 total deaths, 10 came in that single incident.

The bridge had been built against every expectation, starting with the site itself. The Golden Gate Strait sits at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, where the Pacific Ocean funnels through a channel only a mile and a quarter wide but up to 335 feet deep. The currents there move roughly three and a half times more water than the Mississippi River. The San Andreas Fault runs just 12 miles offshore.

Fog rolls in without warning, sometimes cutting visibility to less than 100 feet within minutes. Winds gust to 45 miles per hour. The water hovers around 50 degrees year-round, cold enough to cause hypothermia within 30 minutes. Ships passing through the strait had been running aground for decades, and the bottom was littered with wrecks.

Every engineer who studied the site in the early 1900s reached the same conclusion: a bridge across the Golden Gate was impossible. One man disagreed. Joseph Strauss, a 5-foot-3-inch bridge builder from Cincinnati, Ohio, had designed more than 400 movable bridges across America, bascule bridges and drawbridges, the kind that open and close over rivers. He had never designed a suspension bridge in his life.

In 1921, he proposed spanning the Golden Gate for $17 million with a clumsy hybrid, a cantilever with a small suspension segment bolted onto it. The press called it ugly. Engineers dismissed it. Strauss spent the next decade fighting to make it real.

Southern Pacific Railroad owned the Golden Gate Ferry Company, and a bridge would destroy their monopoly; they filed more than 2,300 lawsuits to block construction. The United States War Department feared a bombed bridge could seal the harbor. Southern Pacific finally dropped its lawsuits in 1932 after San Francisco voters responded with a mass boycott of ferry service. Financing remained impossible until November 4th, 1930, when voters in six counties approved a $35 million bond measure by a margin of nearly three to one, pledging their homes, their farms, and their businesses as collateral in the middle of the Great Depression.

Wall Street refused to buy the bonds. Then came Amadeo Peter Giannini, born in 1870, the same year as Strauss. When Giannini was seven, his father was shot dead over a one-dollar debt. The murder shaped everything that followed.

He grew up and founded the Bank of Italy in a converted saloon in 1904. After the 1906 earthquake, he set up a desk on the San Francisco docks and issued credit based on a handshake while every other bank stayed closed. He built the Bank of America into the largest bank in the nation, financing the California wine industry, Hollywood studios, and Walt Disney’s Snow White. When Strauss came to him desperate for funding, Giannini’s response was simple.

“We will take the bonds. We need the bridge. ” Bank of America purchased $6 million in bonds, breaking the logjam and making construction possible. Workers were hired through Iron Workers Union Local 377.

With national unemployment at 25 percent, the response was overwhelming. Out-of-town job seekers bought addresses and social security numbers from San Francisco residents to meet residency requirements. Former farmers, clerks, and taxi drivers claimed iron working experience. One cable supervisor, Charles Kring, later recalled that there was always somebody waiting at the base of the tower for someone to fall off so they could get a job.

Union wages ranged from $4 to $11 per day, roughly $90 to $240 in today’s money, excellent pay during the Depression. But the 30-to-40-minute climb to the work site every morning was unpaid, and the wind at the top of the towers cut through every layer of clothing a man could wear. Workers stuffed crumpled newspaper inside their jackets for insulation. Strauss knew he could not design a suspension bridge himself, so he hired Charles Alton Ellis, a mathematician from Wesleyan University who held degrees in math and Greek but had no formal engineering degree.

What Ellis lacked in credentials he made up for in raw mathematical ability. Working 12-to-14-hour days from March to June of 1930, he computed every structural calculation for the all-suspension design by hand, collaborating by telegram with Leon Moisseiff, the world’s leading authority on deflection theory, in New York. Ellis designed the elegant steel arch over Fort Point, wrote specifications for all 10 construction contracts, and submitted 10 volumes of hand calculations. In November of 1931, Strauss ordered Ellis to take a vacation.

Three days before Ellis was scheduled to return, he received a letter that said, “Do not come back. ” He was fired, officially for wasting money on telegrams. Unable to find other work during the Depression, Ellis continued working on the bridge calculations for free, 70 hours per week, submitting his ten volumes to the project without payment. When the Golden Gate Bridge opened on May 27th, 1937, Ellis was neither invited nor mentioned.

Strauss removed every reference to him from the official report. A plaque honoring Ellis was not installed on the bridge until 2012, 75 years after it opened. Construction officially began on January 5th, 1933. Workers started by excavating 3.

25 million cubic feet of earth for the massive anchorages, blasting bedrock with dynamite and removing debris with high-pressure water hoses exerting 500 pounds of hydraulic pressure. Six pilot holes, each containing 200 pounds of dynamite, blasted the foundation. Separate concrete batching plants were built on each shore specifically for the project. Wet concrete was delivered across the access roads in trucks carrying approximately 5.

2 cubic yards per load. For the anchorages, it was poured through long tubes called elephant trunks into 12-foot-thick blocks laced with reinforcing steel, at rates reaching 120 cubic yards per hour. Once the work started, the pumping could not stop, or the materials would not set properly. In total, 389,000 cubic yards of concrete would be poured across the entire project, and each anchorage weighed 60,000 tons.

But the real battle was the South Pier, located 1,125 feet from the San Francisco shore in open water. It would be the first bridge foundation ever constructed in the open ocean. Pacific Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon, won the contract for $2,935,000. Their first task was building an 1,100-foot timber access trestle from Fort Point out to the pier site.

The Pacific Ocean destroyed it three times in five months. On August 14th, 1933, the SS Sidney M. Hauptman, a McCormick Steamship Line vessel bound for Portland, lost its way in thick fog and plowed directly into the nearly completed trestle. Four hundred feet of timber access road vanished in minutes, one month of work gone.

Crews rebuilt it. In October 1933, high seas destroyed three of the five completed fender sections along with the trestle end, sweeping construction equipment into the sea. Crews rebuilt again. Then on December 13th, 1933, a two-day southwest gale wrecked 800 feet of the trestle, leaving only the 300 feet nearest the shore intact.

The total delay from all three disasters was approximately five months. The trestle was finally repaired by March 8th, 1934, and the real underwater work began. In the 1930s, divers wore hard hat diving suits with surface-supplied air. Portable air tanks had not been invented yet.

A diver’s life depended entirely on continuous pumping of air through a long hose to the surface. The Gate’s vicious tidal currents allowed only four 20-minute dive windows per day, when the tides changed and the currents briefly slackened. Some accounts put the total usable working time at just one hour and fifteen minutes across an entire day. Chief Diver Chris Hansen and Diver Bob Patching worked in near zero visibility, feeling their way through murky water while tides bashed rocks and dragged debris through the darkness.

Patching later recalled that at 50 feet, the atmospheric pressure doubled, strong enough to pin a man against a wall so he could not move. Despite the danger, men flocked to the underwater work. In Depression-era America, any steady, well-paid job was a godsend. The divers guided 40-ton steel forms into position entirely by touch, connected wire detonator leads to underwater bomb heads, and smoothed the seafloor with 500-pound hydraulic pressure hoses.

When underwater blasts detonated, the force threw dozens of fish out of the water onto the south shore, and the workers held a fish fry that night. The original plan called for a pneumatic caisson to be sunk inside the fender structure. But after the repeated disasters, engineers made a critical decision in mid-construction: they converted the fender itself into a cofferdam. The workers called it the giant bathtub.

The fender was an elliptical reinforced concrete structure measuring 300 feet along the channel axis by 155 feet across, roughly the size of a football field. Its walls tapered from approximately 40 feet thick at the deepest base to 10 feet at the waterline, rising 15 feet above the surface, with a total weight approaching 130,000 tons of concrete. On November 27th, 1934, workers pumped out 9. 41 million gallons of seawater from inside the fender.

The pumps ran continuously for days. As the water level dropped, the pressure on the fender walls from the outside ocean increased enormously, and engineers watched for cracks. If the walls had failed, the Pacific would have flooded the enclosure in minutes, drowning anyone inside. The walls held.

When the water finally drained, fish flopped on the exposed serpentine bedrock. University of California, Berkeley geologist Andrew Lawson inspected the rock and declared that when struck with a hammer, it rang like steel. On December 3rd, 1934, chief diver Chris Hansen descended an inspection well to 107 feet alongside pier superintendent Jack Graham and resident engineer Russell Cone to inspect the completed bedrock foundation. They found it ground to a true plane within 1/32 of an inch.

The South Pier, the most expensive and most dangerous single element of the entire project, was finished to its final height of 44 feet above water by January 3rd, 1935. The tower work began. McClintic Marshall Corporation, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel, won the superstructure contract for $10,494,000, the same company that had fabricated steel for the Empire State Building just four years earlier. They erected the two main towers using creeper derricks mounted on traveler trusses that climbed the towers in stages, advancing upward as each new course of prefabricated steel cells was riveted into place.

Each tower contained approximately 600,000 rivets and 22,200 tons of steel. The towers rose 746 feet above the water, making them the tallest bridge towers in the world, taller than a 60-story building. The steel was fabricated at Bethlehem Steel plants in Pottstown and Steelton, Pennsylvania, shipped by rail to Philadelphia, transferred to barges, sent through the Panama Canal to Alameda, California, and lightered by barge to the bridge site. The non-stop armada of barges delivering sand, gravel, cement, and steel resembled a wartime supply operation.

The same four-man rivet gangs that built skyscrapers in Manhattan built the Golden Gate towers. The heater operated a small portable forge to bring rivets to approximately 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. He tossed the glowing rivet through the air to the catcher, who snagged it in a metal can, sometimes across distances of 70 feet. The riveter drove the rivet home with a pneumatic air hammer, while the bucker-up held a bar against the manufactured head.

Workers inside the hollow tower cells described the sound as deafening. In 1934, something went wrong inside those tower cells. The steel arrived from Bethlehem coated in lead-based primer paint. When glowing rivets struck the primer, the paint released toxic fumes in the enclosed space.

Within weeks, 60 men were hospitalized with lead poisoning. Workers lost hair and teeth. They could not breathe deeply. One worker, Whitey Penela, described the conditions as horrifying.

Strauss responded immediately. He ordered Bethlehem Steel to change the paint formula and contacted the E. D. Bullard Company of San Francisco to develop protective equipment.

Bullard had invented the hard boiled hat in 1919, made from steamed canvas, glue, a leather brim, and black paint, with the world’s first internal suspension system inspired by the World War I doughboy helmet. For the Golden Gate Bridge, Bullard modified the hard hat for construction work and designed the company’s first supplied air respirator: a hard hat fitted with a canvas hood, a glass viewing window, and compressed fresh air pumped in from the bridge structure. The Golden Gate Bridge became the first designated hard hat area in American history. Resident engineer Russell Cone enforced immediate dismissal for anyone who refused to wear one, no exceptions.

The Bullard company remains family owned today, five generations later, and still supplies hard hats to Golden Gate Bridge maintenance workers, their longest standing customer. By the summer of 1935, both towers stood completed and ready for the cables. John A. Roebling’s Sons Company of Trenton, New Jersey, the same firm that built the Brooklyn Bridge cables in 1883, won the cable contract with a bid of $5,855,000, beating U.

S. Steel. The Depression had forced Roebling to lay off half its workforce. The Golden Gate contract restored 2,000 jobs in New Jersey and 500 in California.

The cable work was unlike anything Roebling had ever attempted. Each of the two main cables would contain 27,572 individual galvanized steel wires, each roughly the width of a pencil, with a tensile strength of 235,000 pounds per square inch, 80,000 miles of wire total, enough to circle the equator three times. Cable spinning began in October 1935. Before a single wire could be spun, workers had to string temporary catwalks between the towers.

These narrow footbridges, barely wide enough for two men to pass, hung from cables strung across the strait and swayed in every gust of wind. Workers crossed them daily at heights of over 500 feet above the water, carrying tools with nothing below them but fog and the Pacific. The catwalks became the spinning platforms from which crews would weave the bridge’s lifeline. Roebling had been contracted to finish in 14 months and introduced several innovations that shattered all previous records.

Double spinning wheels carried two wire loops per trip instead of one. A mid-span transfer station meant carriages only traveled halfway across the bay, swapped wires with an opposing carriage, and returned, eliminating dead return time. Four carriages operated simultaneously, two per cable, and eventually six wires spun at once, color-coded to prevent confusion. The result was staggering.

Where the George Washington Bridge had achieved just 61 tons of wire per day per cable in 1931, the Golden Gate reached 271 tons per day per cable, a 4. 4 times improvement. Each spinning wheel crossed the half span in just six and a half minutes. Crews laid 1,000 miles of wire per 8-hour shift.

On May 20th, 1936, the spinning wheel was decorated with flags as it pulled the last wire across. Roebling finished in 6 months and 9 days, 8 months ahead of schedule, four times faster than anyone had predicted. The contract had included a penalty clause for every day over deadline. It was never even discussed.

After spinning, hydraulic jacks applying 4,000 pounds per square inch through 12 hydraulic rams compressed the 27,572 wires into a finished cable diameter of 36 and 3/8 inches, the thickest bridge cable ever built. Each cable weighed approximately 12,000 tons and stretched 7,650 feet in length, resting in 150-ton cast steel saddles atop each tower. At the anchorages, each weighing 60,000 tons, the strands splayed into 61 individual strand shoes connected to steel eye bars embedded in the concrete mass. Each cable exerts 63 million pounds of pull on its anchorage.

With deck construction beginning in mid-1936, Strauss introduced the most expensive safety innovation in construction history. A safety net manufactured by the J. L. Stewart Company cost $130,000, roughly two and a half million dollars in today’s money, spent entirely on protecting workers.

No construction project in America had ever invested anything close to that amount on safety. The net measured 3,000 feet long by 25 feet wide, made of half-inch Manila rope woven into 6-inch squares. It extended 10 feet wider than the bridge on each side and 15 feet past each end, suspended roughly 15 feet below the deck. At the time, the accepted rule in major construction was one worker killed per million dollars spent.

On a $35 million project, that meant 35 expected deaths. Strauss intended to beat those odds. The net was not his only innovation. Workers received glare-free aviator goggles against Pacific reflections, special hand and face creams against the constant wind, carefully formulated diets to fight dizziness at extreme heights, and even sauerkraut juice dispensed as a hangover cure.

Nineteen men were saved by the net. They formed an informal club called the Halfway to Hell Club. The name came from iron worker slang. When a man fell to his death from a bridge, they said he had gone to hell.

The men who fell and were caught said they had only fallen halfway to hell. The club was formalized in December 1936 at St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. The first man saved was carpenter George B.

Murray, thrown off on October 17th, 1936, when a steel conveyor car lost control in heavy wind. Another worker, Ulysses S. Brown, fell alongside Murray in the same incident. Both bounced in the net and climbed back up to work.

The most famous member was Al Zampa, who fell on October 19th, 1936 in thick fog and flipped backward three times during a 60-foot drop, but the net on the Marin end sagged too close to the ground, and he hit the rocks, fracturing four vertebrae. Zampa spent 12 weeks in a steel back brace, then walked across an unpainted girder to prove he had not lost his nerve. He lived to 95. California later named the new Carquinez Bridge the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge in his honor.

Another member, Pete Patterson, the 11th to join the club, bounced several times on the cord and simply climbed back up to his work. A famous Associated Press photograph taken December 14th, 1936 shows six members posing near the San Francisco side. Some workers became so confident in the net that they had to be threatened with dismissal to stop them from deliberately diving into it for thrills. For three years and eight months of construction, not a single worker died on the Golden Gate Bridge.

That record ended on October 21st, 1936, when Kermit Moore, age 23, was killed when a pin atop a traveling derrick broke, dropping a heavy girder that struck him. Then came the morning of February 17th, 1937, and the collapse of the stripping platform, which took ten more lives with it. One of the most recognizable features of the Golden Gate Bridge almost never happened. The steel arrived from Bethlehem coated in a burnt red orange anti-corrosive primer.

Irving Foster Morrow, the UC Berkeley trained consulting architect who had designed the tower openings, the Art Deco street lamps, and the pedestrian railings, noticed the primer’s striking appearance while commuting by ferry, and saw how it stood out against the fog, the green hills, and the blue water. Morrow championed the color over fierce opposition and wrote a 29-page report arguing that this tone was luminous, underwent atmospheric changes with great beauty, and was prominent without insistence. He called black a dead weight incompatible with grace. The Navy had wanted the bridge painted in black and yellow stripes.

The Army had wanted red and white candy cane stripes. Morrow won. The color, later called international orange, became one of the most recognized colors in architecture. Before the South Anchorage concrete was poured, Strauss placed a brick from his alma mater’s demolished McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati inside the forms.

It remains embedded in the anchorage to this day. On April 19th, 1937, the roadway was completed. Edwin “Iron Horse” Stanley, the man who had driven the very first rivet on the project years earlier, ceremonially drove the last gold rivet on April 27th. The gold rivet was purely symbolic; it was replaced with a steel rivet minutes later.

On May 27th, pedestrian day, 200,000 people walked, ran, and even roller skated across the new bridge, paying 25 cents each. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House, and the Golden Gate Bridge officially opened to vehicle traffic. In the first hours, 1,800 cars crossed. By midnight, 32,300 vehicles and 19,350 pedestrians had paid tolls.

The bridge was completed ahead of schedule and $1. 3 million under its original $35 million budget. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world, a record it held for 27 years. The bonds were fully retired in 1971, paid entirely from toll revenue: $35 million in principal plus $39 million in interest, all from drivers crossing the bridge.

But the men who made it possible did not share in the celebration. Charles Ellis, the man who actually designed the bridge, was never credited during his lifetime. He died on August 22nd, 1949, teaching structural engineering at Purdue University. Whether he ever saw the completed Golden Gate Bridge before his death is unknown.

Joseph Strauss disappeared for more than six months during construction without explanation, divorced his long-time wife, married a young singer, and after the bridge opened, resigned from the district and moved to Arizona. He suffered a heart attack and died on May 16th, 1938, just 11 days before the first anniversary of his bridge. He was 68. Leon Moisseiff, the Latvian-born theorist whose deflection calculations made the Golden Gate possible, pushed that same theory too far.

Three years after the Golden Gate opened, Moisseiff designed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, replacing the specified 25-foot-deep trusses with 8-foot plate girders to save money. The bridge was lighter and cheaper, but fatally flexible, earning the nickname Galloping Gertie because the roadway undulated visibly in moderate wind. On November 7th, 1940, just four months after opening, Galloping Gertie twisted apart in 42-mph winds and collapsed into Puget Sound. The footage is still shown to every engineering student in the world.

Moisseiff’s reputation was destroyed. He died three years later, a broken man. The collapse triggered an immediate panic about the Golden Gate. Russell Cone inspected the bridge and confirmed similar wind-induced motion.

In a 1951 windstorm with 69-mph winds, the Golden Gate roadway rippled six feet, and the bridge was closed for the first time in its history. A lateral bracing retrofit from 1953 to 1954 added so much steel that it made the deck too heavy for the planned second deck that would have carried rail service to Marin County. Moisseiff’s theory shaped Bay Area transit for decades. Today, the bridge carries over 40 million vehicles per year.

The Bullard company still makes its hard hats. The Roebling cables still hold, though inspectors have found corrosion in the outer wires that requires constant monitoring. The original international orange paint is reapplied continuously by a crew of painters who never stop; by the time they finish one end of the bridge, the other end needs repainting. And every rivet driven by those four-man gangs in 1935 and 1936, heated to 1,900 degrees, tossed through the air, and hammered home 746 feet above the Pacific, is still in place.

All 1. 2 million of them.