The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate from the opening into the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. It connects the city of San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County as part of US Highway 101 and State Route 1.
The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension bridge span in the world when it was completed in 1937 and has become an internationally recognized symbol of San Francisco and the United States. In the 70 years since completion, the span length has been surpassed by seven other bridges. It still has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the United States, after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.
Before the bridge was built, the only practical short route from San Francisco to what is now Marin County was by boat, through the interior of the San Francisco Bay. Ferry service began as early as 1820, with regularly scheduled service beginning in the 1840s for purposes of transporting water to San Francisco from what is now Marin County. The Sausalito Land and Ferry Company service launched in 1868, which eventually became the Golden Gate Ferry Company, a Southern Pacific Railroad subsidiary, the largest ferry operation in the world by the late 1920s. Once for railroad passengers and customers only, Southern Pacific's automobile ferries became very profitable and important to the regional economy. The ferry crossing between the Hyde Street Pier at the foot of Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco and Sausalito in Marin County took approximately 20 minutes and cost $1.00 per vehicle, a price later reduced to compete with the new bridge. The trip from the Ferry Building took twenty-seven minutes. Many wanted to build a bridge to connect San Francisco to Marin County. San Francisco was the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Because it did not have a permanent link with communities around the bay, the city’s growth rate was below the national average. Many experts said a bridge couldn’t be built across the 6,700-ft.-wide (2,042 m) strait. It had strong, swirling tides and currents, with water 335 ft (102 m) deep at the center of the channel, and almost constant winds of 60 mph (97 km/h). Experts said ferocious winds and blinding fogs would prevent construction and operation.
Strauss was Chief Engineer in charge of overall design and construction of the bridge project. However, because he had little understanding or experience with cable suspension designs, responsibility for much of the engineering and architecture fell on other experts. In particular, bridge architect Irving Morrow, a relatively unknown residential architect, designed the overall shape of the bridge towers, the lighting scheme, and Art Deco elements such as the streetlights, railing, and walkways. Morrow also chose the famous International Orange color. Senior engineer Charles Alton Ellis, collaborating remotely with famed bridge designer Leon Moisseiff, was the principal engineer of the project. Ellis, who had no engineering degree, was a Greek scholar and mathematician who became an expert in structural design, writing the standard textbook of the time. Moisseiff produced the basic structural design, introducing his "deflection theory" by which a thin, flexible roadway would flex in the wind, greatly reducing stress by transmitting forces via suspension cables to the bridge towers. Although the Golden Gate Bridge design was sound, a later Moisseiff design, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, collapsed in a strong windstorm due to an unexpected resonance mode caused by a too-thin roadway and unexpected wind forces.
With an eye toward self-promotion and posterity Strauss downplayed the contributions of his collaborators who, despite receiving little recognition or compensation, are largely responsible for the final form of the bridge. In November, 1931, Straus fired Ellis and replaced him with a former subordinate, Clifford Paine, ostensibly for wasting too much money sending telegrams back and forth to Moisseiff. Ellis, obsessed with the project and unable to find work elsewhere during the Depression, continued working 70 hours per week on an unpaid basis, eventually turning in ten volumes of hand calculations. Straus initially succeeded in winning credit as the figure most responsible for the design and vision of the bridge. Only later were the contributions of the rest of the design team more fully appreciated.
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