(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] They've survived hundreds of earthquakes
and an onslaught of 300,000 vehicles every day.
Over 80 years, the iconic Golden Gate Bridge
and its nearby rival, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge
are engineering legends.
- The whole's eyes were on these two bridges.
This was about America coming into full power
and full bloom.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] But a century ago they seemed impossible.
- Bridges have only been measured in feet, not miles.
- They were experiments.
- [Narrator] During the Great Depression
they go up at the same time.
- The Bay was the site of the greatest bridge race ever.
- [Narrator] Pitting a future president
against an obsessed engineer.
- Hey.
You stick to my plans.
(dramatic music)
- Joseph Strauss is the little dictator.
- [Narrator] They face impossible challenges.
- Think of how dangerous that environment is.
Now, we're gonna put explosives down.
That's nuts.
- [Narrator] Unspeakable tragedy.
- The workers described hearing their cries like babies.
- [Narrator] And high stakes double dealing.
- How would you like to come work for me?
(dramatic music)
- This is treason of the highest order.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] This is the Battle of the Bridges
(dramatic lively music)
In the early 1900s,
San Francisco is America's epicenter of trade
with Asia and the Pacific, handling more cargo
than all other west coast ports combined.
- San Francisco's a critical city,
because it's the only deep water port
really from Seattle all the way down
to California's coastline
and ending in Los Angeles, San Diego.
- America is looking west,
looking past California to the Asian Pacific theater.
This becomes a new pathway for exporting goods and services.
- It's also trying to find new sources of consumer goods
for its increasingly prosperous American consumer class.
Americans don't wanna settle for things
they can get domestically.
They want silks and spices and teas from Asia.
- [Narrator] But it's not just trade
that makes San Francisco so valuable.
- It's this critical sweet spot with this massive Bay
that harbors ships of war.
- They're keeping an eye on another country
with Imperial ambitions, which is Japan.
- [Narrator] But the city of San Francisco
has a major problem.
It's largely cut off from the US mainland.
- San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water
and at the time, the only way to get across was by ferry.
- The city of San Francisco is a prisoner
of its own geography.
- [Narrator] San Francisco must be better connected
for the good of the country and the city's own survival.
- So it's been growing over the past 70 years or so,
since the gold rush,
but all of that money starts to get bottled up
in this tiny space.
- It's got so many people packed into this space
and there's really nowhere for them to go.
- [Narrator] For decades, local officials have dreamed
of a bridge connecting the city to prime land up north,
and in the early 1920s,
they put out a highly publicized call for bids
to finally build it.
But there's a reason it's taken so long,
it might be impossible.
- The waters at the San Francisco Golden Gate,
that is impossible to build a bridge in.
The water's too deep.
It runs so swiftly that boulders the size of houses
are rolling around underneath there.
- It has to cross a Bay that's 350 feet deep.
It has to weather the enormous winds
that go through the Bay.
- [Narrator] The brutal conditions don't end there.
- The Golden Gate Strait is very close
to the San Andreas fault.
They've just lived through the 1906 earthquake
in which 3000 people died,
80% of San Francisco's buildings were destroyed.
- [Narrator] And at over one mile long,
the bridge will have to be the longest ever built.
(lively music)
But there's an underdog bidder
bold enough to think he can do it.
- [Man] Most engineers say building this bridge
is impossible.
(suspenseful music)
- I'm not the most engineers.
(suspenseful music)
- Joseph Strauss is known as the drawbridge king of America.
- But his drawbridges are really not very attractive
to the untrained eye.
They're really workhorses.
- Many of his peers didn't really admire his work.
It wasn't that cutting edge.
- [Narrator] Strauss has long believed
he's destined for something greater.
- Strauss tries out for his college football team.
He's a little over five feet, about 120 pounds.
He gets absolutely unmercifully smashed
and as he's recovering in the infirmary,
he is looking out at a beautiful bridge in Cincinnati
and dreams of creating something like that.
- [Narrator] But at 51 years old, he's running out of time.
- Estimates have it at 100 million.
- I can build it for a fraction of that.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Strauss's initial bid is just 17 million.
- It has to be the ultimate low-ball bid
of all low-ball bids.
As much as an engineer, he was a salesman.
- His work might be fairly mediocre.
His personality though, that's next level.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] The city awards the project to Joseph Strauss,
but little does he know,
2000 miles away in Washington, DC,
there's a competing plan already in motion.
- Herbert Hoover is an engineer.
He's a mining executive
and he becomes the Secretary of Commerce.
- [Narrator] Hoover, a Stanford man
who knows the Bay area well,
thinks a bridge should be in a different location.
Oakland, across the Bay to the east,
is the last stop on the transcontinental railroad,
a vital artery that doesn't reach San Francisco.
- If you're moving goods from the east out to San Francisco,
this international hub of trade,
you're going to have to change lines
and go all the way around the Bay
to get it to San Francisco
or you're gonna have to load all those goods on a ferry
and get them across the Bay.
That's a lot of wasted time, energy and money.
- [Narrator] Incredibly, at over four miles,
a bridge to Oakland would be nearly quadruple the length
of the Golden Gate,
making it the longest high-level bridge in the world,
but Hoover has a surprising opponent.
The US Navy.
- All they see is something
that could possibly damage ships
if clearance isn't high enough,
something that a potential enemy during war could bomb,
blow up, it becomes a trap for the Navy.
- [Narrator] The Navy vetoes Hoover's bridge,
but he won't give up easily.
(birds squawking)
(mysterious music)
Meanwhile, Joseph Strauss presents his first design
to San Francisco officials.
- It's got the strength of that suspension bridge
and the flexibility of a cantilever.
- The American king of drawbridges,
unsurprisingly designs for the Golden Gate Bridge,
a bridge that looks very much like all his others.
- It's immediately seen as a very ugly design,
not representative of San Francisco,
with some even calling it an upside down rat trap.
(mysterious music)
- Strauss is this close to losing his job.
- [Narrator] On the brink of failure,
Strauss turns to two of the best minds
in the bridge business.
- Charles Ellis, an absolute walking human computer
of an engineer,
probably as brilliant as Strauss was with the public
and selling himself,
Charles Ellis was as brilliant with the numbers.
- Leon Moisseiff have was a genius.
He was the chief designer for the Manhattan Bridge in 1909.
- The team that Joseph Strauss put together
was what we would call today, a dream team.
- [Narrator] Ellis and Moisseiff quickly see
that Strauss's concept
is a clumsy combination of bridge types.
(suspenseful music)
- What's this?
Where's my design?
(suspenseful music)
- We feel this is the best way to build a bridge
across that distance and withstand the Bay's conditions.
- [Narrator] They want to build something cutting edge,
a steel cable suspension bridge, the longest in the world.
- A suspension bridge is a method of having a roadway
that is supported, not from the underneath, but from above.
- [Narrator] Primitive suspension bridges
go back millennia,
but the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, launched a new era.
- The Brooklyn Bridge used multiple towers
to actually pull tension cables,
which then suspend and pull up on the bridge
to counteract its weight from the middle.
Now, this allows you to avoid having to put a foundation
in the middle, which then could serve as a obstruction
or a block for ships trying to get through.
- [Narrator] By the 1920s,
New York is planning the next record-setting bridge,
the George Washington, stretching 4,700 feet.
The Golden Gate would be 2000 feet longer.
- No suspension bridge can span six
and a half thousand feet.
- 6,700 feet.
This one will.
(mysterious music)
- The suspension design meant that bridges
can be built bigger and longer,
but Strauss didn't have a lot of experience at that.
- We stick to my plans.
Understood?
(intense music)
- Please, just look at the numbers.
A full suspension bridge will work.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Ultimately, Strauss relents,
agreeing to make the Golden Gate a suspension bridge.
- Strauss has made the right decision,
brought on some real A-players,
but he can't let go of the limelight
and this creates tension almost immediately.
(lively music)
- [Narrator] Not only does the new design double the cost
from 17 million to 35 million, but on October 24th, 1929,
finances for the bridge go from bad to worse.
America's economy goes bust at the worst possible time
for Strauss and the city of San Francisco,
who still haven't secured funding for the bridge.
- He's not getting federal resource,
he's not getting state money, there's just no money.
- [Narrator] So Strauss comes up with a desperate plan.
(dramatic music)
- Joseph Strauss goes out with a dog and pony show
to the surrounding counties.
- [Narrator] He's asking struggling taxpayers
across the region to back loans, funding the bridge
and he's doing it during the worst economic disaster
in US history.
- People are thinking, "Is this a scam or is this a hoax?
We're in the Depression."
- So going door-to-door and asking people to pony up cash
when many of them are already unemployed.
That's nuts.
(intense music)
(crowd chattering)
- [Narrator] It's 1930 and Herbert Hoover
is no longer just the US Commerce Secretary,
he's the president,
dealing with an escalating economic depression,
desperate to show he's putting people to work,
Hoover revives his idea
for a San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge.
- Herbert Hoover wants the San Francisco Bay Bridge project
to be a symbol of his vision
for America's economic recovery in the Depression,
when his administration faces
at some of the lowest approval ratings
in the history of the modern American presidency.
- [Narrator] Hoover also hopes his record breaking bridge,
competing against Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate,
will show the US is back on the rise.
- The whole world's eyes were on these two bridges.
- [Narrator] Hoover just needs the right man
to build his epic bridge.
(upbeat music)
(mysterious music)
- Mr. President, I have built many bridges,
but never one approaching this scale.
- No one has, it'll be the first.
- You might say Charles Purcell
is in a sense, the ant-Strauss.
- [Narrator] Purcell understands big projects,
though a trained bridge engineer,
he heads California's division of highways
at a pivotal time.
- California was the first state
to truly adopt the automobile,
building roads and bridges throughout the state
at an enormous rate.
- [Narrator] Purcell agrees to design
and build Hoover's Bay Bridge
with one deck for vehicles and another for rail
and the president secures 77 million in federal dollars,
a luxury, the Bay area's other bridge project doesn't have.
(lively music)
Local taxpayers have yet to approve funding the Golden Gate,
but Joseph Strauss presses ahead with the difficult design.
He needs a bridge that can withstand
the city's next big earthquake.
- Imagine the bridge as a hammock slung between two trees.
- Instead of trying to build a bridge as strong
and rigid as possible,
it's actually better to make it somewhat flexible.
The weight of the roadway itself
would add stability to the bridge.
- The weight on the hammock
will offset the force of the wind.
Same principle with the bridge.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Their design will allow the bridge to sway
in an earthquake up to 27 feet,
requiring complicated calculations,
Charles Ellis' specialty.
(suspenseful music)
- He works 14 hour days putting together calculations
that end up filling 10 volumes.
- They had to calculate what it would take
if there was a traffic jam
and there was a hurricane force wind
and there was a major earthquake all at the same time.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, Charles Purcell's Bay Bridge
must be more than four times the length of the Golden Gate,
over four miles,
but Purcell is catching one lucky break,
halfway between San Francisco and Oakland,
there's an island.
- It was always understood that Yerba Buena Island
was going to be an anchor for the two parts of the bridge.
- [Narrator] Using Yerba Buena as a pivot point,
Purcell conceives a bridge with two sections,
both roughly two miles long,
but with totally different designs.
The east or Oakland side
will be a more traditional non-suspension bridge
supported from below.
- The reason why they never thought
of building a suspension bridge on the east side,
was they couldn't reach bedrock.
- Obviously, there's gonna be enormous stress on that tower.
If the footings are squishy or can move,
that's really bad news.
- [Narrator] Bedrock can be reached
on the Western San Francisco side,
but a single suspension bridge
would have to stretch two miles,
twice that of the Golden Gate, itself a record distance.
- There was no way that a single suspension bridge
could cross it.
- [Narrator] So Purcell has to think outside the box.
- We have to build,
not one but two suspension bridges back-to-back
and anchor them to a manmade island
between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island.
(intense music)
- [President Hoover] How will you build the island?
- That we need to figure out.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Purcell's two suspension bridges
on one side of Yerba Buena
and a single span on the other side
is the most complex bridge design ever attempted.
- The San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge
is a series of three bridges
connected at this pivot point on Yerba Buena Island.
- [Narrator] While Purcell contemplates
an impossible design,
Joseph Strauss has an impossible sales job
and it's getting worse.
(suspenseful music)
In the Depression, nervous banks decide
they won't issue the loans and less residents put up
their own private property as collateral.
(suspenseful music)
- Strauss was forced to convince people to do things
that they would otherwise have never considered doing.
(intense music)
- A great city without bridges
is like a skyscraper without elevators.
San Francisco needs this bridge.
The United States needs this bridge.
- When it comes to the Golden Gate Bridge,
Joseph Strauss is the ultimate hype man.
- When this bridge is built,
everyone who owns property
will see their land values increase.
- [Narrator] By sheer will,
Strauss's message is getting through.
- There have been safety concerns.
- The bridge is designed
to hold more than six lanes of loaded vehicles,
bumper-to-bumper with no problem.
- And can withstand earthquakes
up to 70 on the Richter scale.
- The bridge is perfectly safe.
It's maximum load capacity far exceeds the ratio
and contortion loads to the dead load,
when you take into account.
- The three of them should've been a very powerful team
and were, until Strauss's ego got in the way.
- He was so insecure about his legacy.
- The sun is starting to shine a little bit more
on Ellis and so it becomes a pinch point.
Joseph Strauss is, at the end of the day,
the little dictator.
(distant chattering)
(knocking on door)
- Come in.
- You wanted to see me?
(tense music)
- I think you should take a two week vacation.
- I don't think--
- I insist.
The rest will do you good.
(intense music)
- So Ellis goes on vacation.
He's away from the project and while he's out,
Strauss sends him a letter telling him,
"No need to come back."
He fires the guy in the letter.
- And once he had wrung Ellis out
for all the calculations he had in him,
he had no more use for him and so he was gone.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] And little does he know,
he just might lose his other ace in the hole.
(dramatic music)
- What's this about?
- How would you like to come work for me?
(suspenseful music)
gear up in San Francisco,
Bay Bridge head, Charles Purcell wants Leon Moisseiff,
lead engineer for Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate,
to join his team.
- Please, take a seat.
(mysterious music)
Whatever Strauss is paying you, I'll match it.
And you can keep cashing his checks too.
(suspenseful music)
I need your help.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Strauss' star engineer is two-timing him.
(suspenseful music)
- When he discovers that one of his employees
is playing for the other team,
this is treason at the highest order.
(suspenseful music)
- You're late.
(suspenseful music)
- I came as quickly as I could.
(suspenseful music)
- You can't work for both sides.
(suspenseful music)
It's either them or us.
(suspenseful music)
- Are you gonna fire me too?
(suspenseful music)
- Moisseiff knows Strauss can't afford to lose him.
(suspenseful music)
- Without Moisseiff, Joseph Strauss would've been
in a world of hurt.
- [Narrator] Because Strauss is inching closer to his dream.
After years of lobbying,
voters have approved his financing plan
with their own property as collateral.
- They frankly were nuts to do it, but they did.
- [Narrator] It's taken over a decade, but in January, 1933,
construction on the Golden Gate Bridge begins
before the Bay Bridge can break ground.
Strauss has been given four years
with a deadline in 1937
to build the longest suspension span in history,
but he's gunning to finish much sooner
so he can beat his rival.
(mysterious music)
A few months later, work begins on the Bay Bridge,
but without Herbert Hoover at the helm.
- This great nation will endure as it has endured.
- [Narrator] Slammed for his handling of the Depression,
President Hoover is out after one term.
(lively music)
- It takes forever to put a project like the Bay Bridge
into implementation.
What FDR understood was,
the advantage of putting people to work today.
- [Narrator] FDR, recognizing the economic
and military importance of San Francisco,
agrees to go ahead with the project.
(suspenseful music)
But Charles Purcell is given just three years,
until 1936, to get the job done.
It all hinges on his manmade island,
connecting back-to-back suspension bridges,
anchored by a watertight structure called a caisson.
- A caisson is basically a fancy word for a box,
but in engineering terms,
it's often a box that can be anchored
to the bottom of a waterway.
- [Narrator] But this is no ordinary caisson,
it's half the width of a city block,
will start 240 feet underwater
and stand 500 feet tall.
The largest and deepest caisson ever.
(suspenseful music)
- Purcell's concept is crazy and brilliant at the same time.
He had a caisson built that was almost like a boat.
It could float.
- [Narrator] Concrete will be poured in gradually
to sink the caisson,
more concrete than in the entire Empire State building.
- Each time they sank it,
they would come out with welders
and they would build the box taller.
- [Narrator] When finished,
it will be a water tight foundation, 500 feet tall,
half the height of the Eiffel Tower.
(lively music)
Purcell hires master diver, William Reed,
to lead the underwater team,
making sure the massive caisson is gaining a foothold.
In an era before scuba gear,
air is pumped through long hoses
for the treacherous 240 foot dives.
- They were the highest paid of any of the workers there.
If you pull them out too quickly,
they suffer what was called caisson disease or the bends.
(mysterious music)
- It can either kill someone
or it can render them physically incapacitated
for the rest of their life.
(dramatic music)
- While Purcell's team battles the deep sea,
on the Golden Gate, Strauss' men have a different issue,
building high.
(dramatic music)
- The towers of a Golden Gate Bridge
we're over 700 feet tall.
(dramatic music)
At a height of that magnitude
under extreme winds over treacherous water,
the workers suffered of almost freezing up.
- They had what were essentially panic attacks
and they needed to be put into a net
and literally carried down from the towers.
(upbeat music)
- Others probably needed a good shot of whiskey on occasion.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] While working conditions
are tough on Strauss's bridge,
he's making steady progress on his goal
to finish in well under four years.
In fact, he's moving faster
than Charles Purcell's Bay Bridge,
because on that job site,
Purcell is suddenly at a standstill.
- The only way we can build this bridge
is if this is exactly right.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] The fate of the Bay Bridge
rests on successfully sinking his massive caisson.
(suspenseful music)
But there's a problem.
- It begins to tilt, something's wrong.
- There's actually a boulder
that the caisson is sitting on
and to right or level the caisson,
that boulder has to be blasted out in place.
This is a ridiculous premise,
because think of how dangerous that environment is
in the absence of explosives,
now we're gonna put explosives down underneath the diver.
That's nuts.
- Diver, William Reed is sent down to carry out
the deadly mission.
(suspenseful music)
- He should've been up by now.
- [Narrator] If he fails,
the Bay Bridge may never be finished.
- Years of planning, years of work,
millions and millions of dollars,
and then it might all be wrecked
just because of one stray boulder
that no one knew was there.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] The Bay Bridge team waits
to see if they've successfully blasted
their underwater caisson into place.
- This caisson is gonna form the foundation
of this mighty tower that has to hold up,
not one, but two enormous suspension bridges.
(suspenseful music)
If anything goes wrong,
the entire bridge project won't work.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] The operation is a success.
(dramatic music)
The largest, deepest underwater caisson ever
is soon ready to support Charles Purcell's manmade island.
- It's one of the great construction achievements
in American history.
- [Narrator] The towers on the Western span rise quickly.
(suspenseful music)
And Joseph Strauss takes notice
of his competition's progress.
- From his apartment on Nob Hill,
he would look at both of those bridges.
- He sees this as a contest,
as something that actually points
to the value of him as a man.
He needs to win it.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] And Strauss doesn't just want to win the race,
he also wants to win the beauty contest.
(suspenseful music)
- The designers of the Golden Gate Bridge
and people in the community
start talking about bridge color,
and a lot of people are weighing in on it,
including the military.
- The Navy's choice.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Officials at the Bay's military bases
demand the bridge be clearly visible
to planes and ships in dense fog
and standard bridge gray won't cut it.
(suspenseful music)
- The Air Force's choice.
(suspenseful music)
- Jet black.
My choice.
(suspenseful music)
- What about this?
It stands out against the water.
- It's just the primer.
(intense music)
- Turns out, orange is not a bad look
when you take into consideration the scenery
around the Golden Gate Strait.
So this iconic color that jumps out at us,
that we all see on postcards and tend to love,
it's really just primer and a happy accident.
- [Narrator] Strauss has nailed down
a legendary feature of the Golden Gate,
but Charles Purcell,
after averting disaster with his underwater caisson,
kicks Bay Bridge construction into high gear,
thanks to a big advantage.
- It was federally funded.
And once that tap gets turned on,
it's very hard for the bureaucracy to turn it off,
and it's very easy to get a few more trickles out of it.
- [Narrator] But there's another reason
why Purcell is moving faster.
Following standards of the time,
safety is not his top priority.
One frightening example, the precarious catwalk,
hundreds of feet up on the western span.
(dramatic music)
- They literally took long stretches
of ordinary chain link fence and attached those
to the cables and stretched them out,
so they had a kind of flexible see-through walkway
with no guard rails or anything.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] This is a time where worker safety
on construction projects was not at the forefront
of anybody's mind.
- [Narrator] The Bay Bridge is well on its way
to a death toll of 24 workers.
- At the time, there was this average number
that for every million dollars spent
on a construction project, one person would die.
Joseph Strauss was not about to let that happen
on his job site.
- [Narrator] So far on Strauss' project,
the death toll is zero.
- For all of the descriptions of Strauss,
he comes across as a hard man, but he had some soft spots,
and one of them happened to be with worker safety.
- [Narrator] He places strict rules
against the daredevil practices high steelworkers
commonly used to work faster
and when it comes to safety equipment,
Strauss is ahead of his time.
- It was the first construction project
in the country at that time to require hardhats.
Rivets and other things would fall out of the sky
and wearing the hardhats saved more than one life.
- He had glare-free goggles to help them see better
in the dense fog,
he had a special diet for workers
to help prevent them from becoming dizzy.
- This type of hardcore safety protocol
is completely unheard of at this time
and it leads to rules that we follow even today.
- [Narrator] But Strauss's obsession with safety
slows down the work,
making it much harder to finish ahead of schedule
and beat the Bay Bridge.
(dramatic music)
And his goal to finish first
is about to take an even bigger hit.
(dramatic music)
Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate
is desperately trying to catch up to the rival Bay Bridge.
(thunder crashing)
Then mother nature intervenes.
- There's a massive storm.
Storms in this area can be incredibly strong.
This is a doorway to the Pacific ocean
and you've got winds howling in.
40% of California drains into the San Francisco Bay.
The tidal action is very strong.
- [Narrator] A pier leading to the south tower is destroyed.
- This is the only way they get people
and equipment out to the south tower.
This is heartbreaking.
- [Narrator] Repairs will take Strauss seven months,
causing a major slowdown for most of 1934.
Meanwhile, on the Bay Bridge, by early 1935,
Charles Purcell is on pace to hit his target opening date,
a little over 18 months away.
The western span back-to-back suspension bridges
is closing in on completion.
It's the eastern span, supposedly a simpler design,
that's causing Purcell problems.
- The eastern portion of the Bay Bridge
was partially pre-assembled.
One piece weighed 20,000 tons
and had to be dropped in to fill a gap
in the middle of the bridge, 185 feet above the water,
held up by these enormous cranes.
- [Narrator] But there's a problem.
Heat from the sun
is making the massive bridge frame expand,
narrowing the gap to be filled.
The 20,000 ton piece won't snap into place.
- And they had to hold it there in position
until the sun wasn't heating the bridge up so much.
- [Narrator] The piece finally fits
and by late 1935 Purcell's finish line is in sight.
Five miles away, on the Golden Gate,
Strauss is still trying to maintain an accelerated schedule
and top the Bay Bridge's 1936 completion target.
His men work around the clock to finish the towers
and hang the suspension cables.
(lively music)
- [Reporter] San Francisco's great Golden Gate Bridge
takes on a more substantial appearance
as an army blimp surveys the work
which has now reached the cable spinning stage.
(uplifting music)
- [Narrator] 80,000 miles of wire,
enough to circle the world three times,
are bound together to make the cables.
- The steel cables that are being used
actually come from John Roebling's company.
He's the famous engineer that built the Brooklyn Bridge.
It's a fascinating connection to see how John Roebling
and his work in the 19th century
really kind of echoes all the way across the nation.
(lively instrumental music)
- [Narrator] Over a decade in the making,
Strauss is finally in the last phase of construction,
but it's the most dangerous part of the whole project,
piecing together the 4,200 foot main span roadway.
- There were workers on the roadway and under the roadway
and in open air, trying to connect component pieces
of the roadway.
- [Narrator] With more activity on the bridge
than any other period,
there's a greater risk of accidents.
(soft calm music)
- Our first death.
Head injury.
- [Narrator] And Strauss's safety record suffers a blow
when a worker is hit by falling debris.
- We are not going to lose any more lives.
(suspenseful music)
We need to make our bridge safer.
- We know Strauss took on this project,
because he wanted to cement his legacy.
If the Golden Gate was gonna be his legacy,
it was gonna be one that was on time, on budget
and didn't kill people.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] There isn't much more Strauss can do
about falling debris,
but he can do something about falling people.
- Without there being federal regulations
forcing him to do so,
he invests in a massive net
that's kept underneath the bridge.
- This was incredibly innovative at the time,
no one else was doing anything like this.
- [Narrator] Strauss' net is an expensive innovation,
$130,000, over 2.5 million today,
but it quickly proves its worth.
- It caught 19 different workers,
saved 19 different workers.
- They formed a little club.
They called it the halfway to hell club.
- The halfway to hell club had its own stationary
and its own logo.
- But even with Strauss's dedication to worker safety
and job site safety,
unfortunately, accidents can still happen.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] On February 17th, 1937,
the Golden Gate Bridge project's
near perfect safety record, is shattered.
- The men are working on scaffolding under the bridge,
which is incredibly heavy.
The scaffolding breaks and it falls into the net.
- It was too heavy, it broke the net.
- And it takes 12 men down with it.
Then they saw them sucked down into the Golden Gate Strait.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] Two are rescued, but 10 men are killed.
The accident is devastating to Joseph Strauss
and adding insult to injury,
he's lost the great bridge race.
(suspenseful music)
On November 12th, 1936, former president,
Herbert Hoover formerly opens the longest bridge
of its kind in the world, the Bay Bridge.
With his bridge on time and slightly under budget,
Charles Purcell has cemented his legacy.
(somber music)
- Charles Purcell achieved
two really amazing accomplishments in his life.
He presided over the construction of the Bay Bridge
and after that, he presided over the building
of the first freeways in California and what are regarded
as among the first true freeways anywhere in the world.
- [Narrator] The Pasadena Freeway,
the 110 is America's first and still in use today.
The Bay Bridge carries more than double the traffic
of the Golden Gate.
- Charles Purcell is kind of like his bridge.
He is this workhorse that has dramatically contributed
to the nation.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Six months later,
Strauss bounces back from tragedy.
On May 27th, 1937, his Golden Gate,
the longest suspension bridge in the world, finally opens,
a month ahead of the four year deadline
and 1.3 million under budget.
(distant applauding)
Strauss has waited decades for his moment
and reads a poem he wrote for the occasion.
- At last, the mighty task is done.
Resplendent in the western sun.
(slow instrumental music)
- Professor.
- Beautiful, isn't she?
- Yeah.
Thanks to you.
(slow uplifting music)
- [Narrator] Joseph Strauss removes any trace
of his former top engineer, Charles Ellis,
in the records of the project.
- It wasn't until the 90s that Ellis' story was even known.
He is not listed as any contributing engineer
on the original plaque of the bridge.
- And it takes 50 years
before some of those historical records come to light
and the bridge district finally honors Ellis
as an engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge.
(uplifting music)
- [Narrator] On the bridge's opening day,
schools and businesses across the city
close for the celebration
and 200,000 people walk the Golden Gate.
- They came away from that bridge deck
convinced this was the best project
in the history of the world.
- [Narrator] While the Bay Bridge labors
in relative obscurity, Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate
helps transform the region
into one of the world's richest
and becomes a landmark visited by millions.
(uplifting music)
- In the end, he built the world's most beautiful bridge.
It was recognized in his lifetime,
that this was an achievement.
I think he probably left that project
knowing it would define him
and that's exactly what he wanted.
(bright music)
- [Narrator] Over 80 years later,
the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges both stand tall.
- They pushed engineering into a whole new realm
in terms of thinking about distances that bridges could go,
how light they could be.
- Future bridges that were constructed
are often evocative of those original designs.
They were the originators.
- [Narrator] They help make the Bay area
an interconnected metropolis,
capable of everything from being the launch point
for the Pacific theater in World War II,
to years later becoming the epicenter
of the US high tech Silicon Valley.
(uplifting music)
- These two bridges were the beginning
of San Francisco as we know it,
California as we know it.
This was about America coming into full power
and full bloom on the west coast
and it all happened in the Bay.
(uplifting instrumental music)