They Called This Bridge Impossible. A Net Saved 19 of Its Builders.

In 1933, a crew of ironworkers walked out onto a strait that engineers had called unbuildable — deep water, blind currents, and fog that could swallow the whole structure whole. Four years later they'd strung two cables holding up a bridge that still stands as one of the most audacious construction projects in American history. This is how they actually did it, bolt by bolt, wire by wire. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Strait They Called Unbuildable 1:47 The Man With the Vision Problem 3:38 Anchoring the Impossible 5:38 Towers of Orange Steel 7:50 Spinning Sixty Million Feet of Wire 9:24 The Net, the Club, and the Day It Failed 11:15 What Was Left Standing SOURCES & FURTHER READING • Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District — goldengate.org 'Working Under Water' and 'A Bathtub for the South Tower' exhibits, and Design & Construction Stats page • PBS American Experience — 'Spinning the Cables' and 'Charles Ellis' features • Wikipedia — 'Golden Gate Bridge,' 'Joseph Strauss (engineer),' 'Half Way to Hell Club,' and 'International orange' • Federal Highway Administration factsheet (fhwa.dot.gov/candc/factsheets/goldengatebridge.pdf) • NOAA tidal current data for the Golden Gate Strait (tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov) • Smithsonian Magazine — reporting on the February 17, 1937 scaffold collapse • NPR — 'The Golden Gate Bridge's Accidental Color' Would you have walked the steel with just a hard hat and a net below — or does a 746-foot drop end the conversation for you? Subscribe to MegaBuilt — how the impossible actually got built. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)