Everyone Said Impossible

In the 1920s, building a bridge across the Golden Gate strait seemed absurd. The channel had violent tidal currents, winds exceeding 100 km/h, frequent fog so thick you could not see your hand, and bedrock buried under the ocean floor. The leading engineering firms of the era refused to touch the project.

Engineer Joseph Strauss pushed the idea for a decade and eventually convinced the city to back it. The single-span suspension design — engineered by Charles Ellis and Leon Moisseiff and championed by Strauss — was the longest in the world at the time, anchored to massive concrete piers. Construction began in 1933 and took four years through the Great Depression. Eleven workers died, but a pioneering safety net saved another 19 lives — men who later called themselves the "Halfway-to-Hell Club."