Original subtitles

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 world's eyes were on these two bridges. This was about America coming

into full power and full bloom.

But a century ago, they seemed impossible.

Bridges had only been measured in feet, not miles. They were experiments.

During the Great Depression, they go up at the same time. The bay was the site

of the greatest bridge race ever.

Pitting a future president against an obsessed engineer.

Hey, you stick to my plans.

Joseph Strauss is the little dictator.

They face impossible challenges.

Think of how dangerous that environment is. Now we're going to put explosives

down. That's nuts.

Unspeakable tragedy.

The workers describe hearing their cries like babies.

And high stakes double dealing.

How would you like to come work for me?

This is treason of the highest order.

This is the Battle of the Bridges.

In the early 1900s, San Francisco is America's epicenter of trade with Asia

the Pacific, handling more cargo than all other West Coast ports combined.

San Francisco is a critical city because it's the only deepwater 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 want to settle for things they can get domestically. They

silks and spices and teas from Asia.

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

Japan. But the city of San Francisco has a major problem.

It's largely cut off from the U .S. 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.

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.

For decades, local officials have dreamed of a bridge connecting the city

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 is too deep. It runs so swiftly that boulders the size

houses are rolling around underneath there.

It has to cross a bay that's 350 feet deep. It has to weather the enormous

that go through the bay.

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 3 ,000 people died, 80 % of San

Francisco's buildings were destroyed.

And at over one mile long, The bridge will have to be the longest ever built.

But there's an underdog bidder bold enough to think he can do it.

Most engineers say building this bridge is impossible.

I'm not most engineers.

Joseph Strauss is known as the drawbridge king of America.

But these 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.

Strauss has long believed he's destined for something greater.

Strauss tries out for his college football team. He's a little over 5

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.

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.

Strauss's initial bid is just 17 million.

It has to be the ultimate lowball bid of all lowball bids. As much as an

engineer, he was a salesman. His work might be fairly mediocre.

His personality, though, that's next level.

The city awards the project to Joseph Strauss. But little does he know, 2 ,000

miles away in Washington, D .C., 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.

Hoover, a Stanford man who knows the Bay Area well, thinks the 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, it's international.

hub of trade, you're going to have to change lines and go all the way around

bay to get to San Francisco.

Or you're going to have to load all those goods on a ferry and get them

the bay. That's a lot of wasted time, energy, and money.

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 U .S. 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.

The Navy vetoes Hoover's bridge, but he won't give up easily.

Meanwhile, Joseph Strauss presents his first design to San Francisco officials.

It's got the strength of a suspension bridge and the flexibility of a

cantilever. The American king of drawbridges, unsurprisingly, designed

Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge that looks very much like all his others.

It's immediately seen as a very ugly design and not representative of San

Francisco, with some even calling it an upside -down rat trap.

Strauss is this close to losing his job.

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 Moiseyev 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

team. Ellis and Moiseyev quickly see that Strauss' concept is a clumsy

combination of bridge types.

Want this?

Where's Mike?

We feel it's the best way to build a bridge across that distance and

the base conditions.

They want to build something cutting edge, a steel cable suspension bridge,

longest in the world. A suspension bridge is a method of having a roadway

is supported not from the underneath but from above.

Primitive suspension bridges go back millennia, but the Brooklyn Bridge,

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

Now this allows you to avoid having to put a foundation in the middle, which

then could serve as an obstruction or a block for ships trying to get through.

By the 1920s, New York is planning the next record -setting bridge, the George

Washington, stretching 4 ,700 feet.

The Golden Gate would be 2 ,000 feet longer.

No suspension bridge will span 6 ,500 feet, 6 ,700 feet.

This one will.

The suspension design meant that bridges could be built bigger and longer, but

Strauss didn't have a lot of experience at that.

We stick to my plans.

Understood?

Please, just look at the numbers.

A full suspension bridge will work.

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.

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. So Strauss comes up with a desperate plan.

Joseph Strauss goes out with a dog and pony show to the surrounding counties.

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 U .S.

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 not me.

It's 1930, and Herbert Hoover is no longer just the U .S. Commerce

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 some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of the

modern American presidency.

Hoover also hopes his record -breaking bridge, competing against Joseph

Golden Gate, will show the U .S. is back on the rise.

The whole world's eyes were on these two bridges. Hoover just needs the right

man to build his epic bridge.

Mr. President, I've built many bridges, but never one approaching this scale. No

one has.

You'll be the first.

You might say Charles Purcell is, in a sense, the anti -Strauss. 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.

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.

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 is 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

would add stability to the bridge.

The weight on a hammock will offset the force of the wind.

Same principle with the bridge.

Their design will allow the bridge to sway in an earthquake up to 27 feet,

requiring complicated calculations.

Charles Ellis' specialty.

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.

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's always understood that Yerba Buena Island was going to be an anchor for the

two parts of the bridge.

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

bridge on the east side was they couldn't reach bedrock.

Obviously, there's going to be enormous stress on that tower.

If the footings are squishy or can move, that's really bad news.

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.

So Purcell has to think.

outside the box.

We have to build not one, but two suspension bridges back to back and

them to a man -made island between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island.

How will you build the island?

That we need to figure out.

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.

While Purcell contemplates an impossible design, Joseph

Strauss has an impossible sales job, and it's getting worse.

In the Depression, Nervous banks decide they won't issue the loans unless

residents put up their own private property as collateral.

Strauss was forced to convince people to do things that they would otherwise

have never considered doing.

A great city without bridges is like a skyscraper without elevators.

San Francisco needs this bridge.

The United States.

Meet 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.

By sheer will, Strauss' 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 seven on the Richter scale.

The bridge is perfectly safe.

Its maximum load capacity far exceeds the ratio of the torsion load to the

load. When you're taking into account building a new bridge... The three of

should have been a very powerful team, and were, until Strauss' ego got in the

way.

He was so insecure about his legacy.

Fun 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. I'm building a new bridge. You have to take into account

various dynamic lows.

Come in.

You wanted to see me?

I think you should take a two -week vacation.

I don't think. I insist.

The rest will do you good.

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 rung Ellis out for all the calculations he had in him, he had

more use for him.

And so he was gone.

And little does he know, he just might lose his other eighth in the hole.

What's this about?

How would you like to come work for me?

As two massive bridge projects gear up in San Francisco, Bay Bridge head

Purcell wants Leon Moiseyev, lead engineer for Joseph Strauss' Golden

join his team. Please, take a seat.

Whatever Strauss is paying you, I'll match it.

And you can keep cashing his checks, too.

I need your help.

Strauss's star engineer is two -timing him.

When he discovers that one of his employees He's playing for the other

This is treason of the highest order.

You're late.

I came as quickly as I could.

You can't work for both sides.

It's either them or us.

Are you going to fire me, too?

Moiseff knows Strauss can't afford to lose him.

Without Moiseff, Joseph Strauss would have been in a world of hurt.

Because Strauss is inching closer to his dream.

After years of lobbying, voters have approved his financing plan, with their

property as collateral.

They frankly were nuts to do it, but they did.

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

longest suspension span in history. But he's gunning to finish much sooner so he

can beat his rival.

A few months later, work begins on the Bay Bridge, but without Herbert Hoover

the helm.

This great nation will endure as it has endured.

Slammed for his handling of the Depression, President Hoover is out

term. 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.

FDR, recognizing the economic and military importance of San Francisco.

agrees to go ahead with the project.

But Charles Purcell is given just three years, until 1936, to get the job done.

It all hinges on his man -made 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.

But this is no ordinary caisson.

It's half the width of a city block, will start 240 feet underwater, and

500 feet tall, the largest and deepest caisson ever.

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.

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.

When finished, it will be a watertight foundation, 500 feet tall, half the

height of the Eiffel Tower.

Brassell 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.

It can either kill someone or it can render them physically incapacitated for

the rest of their life.

While Purcell's team battles the deep sea, on the Golden Gate, Strauss' men

a different issue, building high.

The towers of the Golden Gate Bridge were over 700 feet tall.

At a height of that magnitude, under extreme winds, over treacherous water,

workers suffered of almost freezing up.

They had what were essentially panic attacks, and they needed to be put into

net and literally carried down from the towers.

Others probably needed a good shot of whiskey on occasion.

While working conditions are tough on Strauss' 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.

The fate of the Bay Bridge rests on successfully sinking his massive

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

the caisson, that boulder has to be blasted out of place.

This is a ridiculous premise because think of how dangerous that environment

in the absence of explosives. Now we're going to put explosives down underneath

the diver?

That's nuts.

Diver William Reed is sent down to carry out the deadly mission.

He should have been up by now.

If he fails, the Bay Bridge may never be finished.

Years of planning, years of work, millions and millions of dollars, and

might all be wrecked just because of one stray boulder that no one knew was

there.

The Bay Bridge team waits to see if they've successfully blasted their

underwater caisson into place.

This caisson is going to form the foundation of this mighty tower that has

hold up not one, but two enormous suspension bridges.

If anything goes wrong, the entire bridge project won't work.

The operation is a success.

The largest, deepest underwater caisson ever is soon ready to support Charles

Purcell's man -made island.

It's one of the great construction achievements in American history.

The towers on the western span rise quickly.

And Joseph Strauss takes notice of his competition's progress.

From his apartment on Knob 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.

And Strauss doesn't just want to win the race.

He also wants to win the beauty contest.

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.

Officials at the base military bases demand the bridge be clearly visible to

planes and ships in dense fog, and standard bridge gray won't cut it.

The Air Force choice.

Jet black.

My choice.

What about this?

It stands out against the water.

It's just the prime.

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 jumped out at us that we all see on postcards and tend to love.

It's really just primer and a happy accident.

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.

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.

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 guardrails or anything.

This is a time where worker safety on construction projects was not

at the forefront of anybody's mind.

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

on a construction project, one person would die.

Joseph Strauss was not about to let that happen on his job site.

So far on Strauss' project, the death toll is zero.

For all 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.

He places strict rules against the daredevil practices high steelworkers

commonly use to work faster. And when it comes to safety equipment, Strouth is

ahead of his time.

It was the first construction project in the country at that time to require

hard hats.

Rivets and other things would fall out of the sky, and wearing the hard hats

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.

But Strauss' obsession with safety slows down the work, making it much harder to

finish ahead of schedule and beat the Bay Bridge.

and his goal to finish first is about to take an even bigger hit.

Joseph Strauss' Golden Gate is desperately trying to catch up to the

Bridge.

Then, Mother Nature intervenes.

There's a massive storm.

Storms in this area can be incredibly strong.

This is the doorway to the Pacific Ocean, and you've got winds howling in.

Forty percent of California drains into the San Francisco Bay.

Tidal action is very strong.

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.

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

bridge, 185 feet above the water, held up by these enormous cranes.

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

bridge up so much.

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.

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.

Eighty thousand 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

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.

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. With more activity on the

than any other period, there's a greater risk of accidents.

Our first death.

Head injury.

And Strauss' safety record suffers a blow when a worker is hit by falling

debris.

We are not going to lose any more lives.

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 going to be his legacy, it was going to be one that was

on time, on budget, and didn't kill people.

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

this. Strauss's net is an expensive innovation, $130 ,000, over $2 .5

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 stationery and its own logo. But even

Strauss' dedication to worker safety and job site safety, unfortunately,

accidents can still happen.

On February 17, 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 suck down into the Golden Gate Strait.

Two are rescued, but ten men are killed.

The accident is devastating to Joseph Strauss.

And adding insult to injury, he's lost the great bridge race.

On November 12, 1936, former President Herbert Hoover formally opened the

longest bridge of its kind in the world, the Bay Bridge.

With his bridge on time and slightly under budget, Charles Purcell has

his legacy.

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. 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.

Six months later, Strauss bounces back from tragedy.

On May 27, 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.

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.

This bridge needs neither praise... But, sir... It's

beautiful, isn't she?

Yeah. No eulogy. Thanks to you.

Or encomium.

It speaks for itself.

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

any contributing engineer on the original plaque of the bridge.

And it takes 50 years before some of those historical records come to light,

the bridge district finally honors Ellis as...

an engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge.

On the bridge's opening day, schools and businesses across the city closed for

the celebration, and 200 ,000 people walked the Golden Gate.

They came away from that bridge deck convinced this was the best project in

history of the world.

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.

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.

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.

They helped 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 U .S. high -tech, Silicon Valley.

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.