The genesis of the Golden Gate Bridge was a carnival ride

O’Shaughnessy had begun conferring with experts in bridge-building, and the Aeroscope drew his attention to Strauss. He awarded Strauss’ company a contract to build a (still existing) bascule bridge on Fourth Street at China Basin, and more important, he added Strauss to his list of expert bridge-builders to consult.As noted in the previous Portals, Strauss was a complex and contradictory man with the drive of Napoleon and an ego to match. He had been waiting all his life for such an opportunity, and embraced the project with such fervor that he took it over completely, leaving O’Shaughnessy a bystander.

The two men worked together initially. In 1921 Strauss and O’Shaughnessy released an illustrated 15-page prospectus proposing a 1.6-mile-long bridge, with two cantilever sections at each end and a suspension section in the center. The bridge, Strauss gushed, would be a “crowning achievement of American endeavor… a product of the Great Golden West.”

It would also have been a world-class eyesore. As John van der Zee writes in “Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge,” “With its immense, spidery framework and thick, crosshatched girder towers, Strauss’s original design suggests an enormous railroad bridge, a soulless mechanism to be traversed by other mechanisms.” Critics compared it to an “upside-down rat trap.”

But design concerns were secondary as Strauss began promoting his bridge with messianic fervor, tirelessly touring the “cow counties” of Northern California and touting the economic and development benefits a bridge would bring them. His promotional efforts bore fruit in 1923, when the California Legislature approved the creation of an unprecedented public entity to pay for the bridge, a multi-county Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District.

But the battle over the bridge had just begun. Critics claimed it would be unsafe, and ruinously expensive, would harm the logging industry, would not be tall enough to accommodate warships, and would profane its majestic site. The powerful Southern Pacific Railroad, which owned the ferries, opposed it. Strauss and his allies eventually prevailed, but in 1932, when no buyers stepped forward to purchase the $6 million in bonds needed to start construction, the project faced disaster. It was rescued by Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, who said simply, “We’ll take the bonds. We need the bridge.” When he asked Strauss how long the bridge would last, Strauss replied, “Forever.”

与此同时,施特劳斯的原始t笨拙的设计he bridge had been abandoned. To his credit, Strauss had assembled a team of world-class engineers and architects, who had come up with a new design for a soaring, ethereal suspension bridge, whose main span from tower to tower was a jaw-dropping 4,200 feet. As Kevin Starr writes in “Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge,” this caterpillar-to-butterfly-like transformation highlighted Strauss’ strengths and weaknesses. “On the one hand, Strauss was able to lay aside his design when objections surfaced and recruit a top team of superior talents. On the other hand, as time would tell, Strauss would refuse to give credit where credit was due and would deliberately erase the contribution of the engineer critically responsible for the design of the suspension system.”

The engineer whom Strauss was to “deliberately erase” was a quiet, unassuming professor from Maine named Charles Alton Ellis. A classicist who read Greek literature in the original, Ellis was a brilliant engineer whose genius lay in his ability to perform complex mathematical analyses of challenging structures. The Golden Gate Bridge, longer than any suspension bridge ever built, the first bridge ever built across the mouth of a harbor, which would have to withstand powerful winds, support enormous weights, and would expand and contract in heat and cold, was as challenging as any structure in the world.

To meet this challenge, Ellis worked closely with the world’s leading expert on suspension bridge design, Leon Moisseiff. The two men — Ellis in Chicago, Moisseiff in New York — worked out their calculations independently, frequently checking in with each other. When Ellis was stuck, he would occasionally wire Moisseiff for help. “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE DEFLECTION SIDE SPAN?” began one telegram, followed by specifics. Moisseiff wired back, “DEFLECTION SIDE SPAN SIX THOUSAND LOAD HIGH TEMPERATURE SHOULD NOT EXCEED SEVEN AND A HALF FEET.” Ellis took on equation after equation, incorporating an extraordinary 30 to 38 variables with each one. As Van der Zee writes, “(B)oth men were pushing at the limits of the technology of their time. It was work that, in a later era, would seem far too complicated for men to do without computers.” Almost 100 years has passed, but this forgotten chapter in the bridge’s history — two brilliant minds facing complex problems, and coming up with solutions that allowed one of mankind’s lasting creations to soar into the sky, and remain there — still inspires.

Strauss was ignorant of the advanced engineering challenges that Ellis and Moisseiff were addressing. But he was determined to go down in history as the man who built the Golden Gate Bridge, and he lacked the integrity to admit that while he was the bridge’s indispensable producer and publicist, he was not its creative genius. In 1931, Strauss abruptly fired Ellis, claiming that he was working too slowly. For the rest of his life, Strauss posed as the designer of the bridge, refusing to acknowledge that the true designer was Ellis.

The professorial, self-effacing Ellis did not make a stir about his firing, or seek out recognition for what he had done. He may never even have visited the Golden Gate Bridge before he died in 1949. While a 7-foot statue of Joseph Strauss stands near the Visitor Center, not until 2012 did bridge authorities finally put up a plaque on the South Tower, acknowledging that Charles Alton Ellis deserved major credit for designing the bridge.

No single individual can claim to have built the Golden Gate Bridge. But as van derZee writes, “The bridge was, and is, more (Ellis’s) than anybody else’s.”

With the decadelong political and financial battle over the project finally over, it was time to build the great bridge. That epic story will be the subject of the next Portals.