Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hanging Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging with us too, and it's Stuff you should Know. And we're headed west and yeah that's so.
Yeah. I mean we're recording on the Golden gate Bridge. I guess this is like two weeks wow, two weeks to the day, I think, what from our live show in the city of San Francisco.
That's true because it's the fifteenth in our show's on the twenty ninth.
That's right on a rare Thursday, oh show. Yeah yeah. Oh by the way too, I meant to mention, and I hope this is okay with you. I got booked to do a show on Friday, and I haven't mentioned that to people, but on Friday, I will be performing in the Hanging with Doctor z show.
Do you know Doctor Zayas?
Yeah? Do you know about this?
No? No, no, I don't know anything.
This is the one in which comedian Dana gould Is. He owns a professional like full blown doctor Zais costume and he's been doing this for years and it's like a talk show with him as the host. Is doctor Zaiahs. So I'm on that and I'm very excited because not only is Janet Varney and it co founder of sketch Fest and dear friend, but Dave Foley. I get to be on stage with a kid in the hall.
What and man, that's going to be amazing.
Yeah, and the great Andy Daly. So if anyone wants to see that on Friday night, just go to the sketch Fest website and check it out. I think it's at kind of one of the small comedy.
Clubs, do you know? Okay, so it's it a comedy club.
Yeah, it's one where I did movie Crush one year. I can't remember the name of it.
Though, Well do you remember how to find your way back there? Though?
I hope so.
I hope so too. That's awesome, man, congrats, and yes, I second that everybody should go see it. You're in San Francisco or not, because I'm sure that's gonna be awesome.
Yeah, I mean you can come. I imagine you'll be on a plane home huh yeah. Yeah all right, but thank you.
I appreciate the invite. I'll be there in spirit supporting you. You text me immediately after and be like it was a triumph or no, it won't be anything but a triumph.
Alright. So Golden Gate Bridge.
Yeah, that's why we started talking about California and San Francisco in the first place. Because if you don't bother to look at the titles of episodes and you just let it roll one end of the other. That's what we're talking about in this episode, the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a pretty good chance you know what we're talking about. It's often named as the most photographed bridge in the world. I could believe that.
Yeah, it's my second favorite. What's your first Brooklyn bridge? Man?
Okay, it's got to be to bb Okay, all right, all right, what about you. I don't know. I don't know that I have a favorite bridge. I kind of like the ones that look like sailboats. There's a few of those.
Yeah, those are nice. A Tower Bridge in London is also quite magnificent.
Sure, and then I'm gonna sound so obnoxious, But in Budapest.
It's not obnoxious.
No, just being like, what's your favorite bridge? Oh, mine's in Budapest. No, but they have I think seven different bridges and they went they did seven different designs for all the bridges that go through the city and connect Buddha to Pest, right, And it really is like a city of amazing bridges. They're all just really well done and they're just different. It's cool.
I agree. I forgot about that well. Also, I mean, since we're shouting out bridges, we can't not talk about Pittsburgh because I went to a baseball game there in that beautiful stadium and you get those beautiful bridges there. It's lovely.
Yeah, it's like eight Bridges Stadium. Yeah, I think so, is that right?
Yeah? Okay, eight or twelve I think they call it eight or twelve Bridges Stadium.
That does.
That's right.
So back to the Golden Gate. It's also, Chuck, one of the seven Wonders of the modern World.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, And the American Society of Civil Engineers named it one of the Bridges of the Millennium in two thousand.
Wow.
So it's a well regarded bridge. And if you've always wondered or always thought like, hey, I guess the Golden Gate bridge is called that because the I guess the weird orange color is roughly golden. I don't know, you would be like me probably like you, chuck, and that would mean you were wrong.
That's right, because Golden Gate very much predates the construction of that bridge. And with that we come to our first story.
Okay, I'm gonna make like a horse sound while you tell the story, so this guy will be riding a horse.
Okay, you got two ads of coconuts and you're banging them together. Eighteen forty six. This is the Mexican American wartime. It's going on, and there's an army officer in the United States named John Fremont who basically said without sounds like, without even asking anyone, hey, California's independent from Mexico. At one point he was crossing the San Francisco Bay there from Sonoma to San Francisco to fight the Mexican army there. And he named that boy, you're really doing a great job.
And he named that mile wide strait that connects the bay to the ocean. What would that be chrysophil.
A can't stop.
Oh no, there he goes off into the sunset. I guess chrysophile which means Golden Gate. And later on, rather than the Greek version, he went with the English and that passage was called the Golden Gate.
That's right. So this is the bridge over the Golden Gate.
Right, did you know that? No? Not, I was yesterday years old, as they.
Say, yep. So yeah. And the Golden Gate in particular is pretty neat, not just because it's like the it connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, but geographically it's like three hundred feet deep right there, but on the shelf in the Pacific side it's much shallower. And then in the bay, so the bay is like an average of fourteen feet deep or something crazy like that.
So it just suddenly goes like this huge depression. And this is what they needed to cross, like a three hundred foot depression through the Golden Gate with a bridge. And I think the first person to ever suggest it was a guy named Charles Crocker. And one of the reasons they needed a bridge, Chuck in the first place, is because if you ever look at a map of San Francisco, it's actually a peninsula, so it's connected to the south, to the rest of California, but there's a
lot of stuff to the north of that. To get to the north, you have to cross the Golden Gate. So people were like, we've got to get here to there. You know, we like Marine County, We like Pedaluma. We like to say Pedaluma at least. Yeah, Sacelito is another fun one to say. So they started with fairies and
that worked just fine. But as more and more people showed up, Tim Francisco was a magnet for immigrants, especially after the Gold Rush of eighteen forty nine, they were like, we might need something better than just fairies, like especially if we want to run railroad cars.
Yeah, and Jack, that ferry was expensive, man. Yeah. They were actually just like tanker boats, but they would double as ferries and say, yeah, sure, we'll take you across. It was two dollars ahead, which is almost seventy dollars today.
Yeah, and you got range teams. Yeah, I saw seventy seven dollars even.
Wow, that's even more outrageous.
And they gave you saltines and grape kool aid. That was the only food you had on.
Board, just like Southern Baptist Communion.
That's what I had in nursery school. It's actually a winning combination.
And that was pretty good, especially if you're in church and you're like hard up for snacks.
So oh, there was finally one called up the Princess. It was a side wheel paddle wheel steamer. That was the first official ferry that happened at eighteen sixty eight. But that guy Charles Crocker, all the way back in eighteen seventy two, he said, we need a bridge. And the reason why he said we need a bridge is because he was a railroad guy, and he's like, we need to get railroads up there. We need to get people, we need to move lumber, we need to do all
sorts of cool stuff. So let's let's get a bridge, guys.
Yeah, And people are like, there's no way. That's two miles. No one's ever built a suspension bridge that long. And in nineteen sixteen there was a San Francisco Sun journalist who used to study engineering named James Wilkins. He said, now I think we can build a suspension bridge. It'll be three thousand feet and it'll cost in those days dollars one hundred million dollars, which is almost I'm sorry, it's more than three billion today. So everyone said that's
probably not going to happen either. So eventually it took a city engineer named Michael O'Shaughnessy to be on the lookout to say, we do need a bridge, but we got to get this cost lower. Enlisted a guy in nineteen twenty one from Chicago name an engineer named Joseph Strauss, who said, here's what we do. Everyone. It is possible, but it can't be a straight suspension bridge all the way over, and it can't be just a cantilevered bridge.
The suspension will be too flexible and FLEXI with those wins, and the cantilever would be way too heavy. So if we do a combination of the two, I think that's the winning idea, and it'll cost you only seventeen million dollars.
Yeah, that was much more in line with what the city engineer knew that the city of San Francisco would be willing to pay for something like that, right right, Yeah. Joseph Strauss, he became the central figure of the Golden gate Bridge. He's often credited to the man who built the Golden gate Bridge. That's a genuinely unfair thing to say, because so many people contributed so much to it. But he was he was not a shy person. He could
work with just about anybody. He knew how to work the system, and he was not a self promoter, but he definitely was after the acclaim of being the man who built the Golden Gate Bridge. So just kind of put that in your in your pipe for later.
Right, don't smoke it yet though, right.
No, no, don't don't spark it. But he enlisted a guy named Charles Ellis, who is like the I don't know how you would describe him. I can't think of an analogous movie character, but I feel like we can get him across a little bit. He was obsessed with making sure that this bridge was not going to collapse.
Yeah, I would describe him as a math whiz. He was the guy.
Uh.
I think we did the when we did the New York Subways episode, we talked about the tunnels that went under the Hudson River.
M hmm.
He was a guy that came up with that plan. And so that's a pretty good dude to get if you're trying to build a bridge that no one thought could be built at the time, right, like super super math guy. Just keep math in your head, because, as we'll see, math would end up being his undoing.
Yeah, but he was not after a claim He did not I get the impression necessarily know how to work with everybody or work the system. He just wanted to do his math stuff, right.
Yeah.
So he was a good guy to have in that sense. And one of the reasons why he was so good is because the design process was so long. At one point, as we'll see, they just completely scrapped Strauss's idea and started over.
Yeah.
Financing was also a thing. I mean, Strauss had gotten it down to an estimate of seventeen million, and I'm sure anybody who was paying any attention was like, we should plan on probably at least double that, just about right. Yeah.
But the state was interested enough that in nineteen twenty three they passed the Golden gate Bridge and Highway District Act of California, which basically said to the people in the surrounding twenty one counties, Hey, you guys want to get in on this and basically vote for a tax district that can create debt to borrow money basically again in Star counties. What do you think?
Yeah? And they said, well, what does that mean. That sounds weird And they said, well, it means that all the businesses and all your homes in your county are going to be put up as collateral jointly against that loan. And surprisingly, maybe six out of the twenty one county said we're in. We see this progress as something that we need. As far as the remaining counties that weren't into it, you know, some of the obvious reasons is
they just didn't want to do that. A so I'm worried about the cost overruns and like, hey, this isn't even going to be enough. Other people didn't. You know, this was the early nineteen twenties, so it was still you know, kind of a I mean it was a bustling city for nineteen twenties, but there were areas of rural you know, ruralness sure across the other side, and like they were like we don't want this bridge, Like we've got livestock over here and we're cutting down our lumber.
And even back then they had conservation this agitating against stuff like this. Notably the Sierra Club was like, we don't want a bridge in that beautiful bay. And there were a lot of other people that came out with a lot of good reasons to bring up lawsuits, like you know, earthquakes. It was one in nineteen oh six. That was recent enough to where like what about this earthquake thing, Like, what if that happens, yeah.
The first big one. Yeah, shippers were like, well, you know, we can make it through the Golden Gate of the Pacific pretty easy. Right now, we're a little worried that just building this bridge is going to hamper our ability to make mad cash. The Department of War, which had a heavy presence in that area, it was like, look, we run like really important warships in and out of this harbor. We're worried that this bridge is going to
block our progress. But then also we're worried that it's going to become a real target for saboteurs and that they will blow up the bridge and block the harbor with the debris. And then the Southern Pacific Railroads stepped up and said, we run the ferries, like we're going to lose a bunch of money if you guys build
a bridge. So all these people together were either parties to or had their own lawsuits against the bridge authority saying like no, you can, you can't do this, And against all of those odds, the people in favor of the bridge managed to overcome that.
Yeah, and before we break, I do want to mention before we get some email, we mentioned Apartment of War not in bended knee to Pete Hegseth. That was the original name that later became the Department of Defense.
Yeah, I forgot that, which and.
Then all again now yeah, is now to the tune of what I just read was going to cost one hundred and twenty five million dollars to change that name back to the Department of War.
So another one hundred and twenty five to change it back to the Defense Department again eventually.
Probably, So, so I just want to point that out. Let's take a break and we'll be right back. So the first design, this hybrid design was pretty ugly. There. It was a critic that said it looked like an upside down rat trap. So they said, all right, we got to redesign this thing because it's got to look good.
Ellis gets together with consulting engineers leon I guess that would be moisseyf and oh Aman, and they got together with Strauss and they said, all right, let's go back to this old idea, but a new design of a full suspension bridge. Yeah, the longest one ever and it'll end up being the tallest one ever at the time at least, because you know, all the winds in the water and the boats and everything, this thing needed to be tall and super long.
Yeah, and it also needed to be tall because the angle of the cables to hold up such a long deck had to come down at a crazy angle. Yeah, which meant that those towers had to be really tall. So this is going to be the tallest bridge in the world, the longest suspension bridge in the world. And they're like, let's do that, Let's make the impossible happen. And it's fourth pointing out chuck, Like, these guys aren't using CAD, they're not using any sort of computer. They
do not exist yet. They're not using calculators. They're doing all of these calculations by hand, using their noodles, paper rules, slide rules, pencils, Like, that's how this bridge was designed. That's how they calculated the stresses on it. That's how they figured out how to engineer it, all by hand and using their heads.
Yeah, amazing. They did all kinds of testing, obviously some pretty impressive stuff. As you'll see, they create a model that was one fifty six scale took it to Princeton University there in New Jersey and did a scale down equivalent of one hundred and twenty million pounds of vertical load to tests to make sure those towers could take that past that test. And like I said, there was
so much math going on. Eventually Strauss got irritated. So the guy Ellis that they hired because he was great at math, got fired because the math was so irritating to Strauss.
Yeah. Ellis later recorded that Strauss said that the structure was nothing unusual and didn't require the time that Ellis thought necessary for it. Oh man, I also saw elsewhere somebody say that Strauss was envious or resentful of I guess the respect that Ellis got from the board whenever he went and spoke to them.
I could see that.
So yeah, this is And I also think that Strauss was getting leaned on. He was the one that was getting pressured to meet the time, and Ellis was like, no, it's going to take six months more than that. So finally Strauss fires Ellis in the most like cowardly way a person can. He forces him to take vacation, and then before his vacation's over, he's ends him a telegram saying you're fired.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Ellis didn't receive a lot of credit at the time, and in fact, he didn't get a lot of credit until after he passed away in nineteen forty nine. So we're taking our hat off to you, mister Ellis, for your great work and your great math, because we are both math whizzes ourselves, and we have a lot of respect for maths.
That's right. He also he didn't have anything to do. He couldn't really find much work because this was during the depression and he was fired. He went back and he went over all the figures again, all of the calculations to make sure they were right. He was spending like seventy hours a week and it took it months. Geez. And he did. And he was like, Yep, this is going to work, even though no one was listening to him,
he wasn't being paid for it. He just wanted to make sure that this thing was going to work.
That's great. So in nineteen twenty eight, they kind of mired their way through, or got their way through, the mire of the legal activity and all the protests and everything. The state government California said the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District is now a thing. They're going to pull
off every facet of this build. And in November nineteen thirty the district issued thirty five million dollars in bonds to finance this thing, which was a problem at the time though, because it was during the Great Depression, obviously, and they couldn't find any buyers for these bonds, and all these legal matters were scaring people away, and so they turned to kind of one of the heroes of this whole thing in nineteen thirty two, a guy named Amadio Giannini, the president of Bank of America.
Yeah, one of the most revered and respected banks in the world. Everyone loves Bank of America. They're basically a mascot here in the US, that's right.
And he was also just a California hero. He kind of kickstarted the Hollywood movie industry, the California wine industry. So he was a guy to go to and he was like, I got you. I got a big room with six million dollars over here, and I'll buy those bonds and you can get started on your project.
Yeah, which is pretty cool. And he is one of the heroes for sure, so they got started. They started during the depression, as we saw, and on the one hand, that meant financing it was difficult. On the other hand, it meant that they had a huge pool of laborers to tack because there are a lot of out of work people. So they got everyone they needed basically immediately to get started. It started on January fifth, nineteen thirty three. And there are a lot of issues that construction face
that made this a unique construction job. Every day, four times a day, so two times in and two times out. The tide brings in and takes out three hundred and ninety billion gallons of water through the Golden Gate. While these guys are trying to build their bridge. There's tons of fog, there's a lot of storms, there's high winds. It was not just like a walk in the park like apparently the Bay Bridge was to build.
Yeah, I mean apparently the Baybridge is more impressive in some ways and was built and finished before, but it didn't get nearly the press because it was just an easier job overall.
Right, It's like eight miles long, which is the exact distance from downtown Detroit to Eminem's house, and.
I didn't see that coming when you said Detroit, I didn't even see it coming. Nice work, thanks, all right. So it's a difficult job, super super hard because of the terrain and the water and the wind and the fog and everything going on. The north tower was built on the Marin County side on the coastline there into a very strong layer of basalt and sandstone, and that's great. So they were like, the north side is fine because
this stuff is very, very sturdy to build into. The south tower was about one thousand feet off shore and a bed of serpentine rock, and they went, this side is a little trickier, so we're gonna have to take our time a little more.
Yeah. They got this guy named Andrew C. Lawson. He's a great example of how many people were thoroughly involved in this because every person you mentioned in this story, just imagine there's dozens or maybe hundreds of people working beneath them in coordination with that person. He was a geologist and he basically took to test the bedrock. He I'm not exactly sure how he did it, but he put the equivalent of a railroad box car fully loaded that amount of weight and force onto a twenty square
inch area and it held up fine. Something it is. I could not find out how he did that exactly. It's just such a spectacular way to put it that I guess everyone's like, no one cares what actually happened.
Yeah, just tell me he did it.
And then he put on an old timey diving suit and diving bell and went down to the bedrock and hit it with a hammer. And apparently if it makes this sound like a dinging sound, that's what you're looking for, because not only is it strong, but it's also flexible, which is going to come in handy whenever the San Andreas gives California the big one, the eight point six magnitude earthquake that everyone says is inevitably coming someday.
Yeah, for sure. In order to ensure that, you know, stability, they had workers dive ninety feet down to put explosives down to blast out even more rock so they could go even deeper. They had to get rid of those fragments to even get out to that tower. You know, they have all these materials, so a lot of big construction like this is constructing things so you can do
the construction. And that was the case here. So they had to build a road basically on a trestle just to get out to that tower, and then they had to protect this thing from like being bumped into by a ship.
Yeah. If you look at the concrete foundations that the towers are built on, you'll notice that they're like oval and those were designed to basically act as fenders, kind of like if you play bumper bowling. Okay, it's basically like that, and imagine the bowling ball is a ship that's being captained by somebody who's not paying attention. Huh,
probably on his phone. Yeah, yeah, and they will hit that fender, the bumper, and it will keep them from running into the actual tower itself, and because of the oval shape, hopefully kind of push the ship away from the fender itself.
Yeah. Well, the captain says, what was that? Yeah, they weren't. I think they said it looked like a giant bathtub is what they referred to it. But you know, they filled that thing once it was peaking above the surface, partially with concrete, pumped out the water, reinforced it with steel, more concrete, and all of a sudden, you've got a protected tower with that that Billiard's bumper bowl. Bumper bowl? Is that what you called it?
Bumper bowling?
Oh okay, I thought you were talking about like bumper.
No, no, no, bumper bowling where they put those guard rails down in the gutters.
Yeah, we went bowling last week and Ruby still uses those.
I do too. Sometimes I can still manage to miss pins bumper bowling.
But oh okay, I thought you might just roll a gutter balls like man who can't.
No, I think even bumper bowling, I can miss the pins. Still.
I did the usual. I know I've mentioned this before, but with bowling usually for and I think the other day I hit like a like a one forty and then like a seventy.
I don't remember. Are those good?
I mean for someone who doesn't bowl much, I feel like is a pretty strong number.
Is that, dude? Or heyesus level good?
Oh?
No?
No, No, like three hundred is a perfect game. Uh, But I mean one forty means you've hit plenty of strikes and spares and probably had a good last frame out. I don't know if that's what they call it, but seventy is bad. My whole point was, though, is I'm good for one game? And then my my game really drops off.
Okay, well, were you junk by the second game?
No, no, no, no, no, I had I had but one beer, a PBR draft. It was delicious.
Okay, yeah, sometimes those are the best ones, that really crowdy ones.
I don't do that much anymore, but it was super refreshing and delicious.
Great.
Yeah, that's Chuck goes bowling.
Yeah and PBR uh huh. So you want to take a break.
Oh yeah, yeah, we're there already. Let's do it.
Okay, so Chuck, they've got the foundation poured. That's a nice fender a bumper around the towers. Apparently, once they got that foundation done, they erected the South Tower, which was the more difficult of the two towers, the one closest to San Francisco. They erected it in like six months, which is really amazing, especially as you find like that
added up. That was not an anomaly for this project, that kept like hitting milestones ahead of time, and that used quite a bit of steel thanks to Bethlehem Steel Corporation of Pennsylvania. And as we know from our Christmas episode, the reason it is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is thanks to our Moravian friends who moved there in the eighteenth cents.
Right New Jersey chips into gott gotta shout out New Jersey for sure.
I don't believe the Moravians had much to do with naming New Jersey.
No, no, no, But as far as the steel goes.
Okay, yes, And so Bethlehem Steel provided forty four thousand tons of steel for each tower. That was each tower, and this is not like a quick thing. They prefabricated them, put them on a barge, and then sent them to San Francisco, down the East coast, passed Florida, through the Panama Canal, and then up to San Francisco. That's how every single piece of steel, fabricated steel made its way to the Golden Gate project.
Yeah, that's right, via the Panama Canal. They get there, they obviously use these giant cranes to lit these steel sections into place and start kind of just putting this thing together like a kit. At this point, and at this point they haven't even you know. Eventually they had temporary elevators built so people could get up and down quicker. But before that it would take a worker twenty minutes
just to climb a ladder. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be just to be climbing a ladder that high, that takes twenty minutes to climb. But that's how it got to the top. And then we get to the color. Like we mentioned before, it's not named Golden gate Bridge because of the color, because it's really not golden in color. It got there, like we said, prefab then it was painted with an orange just red lead primer just to kind of make sure it made the journey there okay,
without getting rusted out. And once it got there, consulting architect Irving Morrow said, man, that looks pretty darn good. Everybody, what do you think? And everyone went bully bully, And so they started searching for sort of related colors and ended up landing on what is now known is Golden gate Bridge International. Orange.
I would have kept my mouth shup, but I would have been looking around, like you guys think that looks good. That's the color we're going.
To paint the mean to green personally, but.
Okay. So one of the things that is great about that particular color orange, And I think one of the reasons people said bully for it was because it didn't. It didn't well, it harmonized with the surrounding area. It's nice, hilly shrubby it like. It was a good choice for sure for that, and I think it also kind of placated a lot of people too there like that actually kind of goes with everything. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. So it was a good idea, and
that International orange is still used today. You can thank International orange for the color of your life vest if it's orange.
That's right. That is just regular International orange. The golden gate bridge International orange is a little different. It's like a variation on that, but like you said, it blended in well. And it also did you know, the job that it was really supposed to do was stand out
for ships and boats there in the fog. Rejected colors included silver, black, and then black and yellow, which was suggested by the US Navy, like you know, stripe, black and yellow, because that was the best color for visibility to them.
It's the best color for Christian metal too.
That's right. It's funny because I can that striper. This stuff looks so good, but I can't picture a bridge in yellow and black stripe. It just looks too safety industrial, you know, or cliffs nose? Yeah, yeah, true.
Didn't the dude, the drummer from Striper have black and yellow striped drum sticks? Even?
I think he had a black and yellow striped everything, if you know what I mean.
Oh, I see he had a black and yellow stripe Gnomon.
Let's keep going, boy, that's good, all right? So Marrow we mentioned Irving Morrow. He's the consulting architect who said, like, I'd like this color. He also obviously played a part in a lot of the aesthetic aesthetic aesthetic decisions. That's tough, good band name, but also bad esthetic. No one could ever say it, are you going to see tonight? The aesthetic decisions. One of the things that he designed aesthetically was to make it look a little taller. Was those
tower panels decrease in size from bottom to top. Pretty good idea, yep.
And the well I guess Lawson was like, let's do this, and let's add a little bit of this and maybe put bows on the top kind of thing. Strauss, who again is the man at the center of all of this, he was way ahead of his time as far as safety goes. Apparently, the Golden Project was the first one that required hard hats on site, which is not fairly ubiquitous.
Yeah, good little fact.
Yeah. And then he also created a safety net that was movable, so I think the people who were in the highest risk of falling to their deaths got to use the safety net while they were up their work.
Yeah, and use it they did, because that thing ended up saving the lives of nineteen construction workers. They became known that those nineteen became known as the Halfway to Hell Club, which is pretty funny in a way. But there were some deaths. In February thirty seven, scaffolding collapsed due to an accident, thirteen men on it. The net failed, and ten of them died. But in the end, eleven people died from this project, which is pretty good. I mean,
it's awful that eleven people died. But for the time, they would say, like for every million dollars of a project, you can expect one death, And this thing came in at like thirty five million or so, so they expected, you know, thirty to forty deaths and there were only eleven. So that was that was I guess a win for safety for the time at least.
Yeah, for sure, I find that a really strange rule of thumb. For every million spent, you can expect to death. Like, I guess what that's based on is just the complexity increases by the price. I may're the height something.
Yeah, probably just that means it's it's big and difficult and complex. I think you're right, But it's definitely the only thing the way to calculate something, it really is.
So, yeah, there's thirty four people dead in one person's like, how much is this bridge going cost?
You?
Like thirty five? And you're in.
There's cost overruns and you know what that means.
So they completed the towers, both towers in nineteen thirty five. Remember they started this whole thing. I think they started building that temporary roadway to the first foundation in nineteen thirty one. They're moving along, and after the towers would complete, it was time to create those four iconic cables that are the actual things that hold up the road deck. The bridge itself. The point of the bridge is held
up by these cables. And if you see one of those cables in person, you will find that it is three feet one meter thirty six inches. Let's see, do it three hundred centimeters in. Let's see, it would be a third of a decameter in width or in diameter, and it's actually made of twenty five thousand wires. Each of those cables are all twisted together.
Yeah, and to get that done, they hired John A. Roebling's son's company is the name of the company, and they had worked on the Brooklyn Bridge, so they were obviously great people to call for that. But like you said, I think you said it was completed ahead of schedule. This was April nineteenth, nineteen thirty seven, about a million three under the thirty five million dollar budget. Just a
little housekeeping here. It's one point seven miles long, ninety feet wide, holds six lanes of traffic, two sidewalks, seven hundred and forty six foot high towers, with the main span between them being forty two hundred feet and at his midpoint the span hangs two hundred and sixty five feet above the average height of the water below. And people were really excited to get on this thing.
They were an opening day. The first day they let pedestrians across, the next day was cars, and at the grand opening. I think this kind of gets across the type of person Joseph strausswa he read a poem that he wrote for the day, and he was a poet, so it's not bad. I like the rhythm of it. The meter sure is that correct?
Yeah? I think so.
I would say go look it up and read it yourself. I'm not going to read it. But it's called the Mighty Task is done by Joseph Strauss. The thing that bothers me, Aside from a couple of clunky lines, he says essentially like that all the people who are involved of this are glorified and that no selfish urge stains
its life, no envy, greed, intrigue or strife. And I'm like, dude, he specifically didn't mention Ellis, Charles Ellis at this whole thing, and then he goes to the he has the audacity to say that that's not being done here at this grand ceremony.
Yeah, and they built a Trellis so you had a word there in the bag.
That's right, good point, Chuck Man.
I don't know about Strauss, now, Yeah.
He's not really talked about like that from what I can tell, I just kind of put this together from different different places. But there's a there's a bronze statue of him in Golden Gate Park, I think, and there's books about him and his amazing feet, And it's just I don't like people like that who take full credit for something that yeah, hundreds or thousands of people have done and that they did, like backbiting along the way with it. It's just I don't like people like that.
I'm with you. He actually had a Trellis line. He was like, what rhymes with trellis? Hmm? I got nothing?
Yeah, he scratched it out.
Like Ellis is outside the window holding up a sign. The math checks out.
I saw that. No one can say for certain whether Ellis ever saw the Golden Gate Bridge himself. I'm sure sure that he went and saw it at some point, because he died decade or two, yeah, a good decade after it opened, So I would guess unless he had like a horrible aversion at just the thought of the bridge, I'll bet he went and visited it.
Yeah, I bet you're right. So we can compare it to other suspension bridges in a few ways, because I think that's fairly interesting. It's got a lighter roadway than most, it does not have train tracks on it, but it seems like that was one of the original ideas, is they wanted a train to be able to run across that thing. But they realized that the winds were a real problem in nineteen forty after the to Come Up Narrows Bridge disaster, and they saw those things in forty
mile an hour winds twisting around. They're like, we need to cause we get winds up to like seventy five miles an hour, so we need to stiffen this thing up. So they added horizontal trusses to stiffen the structure against twisting, and that's what brought the total weight of the deck too high, basically to where they could not end up putting railroad tracks down.
No, like they were close to the limit of it.
I guess right, yeah, I couldn't do it, Okay.
So the Golden Gate it was the longest suspension bridge until nineteen sixty four when the Arizona Narrows took over that for a while. And like we said, there's Golden Gate Park that predates the bridge, but Golden Gate National Record Creation Area was created on either side of the bridge after the bridge was already around for a while, and there's some pretty neat things about it. One of the things we remember, we talked about how people were
worried about earthquakes. Well, it actually survived the Loma Prieta earthquake, the nineteen eighty nine earthquake that took place when the A's and the Giants were playing each other in the World Series and just killed a lot of people. The Bay Bridge apparently a section of that collapsed and the Golden Gate survived with no damage whatsoever from when I could tell her, very little of it.
Yeah, pretty good there. And this is something I heard early on in my life was that the Golden Gate Bridge basically is in constant paint mode basically, so like it's always being painted apparently, like it takes so long to paint and sort of you know, take care of the corrosion because of all that salty fog and salty air and water. Right, just it never stops. It's not like, all right, we're done and we're going to take a few months off. It's continuously being kept up.
Yeah. And one other thing about the earthquake thing, they somebody at some point figured out that the San Andreas could produce at most of eight point six magnitude earthquake, and then they went and figured out that the Golden Gate would probably not be able to withstand that. So they started, I think back in well after the Loma Prieta earthquake in nineteen eighty nine, they started a bit of a retro fit to try to make it earthquake
proof up to eight point six magnitude. And one of the things that they were having to shore up Chuck was that they didn't bolt the towers to the foundation because they're like, these are so heavy, we don't even need to waste the time or money on bolts. And an eight point six earthquake, they realized if you stay in stiffly with your leg stiff and then you kind of fall to the side and one of your feet
comes off the ground. When you go back to center again, your feet comes down, and imagine one of the towers doing that when it comes back down on that foundation. They're like, that foundation is not going to hold that up. Yeah, so that's what they're trying to retrofit. Now.
Yeah, that's a big footstomp, is what they said for sure. So we have to close now with some sort of darker stuff because the Golden Gate bridge, if it's known for. It's known for many things, but one thing it's very much known for is that there have been many many suicides attempted and completed over the years. They averaged about twenty per year for a very long time. Hundreds of others had been stopped by obviously volunteers that are stationed
there to watch for this sort of thing. Bridge workers, cops, sometimes just random people like you see in a movie. And they took a very long time to eventually get a safety net, even though it was possible. They really dragged their feet getting that thing up, didn't they.
Yeah. I saw that there was an opposition to it that included it will be ugly.
Oh god, so.
Every I think since the first guy who died by suicide's name was Harold Waber. He was walking on the bridge all the way back, just like a few months after it opened, and he was walking with a friend. He said, this is as far as I go, and he became the first person to jump to his death from the bridge. That was in nineteen thirty seven.
Yeah, what a thing, What a last line, you know?
Yeah, imagine being that friend and being like wait what and then yeah, yeah, I can't imagine that since then at least two thousand people, maybe a little more, probably more, because I think they assume that there's plenty of people who have jumped and their bodies were never found. But at least two thousand confirmed people have jumped to their
deaths from the Golden gate Bridge. And in nineteen ninety five, the California Highway Patrol, which had been keeping an official count, stop their official count at nine hundred and ninety seven because they were worried that there was going to be a rash of suicides to become the one thousandth person to die by suicide by jumping off the Golden gate Bridge. So officially the count's nine and ninety seven, but I think most credible sources put it at over two thousand.
Now, yeah, and what a thing to think about, What an awful thing to consider. But like, thank god they thought of something like that, because they're.
Probably right, you know what the security net.
No, the stopping the public count, because oh yeah, you know, I would never have thought of something like that, So I'm glad they thought of that. There was a really, I don't know what to call it, interesting and awful documentary from two thousand and six called the bridge. I saw it. I'm not sure did you see that one? Yeah, there's a lot to it. It was you know, the point was to drive awareness about this and about suicide and suicide prevention. But it was very controversial in that
they captured footage. They had cameras you know, trained on the bridge from the mountains nearby, and they captured footage of twenty three suicides, including a survivor, and they you know, filmed family members and interviewed one about their loved ones. It's very moving and upsetting documentary from when did I say, two thousand and six?
Yeah, it is so Yeah. That definitely raised public awareness and kind of I think amplified the public outcry about this and made people be like, wait, we probably should do something about this, because twenty to thirty people a year were taking their own lives at this time. Right.
They finally, finally in twoenty the beginning of twenty twenty four, they finished putting up these safety nets essentially that stick out from the side of the bridge, so that if you jump off the side of the bridge, you're going to land in the steel net. The whole thing costs two hundred and twenty four million dollars and completed suicides dropped by seventy three percent. Yeah, after they were installed.
And even more amazing than that, I think there were two hundred attempts and thirty completed suicides a year on average after the nets were installed. That fell to one hundred and thirty two and eight in twenty twenty four, and there were no suicides in the last seven months of twenty twenty five. So these nets are actually preventing people from completing suicide and also deterring people from attempting suicide there.
Yeah, and you know, they've done studies where they've interviewed people who did survive. Most of them don't ever try again, which is like very encouraging to know. I think there was a study in the nineteen seventies by a guy named Richard Sidon, and he followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who had been stopped These aren't people who jumped and survived, but they were stopped from jumping in the thirty five years prior to the study, and he found that only thirty five of the five point
fifteen went on to die by suicide. So that's really great to know that if you can be an EMT or a police officer or a random passer by who can get someone out of that dire situation that there's a very very good chance that will be not something they go on to complete.
Yeah, and you mentioned those volunteers that are stationed along the bridge just for that very purpose. I would wager that there's at least one stuff you should know a listener who does that, and I would love to hear from them.
I bet you're right. And I hope someone comes to our live show and stands up at the end and tells everybody that they do that. I bet you that happens.
Yeah, they will get thunderous applause. That's right. I feel like we should end on a high note. And the high note is the Golden Gate Bridge was where James Bond successfully defeated Christopher Walkin saving Tanya Roberts in The Bargain.
That's right of you to a kill.
Probably the best bomb movie ever.
Hmmm, interesting, All right.
I mean that was the one I grew up on, so that's probably why I like that. But there's no kid who grew up on like The Living Daylights and was like, that's.
The good stuff.
Chuck said, good stuff, which is where I was trying to push him because that unlocks the listener mail.
All right, this is a chance to plug friends of the show here. Hey, guys, just finished the episode on the radio, the national radio Quiet Zone. Found it very fascinating and by the way, we got a few emails from people pointing this out. I want to reach out with a recommendation of one of the McElroy pods. The maclroy brothers, Justin Griffin and Travis McElroy have long done my brother, my brother and me and I've known those
guys for a long time. Super cool dudes. And then they do a show with their dad called The adventure Zone, which is where they play D and D and that's become hugely popular.
That's awesome, man, Yeah, it's super cool.
But the second season of Adventure Zone is called Amnesty, and it is well, it's a tabletop role playing game, so I don't know if it's always D and D, but Griffin has said it in the Green Bank area, so the folks in that area that it attracts and the lack of communication is a plot device and really drives a story. It's one of my favorites that they've done, I hold stuff you dealing with my heart. Thanks for doing what you do. And ps, I loved hearing a
few of the macarroys on Movie Crush. I loved hearing josh on Behind the Bastards and so on all of my favorite podcasters. Crossing paths now and then really drives those parasocial bonds. So go listen to josh on Behind the Bastards your past episodes. You're on a couple of times, right.
Yes, I was, and on Daily Zeitgeist. No, I was on Behind the Bastards once. I was on Daily's Seikeist.
A couple of times, Zeitgeist a couple of times. And then I had Griffin on Movie Crush in his favorite movie, which he claims is not his favorite movie only but also the best movie was groundhog Day.
It is a good movie.
And I had Justin on and Justin I think I can remember every single guest in their movie. Still his was with Nail and.
I I've never seen that. Isn't that a Morrisey album?
I don't know, but it's a British independent film, so it wouldn't surprise me.
This is Vauxhall and I okay with.
Neil and I Richard D. Grant. It's it's really good. I think you and Yumi would both like it.
All right, we'll watch it then, Chuck.
It's from like the indie movie revolution of the nineties and from England, and it's really really great.
You know. I think I was talking smack not too long ago about pt Anderson. I don't know if it was on the podcast or not, and that I basically hadn't liked anything at his since Boogie Knights, Okay, maybe Magnolia, Okay. Then I saw One Battle after Another and I'm like, buddy, this guy is back in my estimate. Not only did he direct it, he wrote it too. It's a good movie.
Yeah, he writ and directs all his movies. He Yeah, I loved, loved, loved One Battle after Another. I think it was my favorite movie the year that that in Centers. We're probably tied.
I've not seen Sinners yet, is it? It's pretty good. It's all right, I'll check it out. Don't tell me anything. That's fine. All I needed to hear was oh man.
Capital G grade and it's right up your alley.
Okay. Cool?
Great, And by the way, is from Ryan Pinto, who's coming to see us in Denver, and I'm sorry, Ryan, but we're not doing it on the pinto. We've already done that live show.
That's a shame. You can go back and listen to it and imagine that you're there because we did release it eventually as an.
Episode, and then he might have been who knows.
Thanks Ryan, We'll see you in Denver. If you want to see us in Denver, Seattle, or San Francisco, where you can also visit the Golden Gate Bridge, you can go to stuff youshould Know do dot com and get tickets, And in the meantime, if you want to email us like Ryan did, you can send an email to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.