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Joseph Strauss

1870–1938 · 68 years Specialist

The Golden Gate Bridge's chief engineer, and the man he erased

Portrait of Joseph Strauss — Steven Pavlov — 2010 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Strauss grew up in Cincinnati in a family of artists, his mother a pianist, his father a painter and writer, and seemed headed for a similar path until illness put him in a hospital bed with a view of John Roebling's suspension bridge over the Ohio River. He decided, at nineteen, to build bridges instead. He earned a civil engineering degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1892, doubling as class poet, then left a Chicago engineering firm to found his own company around a single idea: cheaper concrete counterweights could replace the expensive machinery used to raise drawbridges. He patented the design and built more than four hundred bascule bridges around the world before San Francisco came calling.

San Francisco wanted a bridge across the Golden Gate's currents and fog, and in 1929 it hired Strauss as chief engineer on the strength of his bascule-bridge career, though the strait needed a suspension span he had never designed. Leon Moisseiff worked out the aerodynamics, and Charles Ellis, a Strauss employee, did most of the structural calculations for the towers and cables, work that took him more than a year and that Strauss left unmentioned when the bridge opened. Construction ran from January 1933 to May 1937, a main span of over four thousand feet painted International Orange, finished under budget and ahead of schedule. On May 28, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt pushed a button in Washington to open it to cars. Strauss got the credit and, for decades, kept it.

Strauss insisted on safety measures no American bridge project had used before, a movable net slung under the work deck that caught nineteen falling men, who formed their own club and called themselves the Half Way to Hell Club. It did not save everyone: on February 17, 1937, a scaffold carrying twelve workers tore the net loose, and ten of them fell to the water, the deadliest single accident in the bridge's construction and most of the eleven deaths recorded there. The larger cost fell on Charles Ellis, whom Strauss forced off the project in 1931 in a dispute over pay and pace, then wrote out of the record. Ellis was not formally credited for his structural work until decades after both men were dead.

Strauss died on May 16, 1938, less than a year after the bridge opened, and a statue of him now stands at its southern end. The Golden Gate itself became one of the most photographed structures on earth, and the credit followed the statue, not the math. Historians and engineers spent decades restoring Ellis to the story, the American Society of Civil Engineers eventually credited him as principal structural engineer, and in 2012 a plaque bearing his name went up on the south tower, beside Strauss's. The bridge needed both of their names. For a long time it carried only one.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Joseph Strauss's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Strauss Bascule Bridge Company company
Chicago firm; built more than 400 bascule bridges worldwide 1904
Burnside Bridge building
Portland, Oregon, one of his signature bascule spans 1926
Golden Gate Bridge building
As chief engineer; structural design credited posthumously to Charles Ellis 1937
'The Mighty Task is Done' other
Poem written to mark the bridge's completion 1937

Life in brief

with age at each point

January 9, 1870 aged 0 Born in Cincinnati, Ohio
1892 aged ~22 Graduates University of Cincinnati with a civil engineering degree
1904 aged ~34 Founds the Strauss Bascule Bridge Company in Chicago
1929 aged ~59 Named chief engineer of the proposed Golden Gate Bridge
January 5, 1933 aged 62 Construction begins
February 17, 1937 aged 67 Ten workers die when a scaffold tears through the safety net The deadliest accident in the bridge's construction.
May 28, 1937 aged 67 President Franklin Roosevelt opens the bridge to vehicle traffic He pushed a telegraph button in Washington, D.C.
May 16, 1938 aged 68 Dies in Los Angeles, less than a year after the bridge opened