On 5 January 1933, with the Great Depression squeezing America hard, workers in heavy boots started swinging picks into the rocky cliffs at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. They were beginning the Golden Gate Bridge - a span so long and so daring that many engineers had said it could never be built. The water below them was deep, freezing, and constantly hammered by Pacific storms.
Chief engineer Joseph Strauss had been pushing the idea for over a decade. To pull it off he hired thousands of workers and did something unusual for the 1930s - he hung a giant safety net beneath the deck. Nineteen men fell into that net during construction and survived. They started a club called the Halfway-to-Hell Club. The bridge's famous orange-red colour, called International Orange, was actually meant to be temporary primer, but everyone loved how it glowed in the fog, so it stayed.
Four years and four months later, on 27 May 1937, the bridge opened. About 200,000 people walked across it on the first day - some on roller skates, some on stilts. The two main towers stood 746 feet tall, the tallest of any bridge on Earth at the time. Today around 40 million vehicles cross the Golden Gate Bridge every year. Painters constantly repaint it from end to end to keep the salt air from chewing through its steel, and it remains one of the most photographed structures in the world.
