You're on the bridge. You're walking on it. Take a second and feel the deck move under your feet, because it is moving — the roadway can swing up to twenty-seven feet side to side in high winds. That's not a defect. That's the design. A bridge that doesn't flex breaks.
The cables holding you up right now contain eighty thousand miles of wire. That's enough to wrap around the Earth three times. Each main cable is three feet in diameter and contains twenty-seven thousand, five hundred and seventy-two individual wires bundled together. The company that spun these cables — John Augustus Roebling and Sons — was the same company that built the cables for the Brooklyn Bridge fifty years earlier. The Roeblings basically invented suspension bridge cables and then cornered the market.
Building this was as dangerous as you'd expect. Workers drove rivets at seven hundred feet, catching red-hot metal in buckets while wind tried to knock them off the towers. Divers went down a hundred and ten feet
in the open Pacific to pour the foundations. They had twenty-minute work windows before the currents got too strong. They regularly got the bends coming up. The water temperature was around fifty degrees. The visibility was zero. They were essentially building by feel.
But Strauss did something nobody had done before — he hung a safety net. The first safety net in major bridge construction histo
