Golden Gate Bridge

You're looking at what might be the most photographed bridge on Earth, and almost nothing about it went according to plan. Start with the color. That famous International Orange? It was never supposed to stay. It was just the primer — the anti-rust coating on the steel. The US Navy actually wanted the bridge painted in black and yellow stripes so ships could see it in the fog. Can you imagine? A giant bumblebee stretching across the Golden Gate. The consulting architect, Irving Morrow, took one look at that orange primer against the fog and the hills and said, no, that's the color. And he was right.

During construction, chief engineer Joseph Strauss did something radical. He spent one hundred and thirty thousand dollars on a safety net strung beneath the bridge — the first time that had ever been done on a major American bridge project. Over the course of construction, that net caught nineteen men who fell. They formed a dark little fraternity called the Halfway to Hell Club. For most of the four-year build, the net held. But on February seventeenth, nineteen thirty-seven, a scaffold carrying twelve men broke free and tore through the net. Ten of them died. It was the single deadliest incident of the entire project, and it accounted for ten of the eleven total construction deaths.

Now fast-forward fifty years. On the bridge's fiftieth anniversary in nineteen eighty-seven, the city closed it to cars and invited pedestrians to walk across. Three hundred thousand people showed up — so many that their combined weight actually flattened the roadway's upward arch by seven feet. Engineers watching in real time held their breath. The bridge, designed to flex in high winds and earthquakes, handled it. But nobody's tried that experiment again.