Chapter 1: What interesting facts about the Golden Gate Bridge are shared?
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Hey, and 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 are headed west. And, yeah, that's all.
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 15th and our show's on the 29th. That's right, on a rare Thursday. Oh, a 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 Dr. Z show. Do you know that one?
Like Dr. Zayas?
Yeah, do you know about this?
No, no, no, I don't know anything about this.
This is the one in which comedian Dana Gould is, he owns a professional, like, full-blown Dr. Zaius costume. And he's been doing this for years, and it's like a talk show. With him as the host is Dr. Zaius, so I'm on that. And I'm very excited because not only is Janet Varney in it, co-founder of SketchFest and dear friend, but Dave Foley. I get to be on stage with a kid in the hall. What?
Man, that's going to be amazing.
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Chapter 2: How did the name 'Golden Gate' originate?
They were like, we might need something better than just ferries, 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 $2 a head, which is almost $70 today.
Yeah.
That's outrageous.
Yeah, I saw $77 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.
That was pretty good, especially if you're in church and you're hard up for snacks.
So, oh, there was finally one called the Princess. It was a side wheel, paddle wheel steamer, I guess, that was the first official ferry. That happened in 1868. But that guy, Charles Crocker, all the way back in 1872, 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...
To get people, we need to move lumber. We need to do all sorts of cool stuff. So 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 1916, there was a San Francisco Sun journalist who used to study engineering named James Wilkins. He said, no, I think we can build a suspension bridge. It'll be 3,000 feet, and it'll cost, in those days' dollars, $100 million.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did engineers face in constructing the bridge?
They did all kinds of testing, obviously. Some pretty impressive stuff, as you'll see. They created a model that was 156 scale. took it to Princeton University there in New Jersey, and did a scaled-down equivalent of 120 million pounds of vertical load to test to make sure those towers could take that, passed 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 of 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.
Yeah.
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 a vacation. And then before his vacation's over, he sends 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 1949. So we're taking our hat off to you, Mr. 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 70 hours a week and it took him months. And he did. And he was like, yep, this is going to work.
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Chapter 4: Who were the key figures involved in the bridge's construction?
And people were really excited to get on this thing.
They were. On 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 Strauss was.
Yeah.
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 that all the people who were 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 this grand ceremony.
Yeah. And they 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 places. But there's a bronze statue of him in Golden Gate Park, I think. And there's books about him and his amazing feat.
And it's just, I don't like people like that who take full credit for something that hundreds or thousands of people have done and that they did like backbiting along the way with. It's just, I don't like people like that.
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