Joseph Strauss
Joseph Strauss · Technology & Engineering
Chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) and revolutionizer of the bascule drawbridge; his safety net saved 19 workers' lives.
9 janvier 1870, Cincinnati, Ohio, États-Unis — 16 mai 1938, Los Angeles, États-Unis
Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco
Joseph Strauss is recognized among Jewish contributors to Technology & Engineering — Chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) and revolutionizer of the bascule drawbridge; his safety net saved 19 workers' lives.
The poet engineer
Joseph Baermann Strauss was born on 9 January 1870 in Cincinnati, Ohio, into an artistic family of German Jewish ancestry: his father Raphael Strauss was a writer and painter, his mother a pianist. At the University of Cincinnati, where he took his civil engineering degree in 1892, he was class poet and class president — and he never stopped writing verse while he built in steel.
The bascule bridges
His idea was simple and heretical: replace the iron counterweights of drawbridges with cheap concrete. When his employer rejected it, he founded the Strauss Bascule Bridge Company in Chicago, and his patented spans opened and closed over rivers across America and beyond — the fortune and the reputation that would carry him to the Golden Gate.
The Golden Gate, said plainly
As chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, opened in 1937, he fought a decade for the project and imposed a novelty on the industry: a safety net under the deck, which saved the lives of nineteen workers. This card also records what the record says plainly: most of the structural design was the work of Charles Alton Ellis, dismissed and denied recognition until a plaque was installed in 2012. Strauss read his poem 'The Mighty Task is Done' at the opening, died a year later — 16 May 1938, Los Angeles — and his statue stands at the San Francisco end of the bridge.
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Source: Wikipedia
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Chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) and revolutionizer of the bascule drawbridge; his safety net saved 19 workers' lives.
Source: Wikipedia
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