Since I started thinking about being a Civil engineer, visit the Golden Gate Bridge was a goal of life for me. I was obsessed with it. I saw so many pictures, tried to understand its structure so many times. The first contact with “her” was a great experience for me. I spend the whole day there. There is a lot of things to see around and I wanted to make sure that I saw “her” from as many angles as I could. So, let me tell you a little more about this beauty.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge located in the state of California, United States, which connects the city of San Francisco to Sausalito, in the San Francisco metropolitan area. The bridge is the city’s main postcard, one of the most famous structures in the United States, and is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
At the beginning of the 20th century, especially after the 1906 earthquake, the city of San Francisco went through a period of economic rise and immediately there was a need to connect it with neighboring regions in order to develop the economy in the cities around the Bay of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco is surrounded by water on almost all sides, except for the portion of land that connects it with the greater region, which makes it a peninsula. The need to connect with neighboring regions took the form of a road structure.
The idea of a bridge crossing the Golden Gate first appeared in an article by journalist James Wilkins in 1916. The idea posed a major challenge since the Golden Gate was known for strong winds and currents and at that time such a structure was considered impossible to be built. The name of the bridge was chosen in 1927, when MM O’Shaughnessy, a senior San Francisco engineer mentioned the bridge as Golden Gate Bridge, referring to the strait. The very difficult task of designing such a structure was the responsibility of the German engineer Joseph Strauss. Although he had no experience with suspension bridges, engineer Joseph Strauss signed a contract with the city hall and designed the bridge that began to be built in January 1933 and completed in 1937.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge. With 2,737 meters of total length, including the accesses, and 1,966 meters of suspended length, with the distance between the two towers of 1,280 meters. These suspension towers, on the other hand, rise 227 meters above sea level, supporting the cables that, in the bridges with this architecture, support the suspended board. This means that the two main cables that support it must be prepared to withstand the full weight of the tray and the cables starting from the main cables. Each of these, therefore, has a diameter of 92 centimeters, being formed by 27,572 smaller cords.
If you are coming to the US, you definitely should take a few days to visit the city of San Francisco and, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge.
See you!
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