Golden Gate Bridge wanted it to be painted with black and yellow stripes to ensure visibility by passing ships. Senior engineer Charles Alton Ellis, collaborating remotely with Moisseiff, was the principal engineer of the project. Moisseiff produced the basic structural design, introducing his "deflection theory" by which a thin, flexible roadway would flex in the wind, greatly reducing stress by transmitting forces via suspension cables to the bridge towers. Although the Golden Gate Bridge design has proved sound, a later Moisseiff design, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, collapsed in a strong windstorm soon after it was completed, because of an unexpected aeroelastic flutter.
Golden Gate Bridge Although the idea of a bridge spanning the Golden Gate was not new, the proposal that eventually took hold was made in a 1916 "San Francisco Bulletin" article by former engineering student James Wilkins. San Francisco's City Engineer estimated the cost at $100 million, which would have been $2.12 billion in 2009, and impractical for the time. He asked bridge engineers whether it could be built for less. One who responded, Joseph Strauss, was an ambitious engineer and poet who had, for his graduate thesis, designed a railroad bridge across the Bering Strait. At the time, Strauss had completed some