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.
Suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge had asked him to "do things he couldn't do". Christensen saw himself as a failure and never returned to San Francisco. In 1985 28-year-old Kenneth Baldwin jumped over and survived. He was rescued by the US Coast Guard, he suffered a few broken ribs and a bruised lung. On September 24, 2000, Kevin Hines was 19 years old, paranoid, and hallucinating when he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Throwing himself headfirst over the bridge railing, he fell 220 feet into San Francisco Bay. During the fall, his body rotated so that when Hines hit the water he landed in