the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 56
But up and down? And twisting like an angry serpent? That wasn’t
part of anybody’s plan.
The “Pearl Harbor of Engineering”
An estimated seven thousand people attended the offi cial opening
of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on July 1, 1940, and a parade of two thou-
sand cars trekked from one side to the other that first day. The lead car
carried the state’s governor, who proudly paid the toll (75¢ each direction)
as photographers snapped away. But by then, the bridge already had a
reputation among workers and others who knew it well as something of a
thrill ride. Even a wind of less than 5 miles per hour sometimes rippled
the road structure, and those ripples sometimes reached five feet high and
left the road surface undulating for hours. Motorists reported that driving
across was like bobbing among ocean waves, with cars ahead and behind
rising to peaks and disappearing into troughs. Within a couple of months
of its opening, the bridge bore the jovial nickname “Galloping Gertie”—
a nickname Hobbs notes was first assigned to the doomed bridge in
Wheeling.
“Suspension bridges are supposed to move,” he wrote, “but this
was different.”
Transportation officials were publicly delighted that traffi c across
the bridge during its first months was much heavier than expected—more
than triple their projected figures—and it appeared the fi nancial gamble
of building the bridge had paid off. They also dismissed the bridge’s
bouncing as normal conduct for a new suspension bridge.
Privately, though, they were worried. They had already contacted
Moisseiff with their concerns, and he acknowledged that two other recently
opened suspension bridges, the Deer Isle Bridge in Maine and the
Bronx-Whitestone Bridge across the East River in New York (for which
he had been a consulting engineer), had similar problems. The state also
had contacted an engineering professor at the University of Washington,
F. Bert Farquharson, to begin scale-model wind testing to find a solution