In May 2013 I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk about the alternative designs and proposed (but never executed) updates to the Golden Gate Bridge:
Since the slides in the video are a bit blurry, I decided to share some of the original images, and elaborate on where I found them (mostly, at San Francisco History Center on the 6th floor of the Public Library).
The original proposal comes from a Strauss and O’Shaugnessy’s 1921 booklet Bridging “The Golden Gate”:
The second one was published in an article Definite steps taken toward construction of Golden Gate Bridge by Joseph Strauss, in 1930—nine years later:
This Allan Rush 1924 mock-up was in a book The Gate: The true story of the design and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge:
The next set of photos are my own contribution, done in Photoshop. I tried to find a set of distinctive, non-repetitive photos, and then “repaint” the bridge on each on of them. Additionally, for the Air Force and Navy variants, I wanted photos with planes and boats respectively. (For one of the most photographed landmarks in the world, it was actually somewhat hard to find good, high-resolution shots!)
Most of the following were photographed from San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 5, 1930:
And this monstrosity is a capture from a movie Bicentennial Man. Kind of a low resolution, since only DVD edition was available:
The following four scans come from an amazing collection of historical scans by Eric Fischer. Eric was also kind enough to lend me some historical artifacts!
This slide with an update log is combined from many different sources, most notably The Golden Gate Bridge: Report of the Chief Engineer, Volume II from 2007:
And the last, evocative drawing, comes from a brochure The Golden Gate Bridge: History & Principal Characteristics, published in 1933 or 1934—I don’t remember which edition exactly:
I needed to cut a few slides because of Ignite time constraints—the slide with various proposed tower designs had to go, and this cute stunt… with three towers!