studentcam.org. studentcam 2018 starts in september for the theme, the constitution and you. we are asking students to choose any provision of the constitution, and create a video of why the provision is important. over the traveling tacoma narrows bridge, the original collapsed in 1940, only six months after its completion. michael sullivan it will short -- will share that story with us. michael: the area we are standing in right now is in the washingtonction of state of the pacific northwest. when the transcontinental railroad came, there was talk about one day being able to span sound. undertakings not an anybody was prepared to do. during the depression, federal programs, like the building of

the grand coulee dam, and stuff that were paid public works projects happening in the pacific northwest. in the mid-1930's, there was talk about creating a bridge to reach from tacoma to the peninsula. the bridge was opened on the first of july in 1940. after two years of construction. is also a bitrows of a wind tunnel. people working on the deck began to notice movement. wings, ike airplane lift in the bridge. they begin to feel vertical lift in the bridge, especially in the center span. -- there was no

suspension bridge anywhere like this, anywhere in the pacific northwest. unfamiliarity of how a big thing like this was supposed to behave. people excited about this. there is a certain gracefulness about a bridge like this. , just wanted to think there was not anything wrong. that it was normal. once they got the concrete on the deck, the additional weight would all go away. as we got out of summer and begin to get into fall, and the winds picked up, our prevailing winds out of the southwest, which blows almost directly across the bridge deck, they begin to notice that there was an angulation in that deck. by fall, soldiers were coming out from the military base for the novelty of writing the bridge.

they would kick their feet over the railing and stand on the outside of the bridge. they would lean out as far as they could and the center deck of the bridge would be rising. not just inches, but to a point where the angulation was so automobiles, or a truck and an automobile coming direction -- the headlights would disappear under the rolling hill of the deck. for conservative people, something was horribly wrong from the very beginning. for a community that was proud of their new bridge, for the many people that participated in building the bridge, it was unthinkable that this was wrong. but, the engineers began to work on the idea of some stiff thing -- stiffening of the bridge. they thought the railings on the side could be conferred it into

steep high beams and that would add some rigidity to the bridge. some of those minor structural additions, modifications were implemented, or were about to be implemented as we got through october of 1940. onlyrly november of 1940, four and a half months after the bridge had been completed, the weather begin to shift into its winter patterns. that really was the bellwether of what was about to happen. on the morning of november 7, the winds picked up to 40 miles and they were fiercely directed at the side of the bridge. the way wind comes over the wing on an airplane. instead of the normal angulation of the bridge, the deck began to twist, began to turn.

everybody noticed immediately that had been watching the bridge that that was a behavior people had not noticed before. early in the morning of the seventh, there were hundreds, if not thousands of people that had come out on both sides of the bridge to be able to start to watch what was happening and watch this behavior. was aidge keepers, it toll bridge, so the bridge keepers had decided that they would close the bridge and it was wrong, it just was not safe anymore. was just not a -- not a action that should happen within inanimate object of this size. one less car was coming across the bridge, even though access to the bridge had been shut off. there was one last car coming across the bridge. a man coming from his summer peninsula had a

cocker spaniel with him in the car. by the time he got to the most severely moving part of the bridge deck, he cannot control the automobile. the car screeched around and ended up diagonally across both lanes on the bridge. he jumped out and ran and got off the bridge. then for the next 30 or 40 minutes, the bridge went into a just movement that no one had seen before. all of the crowds on both sides closed in to just watch. they think everyone started to suspect that the impossible was about to happen and the bridge was going to fail. with no one really on the bridge, strangely enough, a

university professor who had worked on trying to solve the puzzle -- it was enough time for people to get out there. the university of washington professor actually ran out onto the bridge trying to get the dog out of the car. there is great footage of him. it looks like a steven spielberg movie. today you watch that footage and you cannot even imagine that somebody would run out onto the tearing deck.his he got out there and the dog was too terrified to get out of the car. back andp and strolled was knocked down a couple times by the bridge. finally got off the bridge. in a few moments that followed, the deck for away from the hangers and witnesses talk about being like listening to gunshots ls they the tools -- jewe

are called. the cable comes down and are is a big bolt on the bottom to keep it from pulling out. those begin to pop and the cables begin to snap under the force. the light standards on the bridge are swirling across rapidly. cables. on the in just a moment, the connection between two sections of the bridge deck fail and there is a violent twist and tear of the deck. in the moments that followed that, it's sections all begin to fail. the of the center span of bridge, underneath the big suspensions cables, falls away into puget stand. no one is killed in the

incident, no one is even hurt. they demolish as much as they can in november of 1940. then as they begin to think about having to reengineer the the clouds of war closed in. by that time, they realize there is no time that they will be able to get the bridge rebuilt. pearl harbor happens and the shipyard has become a critical strategic thing. the focused ships away from ts away fromif public works projects. the tower and steel is removed and brought into the war effort. it is recycled and turned into bullets and tanks, or whatever. , of the of the bridge steel used on the alaska highway

to build a highway up to alaska during the second world war because of the program and the ties with the northwest and alaska. remnants sit in the channel through the war. it is only after the war that they begin to reconstruct another suspension bridge. second bridge is complete. that is the bridge we see in the distance here. this steel bridge that is standing in the distance. textbookhat there is a , or a reference book written in about bridge engineering that does not include tacoma in the index because of the tacoma narrows bridge. it is impossible for me to imagine that engineering students all over the world have seen the film of the collapse.

absolutelyf those spellbinding moments in engineering history. those those disasters, utter failures of design that is completely captured on film. it is amazing. seetill is job dropping to to see a hugeg endeavor like this, a physical to move that are out of the original design. >> our cities tour stuff recently traveled to tacoma, washington to learn about its rich history. learn more about the, and other sites on our tour at our website. you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every

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