Background

Joseph was born on January 9, 1870 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He was the youngest of four children and second son of Raphael and Lena (Baermann) Strauss. His father, a native of Bavaria who had come to Cincinnati in 1854, was a miniature and portrait painter of considerable local renown; his mother was a musician.

Education

His important interest was in the sciences and mechanics, and in school and college he evinced the inventive genius that was to make him famous. He studied engineering at the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1892 with the degree of C. E.

Career

After brief employment as a draftsman for the New Jersey Steel and Iron Company, Trenton, New Jersey, and as instructor in engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Strauss worked in Chicago, successively as detailer, inspector, estimator, and designer for the Lassig Bridge & Iron Company (1895 - 97), designer for the Sanitary District of Chicago (1897 - 99), and, from 1899 to 1902, principal assistant engineer in charge of the Chicago office of the engineer Ralph Modjeski.

The Chicago of that period was full of opportunities for bridge engineers, and Strauss seized the chance to study railway bridges and viaducts and to become familiar with the new art of bascule bridge design which was just being introduced.

From 1902 to 1904 Strauss was in private practice in Chicago.

As chief engineer and president of the company, he originated and developed the Strauss trunnion bascule bridge and the Strauss lift bridge. Prior to his work with bascule bridges they had been little used.

This was partly because of operating difficulties caused by the excessive weight of the cast-iron counterweights, but a principal objection was the expense of these counterweights. The early bascules were also limited in length. Strauss had the idea of substituting concrete counterweights for the cast iron, which successfully reduced costs. The concrete counterweights, however, were large and bulky. To permit them to operate without interfering with the supporting structure, he developed a pin-connected counterweight system.

This departure from conventional practice proved highly successful and was enthusiastically adopted by bascule bridge designers. The first Strauss bascule, consisting of a 150-foot-long single-track span, was built for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad in Cleveland in 1905.

In the next few years Strauss developed four different types of bascules, identified as the heel trunnion, the vertical overhead counterweight, the underneath counterweight, and the simple span. With the last type he established new records for length of bascule span, notably in the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (1914), which had a length of 336 feet center-to-center of trunnions.

During this period he was also experimenting with vertical lift bridges, producing several new types.

In one of these structures he gained increased safety and efficiency by substituting a rack-and-pinion drive for the operating cables. Several of his Mississippi River bridges were spans of this type. In all, Strauss designed and built well over 400 bridges.

He was engineer for the Columbia River bridge at Longview, Wash. (1930); co-designer of the St. Lawrence River bridge at Montreal (1930); engineer for the draw span of the Arlington Memorial Bridge across the Potomac in Washington (1932); and consultant to the Port of New York Authority on several bridges, including the 1, 650-foot Bayonne Arch and the George Washington Bridge.

Farther afield, he built bridges in Cuba, in the Canal Zone, and in Norway, Russia, and Japan. Despite his achievements in bascule-bridge design, Strauss is best known as chief engineer for a suspension bridge: the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco.

This last and crowning project - the longest single-span suspension bridge constructed to that time - presented a combination of difficulties never before encountered in a single structure. The site, at the narrowest part of the entrance to San Francisco Bay, where it is nevertheless a mile wide, is virtually in the open sea, a storm-swept area subject to heavy ground swells and cross winds and strong tidal currents.

In addition, earthquakes are not uncommon to the area.

As chief engineer, Strauss dealt so successfully with these obstacles that, when the structure was completed in 1937, he was made consulting engineer on it for life. Many innovations were employed in anchoring the San Francisco piers in the turbulent waters, and the towers were the first ever designed to resist earthquake stresses.

Strauss died of a heart attack in Los Angeles.

Achievements

• Joseph Baermann Strauss founded the Strauss Engineering Corporation, a consulting firm specializing in movable and long-span bridge design, with offices in Chicago and San Francisco. One of Strauss's abiding interests was the training of youth for better citizenship, and he was founder of the American Citizenship Foundation and its outgrowth, the Citizen-Training Corps, formed for that purpose. Strauss patented a wide range of inventions, such as the bascule-door hangar, portable searchlight outfits that were in wide use in World War I, and a system of rapid transit known as the Airtram. He also pioneered and built the yielding barrier, the first practical device to stop automobiles at railway grade crossings. Later the navy adopted the principle for automatically stopping airplanes landing on carrier decks.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Golden Gate Bridge: Report of the Chief Engineer to the Board of Directors of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, California

    (One volume containing: Book One-General History; Book Two...)

  • Higher Ground

    (Higher Ground is a unique collection of philosophical, mo...)

  • REFINED BY FIRE - The Evolution of Straight Chiropractic

    (Refined by Fire: the Evolution of Straight Chiropractic, ...)

  • Strauss Commentary on the Green Books - Volumes IV - XIV

    (Dr. Joe Strauss comments on Green Books IV (1921) through...)

  • Reggie: Making the Message Simple

Interests

• Joseph Strauss had many hobbies. One of these included poetry. After completion of the Golden Gate Bridge he returned to his passion of poetry and wrote his most recognizable poem "The Mighty Task is Done". He also wrote "The Redwoods, " and his "Sequoia" can still be purchased by tourists visiting the California redwoods.

Connections

He was married twice: on June 9, 1895, to May Van of Cincinnati, by whom he had two sons, Ralph Van and Richard Kenneth; and on June 26, 1933, to Mrs. Ethelyn Annette (Elworthy) Hewitt of Prince Georges County, Maryland.

Father:

Raphael Strauss

Mother:

Lena (Baermann) Strauss

Wife:

May Van of Cincinnati

Wife:

Ethelyn Annette (Elworthy) Hewitt

Son:

Richard Kenneth Strauss

Son:

Ralph Van Strauss