Building Bridges

There had been calls for a bridge across Sydney harbour for ages before it was finally built, but the government thought it would be too expensive and kept turning the idea down. Until the bridge opened, the ferry system transported about 40,000 people a day across the water between the city and the north shore.

The harbour bridge was built over the course of seven years using money borrowed from the British government and provided employment for thousands of families in the area during the great depression, earning it the nickname of "the iron lung".

It was opened in 1932, but much earlier in the century there were already some ideas in the pipeline and in 1903 they approved the design in the first photograph, though the goverment later changed their mind. Hard to imagine Sydney with that bridge instead of the one they ended up with, isn't it?

The second photograph is a replica of the central pin holding the bridge arch together. They built both ends of the structure simultanously and got it to meet in the middle with this thing; a fantastic achievement, especially when you consider they didn't have any fancy machinery to help them and built most of it using men suspended on ropes (16 died). Thank god there was no such thing as health and safety at work; the thing would never have been built.