There used to be a type of man who made his living securing girders and large slabs of iron together to create geometric forms designed to hold us other, more rational, humans above the ground. He built bridges and skyscrapers and dams. He built oil rigs and towers and monuments that seemed to defy gravity; and logic. He did this for money of course, but there was also the special thrill of being suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, or in the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, above water. Often he was not suspended at all. Most of the time the men of high steel, as the iron workers were called, worked untethered and free to plummet to their deaths; which they often did. We don't think about these people when we look up at a skyscraper or a bridge, nor do we think about the people who designed them and championed their construction against overwhelming opposition and odds. It is fascinating to know how a bridge like the Golden Gate was conceived and constructed, but this is not Wikipedia and those facts have no place here. For the known names of those responsible - Strauss, Ellis, Morrow, Moisseiff - are forever etched in bronze on bridge footings and plaques. It is to the men whose names we will never know that such monuments must be dedicated and remembered. Like the tomb of the unknown soldier, which speaks for all those who did not return home from war, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge speak for the 11 killed in its construction, and all the others who fell, and would have been killed were it not for the safety netting pioneered by Strauss. We don't know how long this bridge will last, but as we have seen recently, other great monuments of technology and engineering proved to be more fragile than we had anticipated. The World Trade Center was also a marvel of its time, and the men of the high steel who helped to build it could not have imagined that what they had risked their lives to achieve would last a mere 28 years. 60 construction workers lost their lives building those two steel towers. We don't need another reminder of how many perished when it fell. But ultimately a monument such as that, or as the Golden Gate Bridge above, is not a monument to our superiority over nature, or materials, or to our evolution. These great steel structures are monuments of names. While machines and tools made such endeavors possible, it was human minds that made them probable, and human hands that made them real. Each rivet, each weld, is a man. These structures are infused with the spirits of men, the blood of men and the will of men. But we must never forget that if man can build it, man can destroy it. The hills of Greece and Rome offer ample proof of that. One day, even the Parthenon will be gone. And if we fail as a species, if this facade of steel, and stone and sand crumbles, all we'll have left are hands. If we're lucky.
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