When San Francisco civil engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy sought someone to span the Golden Gate in 1919, experts called the project impossible. The strait's brutal currents, relentless fog, and seismic instability seemed insurmountable. Chicago-based engineer Joseph Strauss believed otherwise, proposing a bridge for $25 to $30 million. His original design combined suspension and cantilever elements, but he eventually refined it to a pure suspension bridge with a main span of 4,200 feet. Construction began in January 1933 and finished in April 1937, ahead of schedule and under budget. At its opening, it was both the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world, titles it held until 1964 and 1998 respectively.

Strauss receives credit as chief engineer, and a memorial statue stands on the San Francisco side. But Charles Alton Ellis performed most of the structural design work, solving the complex mathematics that made the bridge possible. A dispute with Strauss erased Ellis from the story. When the bridge opened in 1937, his name appeared nowhere in the celebrations. It took 75 years for recognition to arrive: a plaque honoring Ellis was finally installed on the south tower in 2012. Irving Morrow, the architect, designed the bridge's distinctive Art Deco styling and selected its famous International Orange color.

Strauss insisted on unprecedented safety measures, requiring a safety net beneath the bridge during construction. Nineteen men fell into that net and survived, forming an informal group they called the Half Way to Hell Club. The net could not prevent all tragedy. On February 17, 1937, a scaffold broke through, killing ten of twelve workers who fell 200 feet into the water. In total, eleven men died building the bridge. On opening day, May 27, 1937, more than 200,000 pedestrians paid twenty-five cents each to walk across. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House, opening the bridge to vehicles.

The San Andreas Fault runs nearby, placing the bridge at constant seismic risk. Once thought capable of withstanding any earthquake, the bridge was later found vulnerable to complete collapse from failure of supports on the arch over Fort Point. A $392 million retrofit program addressed these weaknesses, using custom electro-hydraulic lift systems to transfer loads onto temporary supports without disrupting daily traffic. The elevated approach road through the Presidio, Doyle Drive, was deemed earthquake-vulnerable and replaced with the $1 billion Presidio Parkway, completed in 2015.

Joseph Strauss suffered a heart attack on March 28, 1938, and died on May 16, just eleven days before the first anniversary of his bridge's opening. He was sixty-eight years old. Before his death, he wrote a poem titled "The Mighty Task is Done," now displayed at the bridge. The American Society of Civil Engineers recognizes the Golden Gate Bridge as one of the Wonders of the Modern World. After years of debate and an estimated 2,000 deaths, suicide prevention barriers were finally installed in January 2024. The bridge continues to carry about 91,000 vehicles daily between San Francisco and the North Bay.