Sometimes good things come out of bad, even when it doesn’t seem that way at the time. Such was the case with the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on November 7, 1940. While no human life was lost in the collapse (one dog did perish), the footage of the fall demonstrates how cruel nature can be to the works of man.Workers started construction on the bridge in September of 1938, quickly giving the bridge the nickname “Galloping Gertie” for the way in which the deck buckled. The designers had suggested shorter girders (8 feet as opposed to 25 feet) as a means of cheapening the cost of the bridge. While they expected this to stiffen the bridge, the result was an insufficiently secured deck where alternate halves of the bridge would rise and fall independently.Before the collapse, several measures were recommended to control the motion. These included tying the girders down with cables, which eventually snapped; connecting the main cables to the bridge deck, which was ineffective; and installing hydraulic buffers between the towers and floor system, which were damaged when the bridge was sand-blasted. The Washington Toll Bridge Authority was working on a new program of increasing aerodynamics with deflector vanes when the collapse put an end to their plans.The video is available thanks to Barney Elliott, who owned a local camera shop. Today, physics, engineering, and architecture students study this film as an example of forced resonance and aeroelastic flutter. The collapsed portion of the bridge was left in the water to serve as an artificial reef, and a replacement bridge was opened in 1950 after the war, demonstrating once again the ability of Americans to come back from tragedy.