It looks like a giant ribbon caught in a fan. That’s usually the first thought people have when they see the grainy, black-and-white Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video for the first time. The road doesn’t just shake; it twists. It heaves. It looks fluid, like the concrete and steel have suddenly decided to become a liquid. Honestly, it’s one of the most hypnotic and terrifying pieces of film in history.
Most of us saw it in a high school physics class. Your teacher probably used it to explain "resonance," comparing the bridge to a wine glass shattering from a high-pitched note. But here’s the thing: that explanation is actually wrong.
The real story of why "Galloping Gertie" fell into the Puget Sound is much weirder, involve a three-legged dog named Tubby, and basically changed how every single bridge on the planet has been built since 1940.
Why "Galloping Gertie" Was Doomed Before It Opened
In the late 1930s, the goal for bridge building was all about "deflection theory." The idea, championed by a famous engineer named Leon Moisseiff, was that bridges should be lighter and more flexible. If they could bend with the wind rather than fighting it, you could save a ton of money on materials.
Leon was a big deal. He’d helped design the Manhattan Bridge and the Golden Gate. So, when he proposed a design for the Tacoma Narrows that was incredibly slender—just 39 feet wide but over a mile long—people listened.
They shouldn't have.
To save money, the bridge used 8-foot-tall solid steel plate girders instead of the open lattice trusses you see on most suspension bridges. Think of it like this: an open truss lets the wind blow through the bridge. A solid plate girder acts like a giant sail.
From the day it opened on July 1, 1940, the bridge was a disaster. Construction workers were literally getting seasick while building it. They nicknamed it "Galloping Gertie" because the roadway would bounce up and down so much that cars would disappear from view in the "valleys" of the concrete waves. People actually drove from miles away just to experience the "roller coaster" bridge. It was a tourist attraction until it was a catastrophe.
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The Morning of November 7, 1940
The wind wasn't even that crazy that morning. It was clocked at about 42 mph. For a bridge of that size, that should have been a breeze. But around 10:00 AM, the movement changed.
The bridge stopped just bouncing up and down (longitudinal motion) and started twisting (torsional motion). This is the part you see in the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video. One side of the road would tilt down 45 degrees while the other side tilted up.
The Tragic Story of Tubby
Leonard Coatsworth, a local editor for The News Tribune, was driving across when the bridge started its death spiral. He managed to crawl out of his car and get to safety, but he had to leave his daughter’s dog, a three-legged Cocker Spaniel named Tubby, in the back seat.
Professor Frederick Burt Farquharson—the guy actually filming the bridge for research—tried to save the dog. He crawled out to the car, but Tubby was so terrified he bit the professor's finger. Farquharson had to retreat. Minutes later, the bridge tore itself apart, and the car (with Tubby still inside) plummeted 190 feet into the water.
Tubby was the only fatality of the day. No humans died, mostly because the bridge had been closed to traffic once the twisting got out of control.
The Physics Myth: It Wasn't Resonance
If you search for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video, you’ll find a million captions talking about "forced resonance." This is the idea that the wind was "pushing" the bridge at exactly its natural frequency.
Actually, it was something called aeroelastic flutter.
It’s a subtle difference but a huge one for engineers. Resonance requires an external force to keep "pushing" in time with the movement. Flutter is self-exciting. Because the bridge had those solid plate girders, the wind created "vortices" (little swirls of air) as it passed over the deck. These swirls caused the bridge to twist. But as the bridge twisted, it changed the angle of the wind hitting it, which created even more force.
It was a feedback loop. The bridge was literally feeding itself energy from a steady wind until the steel couldn't take the stress anymore.
How the Video Changed Engineering Forever
The footage we all watch today was mostly captured by Barney Elliott and Harbine Monroe, who owned a local camera shop. They used 16mm Kodachrome film. Because they caught the failure from start to finish, the world couldn't ignore it.
After the collapse, bridge design shifted instantly.
- Wind Tunnels: No major bridge is built today without exhaustive wind tunnel testing of scale models.
- Open Trusses: Engineers went back to using open-work trusses (like on the replacement bridge, "Sturdy Gertie") that let wind pass through.
- Aerodynamics: The field of bridge aerodynamics was basically born from the wreckage of the 1940 span.
Today, the remains of the original bridge sit at the bottom of the Puget Sound. It’s actually one of the largest man-made reefs in the world. Giant Pacific octopuses live in the twisted steel girders and the ruins of Leonard Coatsworth’s car.
What You Should Do Next
If you're fascinated by the engineering side of this, there are a few ways to really "get" the scale of what happened beyond just watching the 2-minute clip:
- Check the University of Washington Digital Collections. They hold the original papers and photos from Professor Farquharson, which show the failed attempts to "stiffen" the bridge with temporary cables before it fell.
- Compare the 1940 and 1950 designs. If you look at the replacement bridge (and the second parallel span built in 2007), you'll see deep trusses and gaps in the road deck. These "grates" are there specifically to let air pressure equalize so the bridge doesn't lift or twist.
- Look up "Vortex Shedding" in modern skyscrapers. The same principles that killed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge are why buildings like the Burj Khalifa have weird, staggered shapes—it's designed to "break up" the wind so it can't create a rhythmic pull on the structure.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video isn't just a "cool disaster clip." It’s a 190-foot-tall reminder that math doesn't care about your budget or your aesthetic vision—it only cares about the laws of physics.