Joseph Strauss

Joseph Strauss was an American structural engineer, born in Cincinnati in 1870 and died in 1938, who graduated with a civil engineering degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1892 and went on to found the Strauss Bascule Bridge Company, revolutionizing bascule bridge design by proposing cheaper concrete counterweights in place of expensive iron ones. He served as chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, completed in 1937, though the bridge's structural design is now understood to have been the primary work of engineer Charles Alton Ellis, who went uncredited for decades until a plaque honoring him was installed in 2012; Strauss himself died the year after the bridge's completion and is memorialized by a statue on its San Francisco side.