December 14, 2015 // 10:00 AM EST
At 10 a.m. on the morning of November 7, 1940, Professor F. Bert Farquharson was one of the few people standing on the world's third longest bridge as it bounced and twisted, and he probably knew better than anyone else how she behaved in a gale. But this . "We knew from the night of the day the bridge opened that something was wrong," he said later. Now something was very wrong and with each wave of steel and concrete, it seemed to be getting wronger.
And somewhere out on the twisting span—you can see it in that dream-like Kodachrome footage—a car was sliding across the deck, with Tubby trapped inside.
From afar, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge looked like a long ribbon stretching across Washington's Puget Sound, and on windy days, it acted a lot like one too. Even before it opened to the public, four months earlier in July
1940, the center span, suspended from two massive towers, had a tendency to dance. In a light wind, slow rolling waves would ripple across the concrete and steel deck--with only minor damage, it seemed--sometimes raising and dropping it by as much as ten feet.
Engineers sought a way to stop her swaying, and somebody came up with the nickname “Galloping Gertie,” after a popular saloon piano song, and it stuck. The bridge, officials assured the public, was safe, and within months it became a central part of the local economic and military interests, cutting the 2 and-a-half-hour drive between Tacoma, Washington and the Kitsap Peninusla down to 11 minutes, and connecting Seattle and
Tacoma with the Puget Sound Naval Yard.fl
For some courageous motorists and pedestrians, crossing Gertie as she rolled like a coaster was a cheap thrill
(the toll was $.75 for cars and just a dime for pedestrians). Her lightweight steel girders and thin layer of concrete permitted a certain unusual flexibility. But no one was quite sure why she flexed in the wind, or what that might lead to
Enter Farquharson. The 45-year-old engineering professor at the University of Washington was one of the region's most respected authorities on the nature of bridges when he was hired by the state that summer. His job was to find a way to tame Gertie before it was too late. Just days earlier, in fact, he thought he had found a solution.
But at 10 a.m. on November 7, none of that mattered. For about an hour, Gertie had been undulating higher than usual, as the winds reached speeds of 40 mph. This was faster wind than Gertie was used to, but a speed that, her engineers thought, she had been designed for.
And now, for the first time, she wasn't undulating. She was twisting. “It had never done that before,”
Farquharson said, according to a history by the Washington State Department of Transportation.
"My knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb."
Half an hour earlier, at around 9:30 a.m., authorities had closed the bridge to traffic, just as one last car was making the crossing. Leonard Coatsworth, news editor for the Tacoma News Tribune , was on his way to his family's summer cottage on the peninsula, with Tubby, his daughter's Cocker Spaniel, in the backseat.
He quickly realized, Gertie's bounce was much bigger than usual. Just past the midpoint, the undulations sent his car toppling over sideways. He climbed out through the window and immediately hit the concrete face first.
"I didn't think of the dog when I first jumped out of the car," he recounted afterwards . "When I did remember

and started back, the bridge was bouncing so violently and breaking up so rapidly it was impossible to reach the animal."
"On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards or more to the towers," he said. "My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb."
It was right around 10 a.m. when Gertie's movement suddenly changed from the vigorous rolling motion to the bizzare new twisting motion. As hundreds of spectators and motorists gathered along both shores amid the howl of wind and screech of steel, Barney Elliott and Harbine Monroe, two owners of a nearby film company, arrived with their brand new Bell & Howell 16mm cameras and several packets of new Kodachrome color film, and began shooting. Monroe stood on a nearby bluff; Elliott was standing on the bridge itself next to Farquharson.
The twisting caused the steel coverings where the cables entered the anchorage to shift, producing a metallic shrieking wail. A workman repeatedly tooted his whistle to try to warn an approaching Coast Guard cutter,
Atlanta, which passed under the bridge. "The shrill whistle blasts mixed with the howl of gusting winds and the grinding and screeching of metal and concrete," wrote a historian for the Washington Dept. of Transportation .
"The wild noises gave onlookers a sense of dread and impending calamity."
At around 10:30 A.M., a small center span floor panel dropped into the water 195 feet below. By now,
Farquharson later estimated, each side of the bridge was tilting by 28 feet on each side and reaching an angle of
30 degrees.
And Tubby was still out on the twisting span. During a lull in the wind, another news photographer, Howard
Clifford, decided he would try to save the dog. But he didn't make it past the East Tower, and he scrambled back.
And so, a few minutes before 11, after nearly an hour of twisting, Farquharson—confident enough that the bridge would hold—decided to make his own attempt.
He ran as close to the center line as he could, where the motion was lowest. At the car, he reached for Tubby, but the frightened dog, he said, snapped at him. Amid the wailing and screeching of the bridge, he abandoned his attempt and rushed back to safety, still wearing his tie and trenchcoat and carrying his stopwatch and pipe.
"At least six lamp posts were snapped off while I watched," Farquharson said. "A few minutes later, I saw a side girder bulge out. “I thought she would be able to fight it out. But, that wasn't to be."
At around 11, the giant steel cables snapped with a sound like gun shots, flying up into the air "like fishing lines," Farquharson said. Amid a growing cacophony of steel and concrete, he, Elliott and Clifford began to run to safety. Two minutes later, the cracking and wailing of the bridge grew into a yawning rumble, and a mechanical thunder roared. A central, 600-foot section of roadway had broken loose and cascaded nearly 200 feet into the water. A mighty geyser of foam and spray shot over 100 feet high mixing with clouds of concrete dust and sparks from shorting electrical cables, and the sudden release of concrete sent a giant wave rippling across the remainder of the span.
"I saw the suspenders snap off and a whole section caved in," Farquharson said. As he ran from the east tower toward the toll plaza, the bridge rippled up and down in an immense wave that within seconds left Farquharson some 30 feet lower than where he had just been. "The bridge dropped from under me."
"It was bouncing," Clifford told an interviewer in a 2007 documentary, "so I would be going down, [and the deck] was coming back up. It hit me every time and knocked me down." In Elliot's footage from the toll plaza,
Clifford can be seen climbing up the roadway to safety and turning back to look for Farquharson, who suddenly appears over the horizon, clutching his cameras.
Over the next eight minutes, people looked on in confusion and horror as the entire center span cracked apart into the waves. “It seemed as though the world was falling apart,” a reporter wrote. Amazingly, while three cars were lost to the collapse, all of their occupants escaped—except Tubby.