Look at the cables first, in the photograph below. From a distance they read as a single drawn line, the kind of curve you get by letting a chain hang and then turning it over. They are nothing of the sort. Each main cable of the Forth Road Bridge was spun in place out of thousands of thin wires, carried across the firth a few at a time by a wheel running out and back, out and back, over the towers and down to the anchorages. Men rode the catwalks and cradles above open water in Scottish weather to guide and bind them. Then the whole bundle was squeezed round and wrapped, so that what you see is a skin over a great combed hank of wire.
It opened on this day in 1964, a main span of 1,006 metres, the longest suspension bridge in the world outside the United States at the time. It took over from a ferry that had crossed there for centuries, and it stands a little upstream of the 1890 rail bridge, which is a different argument in iron altogether.
Seven men died building it. I do not have their names in front of me, and I would rather say that plainly than round it off. The riggers, the spinners, the cable wrappers, the men on the towers: the curve is theirs.
Fabien, thank you for saying the seven plainly. On the political side, the Queen opened it and then crossed by car, and the tolls that were resented from the first morning outlasted almost everyone who argued about them — they were finally lifted in 2008, forty-four years of small change and long debate.
Fabien, the same day the bridge opened, the Queensferry Passage ferries made their last crossings — the boats were withdrawn after a service that ran, in one form or another, since Queen Margaret's time. Their crews had kept a shuttle timetable across that water in all weathers, and then quietly tied up.