9. Golden Gate Bridge

Recalling the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, a "graceful leap over an unprecedented space," as narrator David Ogden Stiers calls it. The Golden Gate presented its engineers with a "magnificent" challenge of wind, fog and colliding currents, and they succeeded so magnificently that historian Kevin Starr, the State Librarian of California, likens it to "Hamlet" or a Beethoven symphony. This hour blends technology and poetry smoothly, as does the bridge. It is, sums up Starr, "a fusion of perfections."