The original vertical cables, technically called a suspender ropes, of the Golden Gate Bridge consisted of 229 strands of steel wire twisted in 6 bundles around 1 central bundle. The full bundle was 2 11/16" in diameter.
HOW DO WE KNOW THIS CABLE WAS FROM THIS BRIDGE?
Unlike many common construction projects which have features borrowed from similar jobs, an engineering feat as large as the Golden Gate Bridge required everything to be custom designed from scratch, since no suspension bridge had been build to that scale before.
The wires of the suspender ropes were arranged in a specific configuration (fig. 2), unique to the bridge's physical requirements, which acts as an embedded signature. This configuration perfectly matches the section that these strands were taken from (fig. 1). This unique configuration was redesigned again in the 1970s (fig. 3), so we know that our cable was from the original construction.
Here are more interesting statistics about the bridge
