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Title: Outspinning the Spider
The Story of Wire and Wire Rope
Author: John Kimberly Mumford
Release Date: July 22, 2014 [EBook #46376]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER ***
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"Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one
one-thousandth--one record after another was passed.
At last a wire was drawn that measured one
four-thousandth of an inch in diameter--twelve
times finer than the hair on your head.
The spider, so long counted a master workman, had
been outdone."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: John A. Roebling
FOUNDER OF JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS COMPANY]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER
THE STORY OF WIRE AND WIRE ROPE
By
John Kimberly Mumford
PUBLISHED BY
Robert L. Stillson Co.
New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1921, by
ROBERT L. STILLSON COMPANY
NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outspinning the Spider
CHAPTER I
WIRE AND MODERN LIFE
It is the wire age.
Modern life, in all its intricate bearings, runs on wire. Wire
everywhere; in the heavens above, the earth beneath and the waters
under the earth. In all the legerdemain of science, which has put
nature in bondage, wire is the indispensable agent.
A curious, slow, finical little trade at which the smiths of forgotten
races toiled and pottered and ruined their eyesight for unnumbered
thousands of years has become, within less than a century, under the
spur of modern need and modern driving power, the pack-bearer of the
world and the mainspring of every activity from the cradle to the grave.
Wire still makes toys and gewgaws as it always did, but it is no longer
the plaything of vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and their
concomitant, "flat wire," from the inventory of human assets tomorrow,
and the world would stop stock-still.
[Sidenote: "WIRE AND THE COMMUTER"]
This is not hyperbole. Picture yourself starting for business in the
morning if there were no wire and see what the verdict would be by
quitting time. Considering the vital part that wire plays in the
growing and transportation of food for man and beast, it is likely you
would go breakfastless after sleeping on a bed without springs or the
luxury of a woven wire mattress. But that would be only the beginning
of sorrow. The trolley would stand dead. Perhaps you are a commuter and
journey to town by steam road. The ferry would hug its slip, and where
is the railroader who in these days of congestion and short headway
would dare to send a train out without the protection of the little
lengths of bonding wire between the rails, that articulate the block
signal system?
You could telephone the office? How and over what unless wire were
used? Wireless? Without the coils and armatures that keep the
instruments going or the aerials that seize the word wave in its
flight, there would be no wireless.
[Illustration: WITHOUT WIRE--NO WIRELESS]
Suppose you managed to get there. Without wire rope no insurance
company would let an elevator get higher than the second story, and you
couldn't signal the elevator anyway, for the annunciator operates only
by an ingenious system of wires, and the control is even more complex.
You can climb the stairs, but the door key is flat wire and the shank
on which the knob turns is square wire and half the lock is wire. More
trouble. The buttons on your suit are flat wire; so are your garters.
As for the stenographer, if she got there at all--for she is as
completely wired as a telegraph system, from her hat to her shoes--the
index files and office books and letter hooks and much of the other
equipment of the office would fall to pieces without wire, and the
machine which is her pride and the symbol of her dominion is about all
wire of one kind or another, except the frame.
Distinctly, it would not be your busy day. You might spend it looking
out of the window at the ships going down the river, but unhappily, the
majestic liner is compact of wire, from her glistening trucks to the
deepest shadows of the engine room; or airplanes soaring and swaying
above the teeming town and far-stretched waterways. But an airplane
lives by wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor even hold together if
its frame were not strung with wire and its wings and ailerons and
fuselage bound and braced and its machinery vitalized by divers forms
of wire and wire strand and woven wire cord.
Far over the town and across the Jerseys you would see columns of smoke
rising from busy factories--save that the mines of coal and the wells
of oil are both dependent for every atom of their product on wire rope,
and the lumber and metals which are the bases of industrial manufacture
are in the same boat. And as for electric light--you might linger till
dark but turning the switch wouldn't help, for the big subterranean
cables and the multitude of littler wires that make a pathway for the
current, even the dynamos with their masses of wire, they were all dead
long ago.
Gas? Made of coal and oil. There would be nothing left to do but to
grope hungry through dark streets and, if you could find a wireless
bridge, go back to Lonelyhurst, where you would learn that without wire
there is no domestic joy in this earthly tabernacle, for from cellar to
roof, from the bale and rim of the coal-scuttle and the binding of the
broom, from the cooking pots, the dishpan and all other culinary
utensils to the baby's toys and mother's corset and hairpins and
needles and safety pins and pins, it is all wire one way or another.
The family would never know what time you got home, for the watches and
clocks are largely wire; and there would be no possible relief in going
to the club, for nobody would have a car that would run--or a
cork-screw, even in the dark.
[Sidenote: WIRE HOLDS THE WORLD TOGETHER]
It is wire that has brought the world together and holds it together,
and when the wire mills stop, as even they would have to do if there
were no wire, modern civilization might as well be dead, and it would
be. Even war would peter out. Populations might perish from hunger and
probably would, but they'd have to stop killing each other except by
primitive methods, for without wire, which controls the movement of
ships and airplanes and submarines, and permits by telegraph and
telephone the manoeuvering of prodigious armies and binds the shining
bodies of great guns and makes most of the instruments of precision for
aiming them, war would no longer offer much chance for machine-made
glory. As a guarantee of perpetual and worldwide peace no League of
Nations could begin to compare with the elimination of wire from the
world's catalogue of weapons.
Wire is an influential member of that family of material giants which
have come into greatness within a relatively short time but which none
the less weigh heavily in the destinies of mankind. It is old, too, but
until a new demon of material ambition began to stir in crowding
populations it had little purpose except to adorn the raiment of the
great or add richness to ancient arts. People whose vision of man's
past is bounded by the encyclopedia have been told times enough that
Aaron's robe had gold wire threads in it, that there was wire in the
pyramids, that Nineveh was beating out wire eight hundred years before
the tragedy of Calvary, and that metal heads with hair of wire were
found in the ruins of Herculaneum and are now again entombed in the
showcases of the Portici Museum.
[Sidenote: THE AGE-LONG USE OF WIRE]
In a world chasing the present and future dollar ethnology moves
slowly; the encyclopedias have not yet told that pre-Inca Peru, hiding
in its tombs the secrets of a vanished civilization, has now given up
garments gleaming with woven metal, which show their makers to have
been past masters ages ago in the wire-beater's art, and to have spun
the wire on woolen filaments in the self same way of lamination in
which Paris does it for the uniforms of haughty major generals today.
And yet, down to the century when the popes were ruling from Avignon,
when Rienzi was raising hob in the streets of Rome and titles of
nobility were being won on the bloody fields of Crécy and Poictiers and
Bannockburn, none of the many metal workers, through all the ages and
in all the lands, ever had a notion he could draw metal through a die
to make a wire. They hammered and hammered through the ages and sliced
the filaments off as a cobbler cuts leather shoestrings--or used to.
And then it was a German that did it, for the ancient records of
Nuremberg and Augsberg tell of a "wire drawer" and later on one Rudolf
had a wire mill at Nuremberg. The chances are that Rudolf was a
capitalist and that the inventor sold him the invention for a pot of
beer, and grumbled for the rest of his medieval days after the manner
of his kind.
Six centuries have gone since then, and in a world of wire it is safe
to say, on the strength of some inquiry, that ninety per cent of the
people whose lives and well being hang on wire from one year's end to
another have no more knowledge of how drawn wire is made than the
Egyptian who hammered out his quota in the days of old Rameses.
[Sidenote: THE BEGINNING OF THE WIRE AGE]
England and France, quick to see what the process meant, even to the
slow commerce of those times, fussed away for another three hundred
years, trying to perfect methods of wire drawing to the point of
independence in the trade, but it was a stern chase. "Iron wire," for
all utility wire in the beginning was drawn from Swedish iron, was
beginning to take up a share of the white man's burden. Gold and silver
and platinum and bronze were still favored in ornamental use, but for
practical purposes iron refused to be displaced. Great Britain essayed
in 1750 the making of wire from steel for musical purposes, but to 1769
Broadwood was still sticking to German iron and even in 1790 was still
buying wire from Pohlman in Nuremberg. So Bavaria, where first the idea
of drawing metal had been hatched, was still leading the world in its
craft.
Little by little, for the tide of industrial activity had barely begun
to rise, new uses were found for wire. In one field after another it
supplanted vegetable fibre where strength and durability were
essential. As the world began to feel the Nineteenth Century surge of
mechanical impulse, as life developed new facets and new needs, science
sought new means of meeting them, and in the quest itself grew.
Producing methods advanced with the new demands of invention. Always
the wire makers spun their filaments a little finer. Men were weighing
zephyrs and measuring the infinitesimal, and needed tools of increasing
delicacy. Wire was the answer.
[Illustration: DREDGING]
Electricity, so long hidden from understanding, was led captive by a
wire, not by a chain--and with its development wire has found a new and
increasingly important role. The ductility of metals was at last being
tested to the full. Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one
one-thousandth--one record after another was passed. At last, by way of
curiosity, a wire was drawn that measured one four-thousandth of an
inch in diameter--twelve times finer than the hair on your head. The
spider, so long counted a master workman, had been undone.
The wire age was arriving--big wires to carry the world's heavy loads;
fine wire to solve its molecular problems. The day of the hammer was
done.
CHAPTER II
THE PIONEER
Since Columbus the centuries have been gathering speed. At first it
came slowly, for the need was not yet. Today a thought is born and
tomorrow it is a giant, parting seas and moving mountains. The waste of
yesterday is turned into the raw material of new manufacture, with its
million wheels moving faster and faster. But back of it all, inevitably
and eternally, is a busy human brain and unsatisfied energy.
Wire rope had lingered, waiting for civilization's loads to grow. The
artisans of old had woven cut wires together to make the trinkets of
their time, little dreaming of the might that lay hidden in the fibres
of the iron, and their world went on hoisting stone for its pyramids by
prodigious multiplication of garlic-fed man-power. It seems strange to
the high-speed mind of today that five hundred years could have passed,
after the drawing of wire was invented, before necessity put it into
the mind of a wire-drawer that with wire, as with other things,
strength lay in union. And yet the human race had been making rope
since the morning stars sang together.
In 1831, when France was picking herself up from the dirt and disorder
of another revolution and the German princes were strangling in the
universities the growing call for "liberty and union," young men of
brains and ambition began to leave the German states for America, where
there was free air and elbow room.
[Sidenote: JOHN A. ROEBLING COMES TO AMERICA]
In a company of such, John A. Roebling journeyed from Muhlhausen in
Saxony, and took up a tract of land in western Pennsylvania. He carried
a degree of civil engineer from the Royal University in Berlin; but
there were "back-to-the-landers" even in those days, and he set about
farming in the thrifty German way, founding for nucleus a little town
which at first was named Germania, but afterward came to be called
Saxonburg.
Fate seems to have ordained that Roebling's engineering skill should
not remain fettered to a Pennsylvania plow handle. The system of canals
and portages which afterward evolved and merged and built itself into
the Pennsylvania Railroad was digging its ditches and dams and building
haulways through the obstinate distances of that hard-ribbed state,
past the hopeful hamlet of Saxonburg and fatefully under the eyes of
the young German engineer. The result was never in doubt. He abandoned
the plow to his compatriots and plunged into the problems of
construction, where he belonged.
[Sidenote: HAULING CANAL BOATS UP THE PORTAGE RAILWAY]
The skeptic who scoffs at fatalism will find it difficult to explain
why the particular engineering work that was brought to Roebling's door
should involve the weary hauling of the Pennsylvania Canal's boats up
the Portage Railway, which Bertrand, one of Napoleon's generals, had
built to overcome the Pennsylvania ridges; or why, just as the bulk and
clumsiness and inefficiency of the huge hemp cables were eating into
his active mind, a casual paper from Germany should convey the fact
that some fellow in Freiburg in Saxony--where wire drawing had
birth--had made a strong rope by twisting wires together.
What man had done man could do. If there was a place to test the
efficacy of wire rope with its increased strength and diminishing size,
it was the Portage Railway. So the Saxonburg wheatfield was turned into
a ropewalk. Ceres made way for Vulcan. The neighbors, as soon as
material could be shipped in from the Falls of the Beaver River, where
wire drawing was done, found themselves under young Roebling's
direction twisting wires, with rude appliances for torsion, into a
fabric which had never been made or seen or probably heard of in
America before, but which was destined, in a comparatively short time,
to change the face of industry.
[Sidenote: WIRE ROPE PROVES ITS PULLING POWER]
It is easy to imagine the caustic comments of the Pennsylvania
countryside, and the forebodings with which the pioneer installed his
cables on what was then a conspicuous engineering labor. But it worked.
Engineering audacity, plus scientific skill and native faculty for
doing things, solved the problem of the Portage, but it did far more
than that. The fame of it was soon broadcast and the orders for wire
rope came flooding from all that fast opening country. Roebling had
found his job. Destiny had him by the collar and he bade farming
good-bye.
[Illustration: HOISTING A BATTLESHIP TOWER WITH WIRE ROPE]
It was in 1840 that the first Roebling rope was finished. Eight years
later, the year when the revolution burst forth in the Teutonic
empires, he moved his plant and its business to Trenton, and began
forthwith to build the foremost wire rope factory in the world.
Nothing can be more amusing or reveal more clearly what brains and
energy have been able to accomplish in the arena of American
opportunity than to contrast the picture of the first Roebling factory
in Trenton, which suggests the rudest of farmsteads, with the
sky-piercing chimneys and the mile or more of many-windowed brick
buildings in and around the Jersey capital today, where the Roebling
work is done.
The three big factory groups which have grown from the shabby little
buildings of 1848 are the fruit of intelligence and ceaseless endeavor,
but they are reared primarily on a basis of manufacturing honor, and
ruled by the general thesis that forever and ever quality comes before
price. This means keeping faith with the structural iron worker,
swinging pigmy-small five hundred feet above the din of the city
streets; with the sailor, the miner, the rigger; with the hurrying
multitude that packs the elevators in tall buildings, and with the
aviator, to whom a breaking wire may spell death.
That is the reason the Roebling Company has outgrown the limits of
Trenton in the last decade and a half and with its overflow founded a
city of its own; that is the reason why Roebling has almost got into
the Thesaurus as a synonym for wire in every civilized language under
the sun.
It is wire, from the huge three-inch cable that pulls the loads of
mountain haulways or moves the thousand cars of a city transit system,
down to the gossamer that jingles the bell in the telephone or the
infinitesimal hair that in the eyepiece of a telescope helps the
astronomer to mark the movement of a distant world. There is hardly a
thing in the nature of wire, round, flat or irregular, that the
Roeblings do not manufacture or have not at some time manufactured,
whether for the world's standard uses or the numberless special
purposes hidden in inventive minds.
[Sidenote: A TWELVE MILLION POUND DEVELOPMENT FROM A FIFTY POUND
BEGINNING]
"I've come to see," said an old man at the Roebling offices one day,
"if you'd go to the trouble on a very small order to find out just what
composition I need in a wire for a patent I've got."
And they did. It took the chemists and the experts some time to work
out the problem of resistances, and the old man ordered fifty pounds.
The next year he ordered a hundred more. There was no profit in it, but
they made it and looked pleasant. They were specialists in wire and
they were simply keeping faith with their job.
The following year the visitor called again. "I don't want any more of
that wire," he grinned, "I've sold my patent to So-and-So," naming one
of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, "but I want to see
some royalties and I made it a condition of the sale that they order
this wire from you on the formula that I got."
In a recent 12 months period Roeblings fabricated more than 5,000,000
pounds of that wire.
* * * * *
If it's wire, the Roeblings make it. All that was in the mind of the
man who seventy years ago was twisting the first rope in Saxonburg. He
was more than an engineer; he was a sane and far-seeing mind in
business. As soon as possible after establishing the factory in Trenton
he added a mill for the manufacture of his own wire. It gave him a
product that he knew from the pig iron up, and it saved a profit,
besides extending to a marked degree the scope of the business. He
knew, when he put the cable on the Portage haulway in 1840, that the
mission of wire, in the world that was then making, would be boundless,
and from the very start he was the explorer in new fields for wire, a
builder, a seeker for problems that wire might solve, archapostle of
the power of wire, in one form or another, to do the heaviest labor of
mankind.
Wire rope, spreading its field of utility ever wider and wider, carried
with ease and safety loads that had broken the back of hemp; it took
the place of solid steel in numerous phases of construction, and when
its adaptability was proven new tasks were devised for it. Wire rope
was the forerunner of "Safety First." It cancelled large burdens of
expense; it set a new record in facility of construction.
[Sidenote: AMERICA'S FIRST WIRE CABLEWAY]
Persistently militant, from the day of his first achievement, in the
promotion of wire rope, John A. Roebling was the first engineer to
introduce into America the novelty of a wire cableway, which with an
ingenious carriage he employed to transport across a river the
materials he needed in the construction of a bridge. This method of
haulage, over streams and gorges, down from high mountains to cars or
boats in the valley below, up from the deep-sunken beds of rich
placers--everywhere and in all sorts of places where Nature seemed to
have set up impassable defense against those who would take away her
treasures--came forthwith into widespread use, and is among the handy
tools of engineers throughout the world today. The Roebling Company
established these cableways in many countries. It had in operation
around the globe no less than twenty different types, including log
rigs and gravity planes for mountain railways, and the demand for wire
rope was increased thereby a thousand fold before the new century had
come in.
[Sidenote: ROEBLING TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO BRIDGES]
The age of wire was marching rapidly, but John A. Roebling had set a
distant mark. In the mountains of Peru, India and other lands for ages
the natives have made use of bridges made of vines, to cross appalling
chasms. As time went on and arts progressed the principle was applied
through the agency of hemp ropes and chains, and men of small
imagination thought that in these the limit had been attained. But
Roebling's faith was as the faith of the Moslem in the Prophet. He
believed that in wire the solution of all the pesky problems of
bridge-building had been found. In a small way the thing was obvious,
but his ambition never stopped there. He believed, and had believed
ever since he made the first rope, that a major bridge made up of wires
of scrupulously high quality, constructed with rigorous regard for
scientific tenets, would carry with ease and indefinitely any
reasonable traffic that might be imposed on it.
Famous engineers said he was a visionary and a hobbyist; still with
force and tenacity he urged his contention until at last the
engineering world was compelled to give heed to him. In the face of
such opposition, and in view of the centuries that had dragged by
before wires were twisted into rope, it is remarkable that so soon
after his initial experiment he should have worked out in practical
entirety the plan of bridge construction which came to its climax in
the spanning of the East River.
Between 1840, when he made his first rope, and 1844, he had not only
perfected his theory of wire bridges but in spite of furious opposition
had built one as an aqueduct for the old Pennsylvania Canal, the basins
of which were at Pittsburg. This was followed by four more suspension
aqueducts for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Co. Having espoused a
theory he let no grass grow under his feet. He cast about vigorously
for bridges to build. He found an opening in Cincinnati.
[Sidenote: THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGE AT CINCINNATI]
River traffic along the Ohio, in the forties, was still a big factor in
business but was contesting tooth and nail the advance of the railways,
and fought bitterly against the right of the invaders to build bridges
over the waterways. The steamboat men said bridge piers would be a
peril to navigation, but the cities of Cincinnati and Covington, facing
each other across the river, cried for the bridge. The rivermen were on
top in 1846 when Roebling came along, fresh from the building of the
wire bridge in Pennsylvania and with his head full of wire bridges, and
offered to throw a wire span across the Ohio with a length of 1057 feet
and a floor height above the water of 103 feet.
[Illustration: LOGGING--HANDLING BIG FELLOWS WITH WIRE ROPE]
For just ten years the steamboat faction staved it off. It was not
begun till 1856, just after the Niagara Bridge was opened. The panic of
1857 and then the Civil War kept the project at a standstill until
1863. On Easter Day in 1867 the bridge was opened. Colonel Washington
A. Roebling, son of the pioneer, was the first to cross on its cable.
In the meantime John A. Roebling had completed not alone the Niagara
Bridge, but the Alleghany Bridge over the Alleghany River at Pittsburg.
The last named differed from the Niagara, Ohio and later East River
bridges in that it had several piers in the streamway, after the manner
of the old type structures, but in principle it conformed to the plan
which had been in his mind from the beginning. His son, Washington, was
his only assistant.
[Sidenote: BRIDGING NIAGARA GORGE]
In all the world, perhaps, no place could have been found where the
building of a simon pure "Suspension Bridge" would have been a more
spectacular accomplishment than over Niagara Gorge, with the Falls
thundering a little way upstream, and the waters lashing and fuming
underneath; no place where its slender beauty could have had such stern
and impressive background. The idea of carrying railroad trains over
that turmoil of waters on a web apparently so frail, evoked a storm of
protest from well-nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. But
Roebling was a practical man as well as a stubborn one. After all, he
was dealing with rock and wire and he knew what they would do. He built
the bridge, the first of its kind to carry railroad traffic. All the
world of that day knew, but most of it now has forgotten, how he flew a
kite across the gorge to get his first wire over, and from that built
up his cables. On March 16, 1855, the first train passed over it. With
one remodeling it continued to carry increasingly heavy loads until
nearly half a century later it was replaced by a larger structure,
better calculated to bear the burden of modern equipment.
[Sidenote: THE "SUSPENSION BRIDGE" PROVES ITSELF]
"Suspension Bridge" not alone proved itself in point of service, but it
demonstrated the soundness of Mr. Roebling's claims for the wire
structure. The Ohio structure, which followed, outdid Suspension
Bridges in length of span; in economy of material, in simplicity and
charm of outline it clearly foreshadowed the still greater work, the
designing of which was to be the crowning accomplishment of his life.
He was working with a practiced hand now. The doubts, if he ever had
any, were behind him. Behind him, also, was a producing plant tuned to
turn out at speed the materials he needed, with certainty of their
quality.
He had proved that the making of big bridges with wire was feasible,
and that it was simple, as most great things are after they have been
done. There were only three basic parts to a suspension bridge after
all--towers, cables and anchorage. Suspending the roadway, which to the
average man seems the vital part of the creation, is, from the
engineering standpoint, only an accessory work. John A. Roebling had
concentrated his life's effort, not on mere methods of commercial
production, but rather on the proving of his contentions. He needed the
right kind of wire rope to prove them, so like a wise man he made it
himself.
* * * * *
He came to the summit of his achievement with the acceptance of his
plans for the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, his faith
vindicated, his theory, which he had fought so hard to sustain,
endorsed by boards of noted engineers and acclaimed by the public,
starting out on the realization of his long dream--the building of the
Eighth Wonder of the World, a comparatively slight accident, the
bungled docking of a ferryboat, which crushed his foot and brought on
tetanus, put out the steady candle of his life.
It was the very whimsy of fate. His work was done. He had created, out
of imagination and energy, the finished designs for a wonder fabric,
ready for the labor of an intenser age. He did not live to see the
spider structures hung like wisps of gossamer above the restless
waterways of New York, but his name is woven into the very steel of
them.
CHAPTER III
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Early in the fifties, when the Niagara accomplishment was more or less
the talk of two continents and communication under seas by cable had
helped to emphasize the possibilities of wire, John A. Roebling,
protagonist of the wire bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect New
York and Long Island by a suspension bridge and release the people of
Brooklyn from a segregation which they had made a somewhat futile
pretense of enjoying. Habit dies hard. The crust of custom becomes
strangely indurated with long exposure, and Brooklyn residents had
fought the East River in profitable, if archaic, ferryboats too long to
be lured lightly into any liaison with iconoclastic Manhattan by way of
a wire bridge.
Roebling waited another decade, but he hustled while he waited. The
Brooklynites continued to make their uncertain ways across the river in
times of storm and tide and ice as the Lord gave them strength, and the
sacred ferryboats still paid dividends. The vicious winter of 1866-7,
coldest, bitterest, longest the cities have ever known, wrung forth at
last a cry for relief. They could wrap themselves up against the
weather, but no weight of woolens could turn the shafts of ridicule. It
was grand ammunition for the advocates of the bridge, when people
traveling by train from Albany actually reached New York sooner than
did the man who did business in New York, and left his domicilium in
Brooklyn at the same hour.
And besides, the Roebling cap had another feather in it now, in the
completion of the Ohio Bridge. He was building wire bridges everywhere,
and it began to look as though there was some body of truth in the
Western contention that New York was the most provincial city in
America, for all its self-approval.
At one of the many hearings that were held on the bridge question a
famous engineer who favored the wire type was asked what reason he had
for believing it would do the work.
"I believe it," he replied, "because Roebling says so."
[Sidenote: THE INITIAL CHARTER GRANTED]
The demand for the bridge rose to a clamor. In the month of May, 1867,
the initial charter was granted, and Mr. Roebling was appointed
engineer. Three months afterward he submitted his report and estimates,
which were examined and approved by a commission of engineers from the
United States War Department. Then he set about preparation for the
task.
[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF JOHN A. ROEBLING]
It was while fixing the location for the Brooklyn tower that he met
with the accident that caused his death. But his work had been well
done, and his son and associate, Col. Washington A. Roebling, took up
without delay the execution of the plan he had helped to create.
If the older Roebling encountered obstacles in bringing his great idea
to the point of acceptance, the pathway of his successor, called
without warning to take over responsibility for the greatest
engineering labor of the age, was not strewn with roses.
[Sidenote: THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTION BEGINS]
[Illustration: WIRE ROPE IN THE QUARRY]
It was in the summer of 1869 that John A. Roebling died. The second day
of January, 1870, saw the actual work of construction begun, when
laborers started to clear away to prepare for the foundations of the
Brooklyn tower. From that day forward, through a baker's dozen of
years, there was no rest, though there was plenty of interruption.
Until the job was ended Washington A. Roebling simply lived the
Brooklyn Bridge. It was a colossal job, punctuated with changes and
problems and complications, but it went forward. The landmarks of a
bygone age, old houses of historic memory on the water fronts of both
cities, vanished silently and where they had been, by and by there grew
piles of masonry to form the approaches. From the huge caissons over
against either shore rose the towers, tall and grim, which were to
carry the cables. In due time they stood complete, with their broad
bases welded to the rock by an ingenious bond of stone and concrete in
the river's bed, and their crests nearly three hundred feet above the
top of the tide. A hundred and nineteen feet--and three inches, to be
precise--above the water opened the two tall arches in each tower,
stretching upward one hundred and seventeen feet in air. It was through
these the bridge proper was to pass, with its gangways for horse and
foot and railway traffic.
[Sidenote: COULD THOSE SLENDER TOWERS CARRY THE GREAT LOAD?]
The hurrying people of New York and Brooklyn watched the thing grow and
wondered fearfully whether the slender towers would stand the strain.
In Harper's Magazine for May, 1883, now itself yellowed by age, is an
exhaustive article concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, in which one is told
at length and with an engineer's exactness, the steps by which the
achievement was brought, after thirteen laborious years, to proud
completion.
Even to the curious layman the details are no longer of insistent
interest. One thing is emphasized, however, which well as we know it
now can never cease to hold the mind in a certain wonder--that all the
weight and solidity and massiveness are in the towers, the foundations
and the long expanses of stone work, which stretching inland nearly a
thousand feet, serve to guard and strengthen the anchorage for the
cables which are the working force. The rest is wire, for the most
part; wire, slender by contrast and against the background of the sky,
but endowed with great strength by care and skill in fabrication. John
A. Roebling and his son had staked their name and their future on the
strength and quality of Roebling wire.
In that long ago story of the Brooklyn Bridge, there is written the
lesson that clear thinking and courage and perseverance can accomplish
the seemingly impossible. What traveler over those high-hung roadways
ever stops to ask himself how those great round cables, stretched in
long, inverted arches above the surge of the river traffic, were ever
put in place? They are today simply a part of the stage setting of a
busy life, like the river itself.
[Sidenote: HOW THE GREAT CABLES WERE MADE]
Each of these cables consists of nineteen strands of about two hundred
and seventy-eight No. 8 B. W. G. wires each, and each wire is
continuous in its strand, like the yarns in a skein, traveling
eternally to Brooklyn and back, up over the top of one tower, down in a
long curve above the tideway, up to the other tower and down again, to
be gripped and carried by links, like a chain, down to the everlasting
clutch of the rock and concrete-bound anchorage. Each skein is a
million feet long--nearly two hundred miles--and still men talk of
"Oriental patience."
There is no twist in these ponderous cables, as there is in a wire
rope. Every reach of wire lies flat and separate, and when all were in
place they were laboriously bound together, first the strands, then
when all the strands were up, the whole fabric, into cylindrical form.
There are other strange things about these cables; one is that they
make practically no strain on the towers save to sustain their weight.
Another is that the long storm cables that radiate downward from the
top of the towers to the bridge floor, for a space of four hundred feet
inside and outside each tower, are themselves calculated to sustain, if
need be, the imposed weight for that distance. So that the margin of
safety in this seeming web-like structure is far in excess of what
timid imaginations have pictured. That was a cardinal feature in all
John A. Roebling's plans. He left a safety margin many times greater
than the load. It has been an open secret for years that the Brooklyn
Bridge has been unwisely taxed, but he knew it would be.
[Sidenote: STRINGING THE CABLES ACROSS THE EAST RIVER]
Before the cables were in place, New York and Brooklyn stared up at the
river-wide space between the bare towers and wondered by what wizardry
a bridge could ever be swung across it. The beginning was simple--as
simple and prosaic in a way as the hitching of a horse--in principle.
It began with wire rope. A scow with a coil of three-quarter inch rope
was moored alongside the Brooklyn tower, and the end of the coil was
hoisted up the face of the masonwork, passed down on the land side and
then carried back.
[Illustration: HELPING TO RELIEVE THE FREIGHT CAR SHORTAGE BY QUICK
LOADING]
Next, suspending the river traffic for the necessary time, the scow was
towed across the river, paying out as she went, and the rope carried
over the New York tower, then wound on a huge drum till it hung high
above the river and clear of the tallest topgallant. A second rope was
run in the same manner and the two were joined around huge driving
wheels or pulleys at each end. An endless belt or "traveler," revolving
by steam power, now stretched from city to city, and on a day in
August, that lives yet in the memory of every man who was there, E. F.
Farrington, the master mechanic of the project, who was a veteran of
Niagara and the Ohio Bridge, set out to show the workmen, who on this
slender aerial were to begin the long labor of hanging the cable, that
it was easy if you only thought so. In a "bosun's chair" he shot out
from the top of the Brooklyn tower, down the long sag in the traveler
and up to the New York side, while a million people craned their necks
from the streets and docks and housetops and boats along the river, and
swallowed hard at their hearts.
The bands played, the cannon tore the air, the multitudes yelled
themselves hoarse, the steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the sky
the tidings that, though nobody then understood it, "Greater New York"
was on the way.
* * * * *
This was six years and a half from the time when Washington A. Roebling
had begun the work of construction. Seven other years followed, years
full of troubled effort, of planning and replanning and replanning, of
battling with the twin devils of Contraction and Expansion. The
tensions all had to be secured in absolutely uniform weather. A
determination made when the sun was shining on one part of the bridge
and not on another might have thrown the whole calculation awry. Sun
and wind played pranks with the work in the summer and in the winter
snow and ice coated the wires and running gear so that work was often
impossible. Deflection varied a third of an inch for every degree of
temperature.
"In short," says the writer of that time, "the ponderous thing, while
neither small nor agile, has a trick in common with the minute and
lively insect which when you put your finger on him isn't there."
[Sidenote: THE FABRIC GROWS TOWARD COMPLETION]
But in due time the great cables were in place, and bound. Then the
suspender bands were set, from which suspender cables hung to hold the
frame of the roadway. And so the fabric grew toward completion, hung
practically in two sections, which all the world nowadays doesn't know,
with an expansion joint connecting them in the middle to absorb the
expansion and contraction of the metal. Even the rails at this section
are split in half lengthwise, to permit them to slide back and forth
with the changes in temperature.
There were accidents and drawbacks and political complications, as
there are always bound to be in public works; there were believer and
unbeliever, booster and knocker, as now, but the work went on to its
completion and in 1883 the day of realization came. Wire was king.
Doubters and malcontents murmured for a time, but little by little
subsided. The opening of the bridge was one of those memorable days of
which New York has had so many in her brief history, a day when
President and Governor and many lesser dignitaries, who have now passed
from the stage, strutted their little hour to hail the passing of a
milestone, and there were "fireworks in the evening."
[Sidenote: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA]
A new era had now definitely begun. There was a recognized agent in the
world strong enough, with engineering guidance, to shoulder its most
staggering burdens, and the name of Roebling began to weave itself in
letters of wire through the whole web of modern industry. Thirty-seven
years have come and gone since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished and
thrown open to the swarming people. Even when they saw they wouldn't
believe it; many of them mounted to its span with their hearts in their
mouths. There had been a world of carping and prophecy of disaster. A
public that clutched at novelty as an addict does for stimulant could
not assimilate the idea that there could be safety in wire where such
enormous weight was laid upon it. Its frailty of appearance fooled
them. For years after the Bridge had taken up its load and was carrying
without protest or misbehavior the traffic of two cities, there came
periodical alarms regarding the discovery of strange faults in
construction, or disintegration of the wires caused by vibration. It
was the one dependable theme for the alarmist and sensational writer.
But the proof was in the using. The slender span has stood the test of
time and tide and wind and wear, and stood them all so well that it has
fixed for a century at least the type of the super-bridge.
[Sidenote: TWO MORE BRIDGES TO BROOKLYN]
Wire bridges have become a familiar thing in the lives of cities. Two
more have come to give the crowding population of New York freeway over
the East River, as the city's life has spread northward. For the
Williamsburg the Roebling firm furnished the wire and installed the
cables. In the Manhattan Bridge it had no part save the making of the
wire, not a trivial task, since in the cables alone there are
12,000,000 pounds.
These bridges are bigger than the Brooklyn Bridge with which the
troublesome river was first overcome, but it will be many a day before
the glamour that surrounded the earlier creation will have worn away,
or people the world over cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain
measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps, can build a wire bridge now; perhaps,
too, somebody some day can build one with more of simple grace and
slender beauty, but it is certain nobody ever has.
CHAPTER IV
WHERE WIRE IS MADE
To measure the growth of wire, with its many forms and composites,
during the last forty years would be to trace in detail not alone the
progress of science, invention and mechanical industry, but the myriad
conceits that have come ostensibly to facilitate the process of living.
In the search for new comforts, for means of avoiding physical
exertion, the world has been littered with novelties, and most of them
depend on wire. Personal life as well as commerce and industry is
interlaced with wire. With the opening of new countries, the increase
of populations, the flocking of outland people to the cities and the
consequent lack of farm labor, ingenuity has been more heavily taxed to
find the quick and easy way of doing the world's work and keeping food
in its mouths. Wire, so adaptable to the heaviest as well as the
lightest tasks, has labored from year to year under an increasing
demand.
It is not surprising therefore that a company which in such an
impressive way had fixed itself in recognition as the first exponent of
wire's usefulness should have grown in this period from modest
commercial stature to a high place in its field and to the enjoyment of
large production.
[Sidenote: THE GROWTH OF THE ROEBLING BUSINESS]
When the sons of John A. Roebling took up control of the business he
had established, about one hundred men were employed and the product of
their industry approximated $250,000 annually. Just before the
beginning of the war more than eight thousand employees were engaged in
the manufacture of Roebling products and the value of the output ran
far into the millions. The factory which was so meagre and so humble in
1848 has spread its buildings not only over the surrounding acres, but
across what were then neighboring farm lands until, constrained not
alone by the pyramiding demand for its products but by the soaring
values of the city that had grown up around it, and of which it had
been in some measure the creator, it went pioneering again, sixteen
years ago, down the Delaware, and established a new nucleus, which will
suffice for a long period to come.
With the erection of the cables for the Williamsburg Bridge, the
Roebling firm withdrew from the competitive field of engineering
contracts and concentrated all its energies in the perfection of its
product--wire.
In view of the more distinctly industrial character of the Roebling
enterprise under the later dispensation, it is of interest that the
varied activities of John A. Roebling, as a scientist, a master of
materials and a peculiarly astute mind in affairs, have been carried on
severally among his sons and grandsons. Colonel Washington A. Roebling,
the president of the company, who executed the plans for the Brooklyn
Bridge, is an engineer of well-known ability. His intimate contact with
all the affairs of the company during such a long period of
development, his kindly and generous support to constructive
achievements, has been a source of pride and invaluable assistance to
the younger generation of the Roebling fraternity. His two brothers,
Charles and Ferdinand, now dead, were both intensely active during
their lives. Charles G. Roebling's talents as a builder of plants and
machinery and an unusual gift of turning out a product of the highest
excellence, were, in a large measure, the cornerstone for the
tremendous success of the Roebling Company. It was during the period of
his direction that the manufacturing capacity grew so rapidly.
The simultaneous expansion of the commercial field was the life work of
the other brother, Ferdinand W. Roebling, who carried the Roebling
products to all corners of the globe. A clear and far vision, an
uncanny ability to go straight to the point and a keen knowledge of
human nature, were a few of the strong traits of his mentality. Under
his control of financial and ethical matters the John A. Roebling's
Sons Company established a worldwide and enviable reputation for
stability and fair dealing.
Ferdinand, although an indulgent father, brought up his two sons, Karl
and Ferdinand, Jr., in the old-fashioned way. They were taught from
early boyhood that theirs would be no bed of roses, that manhood was an
estate where responsibility must be accepted and assumed, and with this
teaching ringing in their ears the mantle of the presidency of the
company fell upon Karl G. Roebling, and the secretaryship and
treasurership upon the shoulders of Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr.
[Illustration: TOWING WITH WIRE ROPE HAWSER]
Both sons upon leaving college were given a rigid training in all
branches of the business and early in their careers exhibited the
executive ability and keen business foresight which their father had in
so large a measure developed. Karl's talents lay principally in the
gift he had of drawing from his associates their whole-hearted fidelity
and devotion to the cause of the Roebling prestige. His death at the
early age of forty-eight was a shock to the industry, and a great
personal loss to those associated with him in the conduct of the
business.
While all of the Roeblings have possessed, in a great degree, the
qualities of leadership, yet they have always recognized the necessity
of surrounding themselves with a strong organization capable of
carrying on this great industry after they had ceased their earthly
activities.
It was particularly under the regime of Karl Roebling that the strong
foundation was laid for the present powerful organization--each
department highly specialized and in charge of experienced well-trained
heads, ably aided by a corps of competent assistants, all functioning
smoothly like a well-balanced machine. Karl left this as his heritage
to the business. He never did things by halves. His working day was
long and intense, but to one so constituted it could not be otherwise.
During the world war and its aftermath the added responsibilities he so
cheerfully assumed, contributed largely toward bringing to an end a
life full of early accomplishments.
Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr., the remaining son, now vice-president and
treasurer, is an able engineer. His early training with the company was
entirely in the manufacturing and engineering side of the business. In
more recent years, however, he has devoted his attention to its
financial affairs. His close contact with his father and brother, his
thorough knowledge of the company's policies, have well fitted him to
sustain the Roebling name and all it represents in the business world.
[Sidenote: THE TRENTON PLANT]
The main or first plant of the company centers around the site of the
original buildings. Its structures, yards and tracks cover more than
thirty-five acres of ground about a mile from the center of the city.
The Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Trenton Division of the
Pennsylvania Railroad pass along its western boundary and directly
before the door of the offices. The office building was erected in 1857
by John A. Roebling as a residence and later, as manufacture crowded in
around, it was given over to business uses. The spur tracks of the
Pennsylvania traverse the company enclosure.
Nearest to the office building are some of the structures that Mr.
Roebling built in the first periods of business expansion, among them
the old rope shop, where by methods of his own devising he strove to
meet the growing demands for rope. Some of the machinery he built is
still in service in production of standard lines, showing how swiftly
and how far, from crude beginnings, his active mind advanced along the
road to better production, and how efficient management can prolong the
life of a mechanism that is honestly built in the beginning.
[Sidenote: THE BUCKTHORN AND KINKORA PLANTS]
The second or Buckthorn plant lies half a mile farther to the south,
also facing the railroad and the canal.
The third, which was christened Kinkora, after a neighboring village on
the railroad, but is now Roebling, with a station of its own, is ten
miles farther down the Delaware. All told, there are probably a hundred
buildings in the three plants, many of them of immense size and
manufacturing capacity.
From the wide diversity of its products, the men in the Roebling
establishment have come to refer to it as a department store. The
problem therefore of distributing its operations and keeping track of
its large volume of moving stock and its equipment is a substantial
one. While in some lines there is activity partitioned among all three
plants, in the main the various divisions of labor are well
concentrated. For the most part the Upper Works, though a considerable
quantity of wire is made there, is devoted to what is termed "finished
product." In the same manner the Buckthorn plant, while turning out
some rope in small sizes, specializes in all forms of insulation and
the manufacture of lead-cased cables.
[Sidenote: THE KINKORA PLANT AT ROEBLING]
The Kinkora or Roebling establishment, carrying the production of the
subsidiary New Jersey Wire Cloth Company, making wire netting, window
screens and other forms of wire cloth, is given over most largely to
the making of steel wire and the fundamental work of wire and steel
production. With the company's large acreage at this location, its
townsite and the facility of river transportation as well as rail, with
unlimited water, of which this plant uses more than is pumped by the
city of Trenton itself, the situation offers large opportunity for
expansion and profitable centralization of operation. At the present
time, while shipments of wire are made direct from Roebling to
manufacturers who use it in production of their own commodities, by far
the greater part of the output goes to the other plants to be finished
into rope and specialties.
[Illustration: MAKING A CROSSING BY CABLEWAY]
Inside the tall palings that enclose the great mill buildings at
Roebling, there is an open space, broad and long as a drill ground,
threaded by spur tracks and heaped endlessly with stacks of pig iron
and steel-making materials. It seems as though some giant had dumped
there the salvage of a hundred battlefields. It lies there sadly
rusting under the weather, waiting the moment when the mills shall
stretch forth hands and hurry it in, rush it like a neophyte through
the fierce initiation of heat and chemistry, and having changed the
very fibre of it by strange processes, send it singing forth, shining
in great coils, twisted into cords and cables small and great, bare or
insulated, bronzed or coppered, galvanized or enameled, huge and bulky
or spun to hair-like tenuousness, to do its work in a busy world.
[Sidenote: MAKING WIRE STEEL]
Of course, the making of steel is no new story, but this is wire
steel--the high carbon, the tough, the sinewy, the resilient, that must
carry in itself as it moves along through these interminable buildings
the analytically measured proportions of this or that, which fit it to
bear up the traffic of a giant bridge or convey a whisper of telephonic
sound or register split seconds in an Elgin timepiece. It is "pig," and
ore and "scrap," but just what kind and just how much of "scrap" and
ore and "pig," these are subtle questions. It costs a lot of time and
money sometimes to answer them.
When the thirty-five hundred and odd degrees of heat in the long rows
of open hearth furnaces have brought this stubborn mixture to bubbling
and seething like a busy kettle of soup--a workman adding a little
manganese or other ingredient to the broth now and then, grimy men with
long handled steel dippers take out a few thimblefuls from time to time
and hurry the sample away to the chemist, who, like a chef, tests the
quality and prescribes the seasoning. By and by it is run off, from an
opening in the bottom of the furnace into a huge caldron they call a
"ladle." A fifty-ton crane conveys it down the long, shadowy building,
to halt above a group of tall moulds. A wizard up in the gloom under
the roof moves it from mould to mould, a few inches at a time, while
the liquid steel is drawn from the bottom into one after another. The
moulds are left to cool.
[Sidenote: BLOOMS]
Its history is now begun. It is an ingot--many ingots--and when removed
from the mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away on its journey.
When in due course the ingot comes to the "blooming mill" it is
fourteen inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated again, it is
marched up on a steel rollway, also controlled by a "man higher up,"
and into the hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of
swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in sheer humility to a
diameter of four inches and with a very long face--some forty-eight
feet to be exact. And no wonder. In the process it has been kneaded
into a dozen different phases of flatness and squareness, and put in a
way to profit by the everlasting squeezing and stretching it is to
undergo. Now it is a bloom.
[Sidenote: BILLETS]
Again it is passed on, and from some subterranean blackness you see it
rushed out and up to a sort of guillotine that first cuts off the flawy
ends, where the impurities accumulated in its ingot state, and sends
them to the "scrap" heap, then lops the bloom as a man saws firewood,
but a great deal faster, into billets varying from one to four hundred
pounds in weight. They are "billets" now, and at last are counted the
raw material of wire, even after such an inferno of cooking.
A steel loader gathers them up, carries them away in bunches and, by a
trick of wire pulling, deposits them on other cars in rows as regular
as the pickets on an old fashioned fence.
[Sidenote: THROUGH THE ROLLING MILL]
Along with the copper billets they are stacked in thousands and
thousands of tons in the stockyard outside the doors of the rolling
mill, each in its group according to physical and chemical character,
waiting the next purgatory of change. One pile is marked for one
mission, one for another, ranging through all the uses wire can be put
to. These piles are forever vanishing, forever being replaced, as the
wide world calls for wire. They disappear into the darkness of the mill
and they are never billets again.
Marshaled on cars and jammed by hydraulic force into big reheating
furnaces like a Brobdignagian bakery, fired with fuel gas, they come
out glowing again and start on the next stage of reduction. The passage
through the rolling mill is a short life and a merry one. If they were
kneaded in the blooming mill it was a mild experience. Here they are
mauled and manhandled and masticated by swift, continuous and looping
mills that are born with a huge appetite for the largest billets, and
make rods of great length. Down they go, under the gripping of
relentless fingers that squeeze them first square, then oval, then
square again, and pass them on, always smaller, toward the journey's
end. Sometimes it's half an inch, sometimes more, according to the
needs of trade.
[Sidenote: THE MILE A MINUTE JOURNEY INTO WIRE]
Wire goes the whole distance, whisking along through the murky, half
dark mill, up and down at a mile a minute, like flaming serpents
flirting fiery tails, as the men, armed with tongs, seize and whip them
from one pair of rolls to another. In they go, around the grooved
repeater and out again to be grabbed with a motion swift as the dash of
a pickerel, and thrust once more into the next set of rolls. Always the
lightning speed and always the long tail, red hot and smaller than
before, and longer, playing "snap the whip" down the steel grooves to
the bottom of the "pit," then straight away up the incline, a flash of
fire in the darkness, and on from roll to roll. The men who handle
these rods hold their ticklish posts only twenty or thirty minutes at a
time. A straight eight hour day, if a man came through it alive, would
send him to an asylum with a conviction that he was great grandson to
Medusa. At the finishing pass where the man stands, a stream of four
rods is going by him continually at lightning speed, about a mile a
minute; hundreds of tons in twenty-four hours looping the loops through
the rolls and finishing in red coils of quarter inch, lying innocent
and rosy and round on the metal floor.
To the novice they look like wire; to the _cognoscenti_ they are only
rods, and in order to be wire some day are hustled off to the cleaning
house and in bunches plunged into a bath of acid. This takes off the
scale the rolling left on them. But acid in wire steel is like heresy
in the church. It has to be purged away. This is done by immersion and
then by a coating of lime to neutralize by chemical action whatever
taint may remain. The steel is then baked from twenty-four to
forty-eight hours to remove the hydrogen.
Wire making has just begun. From this time on it is a wonder-work to
the novice, a mechanical sleight of hand performance by which hundreds
of shadowy men and other hundreds of whirling wheels spin the rod down
ever smaller and smaller till what was once a stodgy four foot billet
is perhaps a thousandth of an inch thick, fifteen odd thousand miles
long, weighs less than a quarter of an ounce to the mile, and has to be
looked for with your best reading glasses. It is just three times as
fine as the hair on your head.
[Sidenote: THE WORK OF THE WIRE DOCTORS]
Never think that the tall chimney of a manufacturing plant tells the
story of all that goes on in its shadow. It isn't all coarse work. If
you could see the things that are done to a block of steel, and the
brains that are mixed with it, in the Roebling plant, before it comes
out and goes on its way, they would make you take off your hat to a
piece of wire for the rest of your natural life. But it isn't all, what
happens to the outside. There are wire doctors who follow the changing
symptoms of the metal through its many processes, with diagnostic eye
as keen as any medico's for traces of typhoid or mumps. Through all the
process there are reheatings and coolings, at carefully specified
temperatures, to give temper and then to take it away, to keep the
ductility without sacrificing endurance. It is one business where you
simply have to eat the cake and keep it, too.
There is wet drawn wire and dry drawn wire, and chemical reasons for
drawing wire wet, and divers ways of drying wet wire to attain certain
conditions; there is lubrication by means of dry materials as well as
oil, and soap suds, funny things that also act on the material itself
in mysterious ways. But this is no text book.
[Illustration: TRAMWAY RUNNING ON WIRE ROPE CABLE DUMPING COAL AT MINE]
No thinkable effort is omitted that will help to make the wire material
perfect in quality and service condition, but the proof of the pudding
in the making of wire is in the Olsen machines--miraculous things that
will smash a big wire rope or snap a hair of wire and register to a
decimal the breaking strength of each. There are tests for tensile
strength, for torsion to show how many twists a piece of wire will
stand, and for bending. There are microscopic tests for molecular
condition and men who will almost tell you from a microscopic section
the maximum service of which the rope made from a given wire is
capable. Any bundle of wire that doesn't pass the test for the job on
hand is discarded and used for something else, and a record of it all
is kept with scrupulous care. Any foot of wire that passes through the
shipping room on the way to market has a clean bill of health, ample
for the use to which it is destined, and the amount of material that is
scrapped for faults, where work is on stringent specifications, would
be sudden death to a business that hadn't a wide range of uses for
product of whatever quality. Fortunately for the users of high-grade
wire the market for the lower grades is always hungry and crying for
more.
[Sidenote: THE WONDER OF DUCTILITY]
There are complexities without end in the making and finishing of wire,
but the real wonder of it lies after all in the initial principle which
the German inventor in Bavaria gave to the world six hundred years
ago--the simple but even now almost incredible fact that a rod of cold
steel of the hardest quality--plow steel is the convincing name for
it--can be seized by its sharpened end with a clamp they call a dog and
drawn through a smaller hole, in a still harder piece of steel, three
or four feet until it can be fastened to a drum, and then be wound off
in miles almost without interruption. It is a wonder that grows as you
watch it and yet it seems so simple. To see that steel, of tremendous
strength and hardness, drawn through a tiny hole as if it were molasses
candy--and yet it may have a tensile strength of two or three hundred
thousand pounds to the square inch.
There is nothing spectacular about the wire mill where this is done. On
long benches the die-holding appliances are set up and the dies set
into them. The wire--or at first the rod--is run from a portable bobbin
they call a swift, that stands on the floor, and the wire, after it has
been given the hole, passes to a bobbin they call a block. Then it is
taken on to a still smaller die and the same process repeated, with
occasional reheatings, until it has the diameter of a thread.
[Sidenote: CUTTING THE DIES]
But by and by the time comes when the wire is so fine it cuts the steel
of the die and loses its rotundity. Then a harder material is needed
and the wire drawer goes the whole figure and uses a diamond. Cutting
the steel dies is a cunning craft enough, but the expert, who, with a
hair-like drill and a dab of diamond dust can penetrate a diamond with
an opening that will be regular and measure to a thousandth of an inch,
is a man who would think it no trick at all to pass a well fed camel
through the needle's eye.
* * * * *
It would take a larger book than this to tell all the things that are
done in the making of wire for various uses. In the main, the entire
volume produced either goes to market as wire of one sort and another,
to be applied to its various objects or for sale, or else it is twisted
into rope, of which the Roebling Company manufactures four hundred
kinds, sizes and many qualities. The common fence wires are not among
the Roebling specialties, but wire nettings are manufactured from a
soft variety of basic steel which lends itself to the weaving process
with almost the ease of animal and vegetable fibres.
[Sidenote: THE ENDLESS MANUFACTURES FROM "FLAT WIRE"]
The "flat wire," which has now attained immense volume of production,
is, for the most part, rolled down from the round, in many qualities,
and shipped as material to the makers of many things. There are wide,
thin, beautiful ribbons which find their way to the shoestring
factories and are cut and clinched to the laces as tips. The list of
novelties and parts that are made from various forms and widths of flat
wire is as long as the list of Smiths in a New York directory. In the
novelty shop, which does a million things, wires are cut and
mechanically bent in hundreds of thousands of shapes, for clothes
hangers, pail ear staples, daubers for bottles, meat skewers, hog
rings, thread guards for textile machinery, basket fasteners, shackles
for car seals, saddlery parts, Welsbach mantles, clips and links for
bedsprings, wiring for toys of all descriptions--and so on and on and
on. And all this novelty business is a side line, like the square and
triangular wires that are used by oil well drillers to keep the sand
from getting into the oil.
The special shapes of high quality wire that are made to order, to
provide hard-wearing parts for typewriters and many other machines, are
almost without number.
[Sidenote: SALVAGING "MILL ENDS"]
With the increasing cost of labor and materials effort has been made to
salvage and make use of "mill ends" of wire, running sometimes to large
quantity, which formerly were accounted waste. These are now passed
through a straightening machine, which lays them out in uniform bundles
of some ten feet in length, which again may be cut to shorter lengths
for special purposes. In the buildings where this is done, at the Upper
Plant, are piles of neat bundles of all shapes and sizes and grades,
which once went to the scrap for reworking but now are utilized without
additional cost.
[Sidenote: COPPER WIRE AND COPPER ROPE]
Copper wire is manufactured by the Roebling mills in very large
quantities and in many sizes and forms, principally for electrical use
and for service where water corrosion shortens the life of steel. The
little bond wires that link the rails of railways to perfect the
carriage of current in the block signal system are mostly steel, but
copper is used at stations and on sidings where the leakage from
standing cars is apt to contain acids. Copper wire of all sizes down to
the very fine is spooled and sold for use in arts and manufactures. For
marine uses a deal of copper rope is made, and copper strand is twisted
for lightning rods, the fixtures and supports of which, in turn, are
manufactured from round and flat steel wire. The piles of this
equipment, waiting shipment in the Roebling storerooms, give proof that
the satire of the cartoonist and the mockery of the funny writer cannot
destroy an ancient faith.
The telephone and telegraph companies use uncountable miles of copper
wire in line service and other miles in fine sizes for instrument coils
and divers other functions. Electricity as an agent would be a halting
cripple without wire. The dynamo would have little more utility than a
washtub. Armatures, frames for which are formed from flat steel wire,
are wound in the Roebling plant in impressive number.
One of the largest fields for copper is trolley wires, which are of
great size and of many eccentric shapes.
This is merely a glimpse at the utilities that go to make up the field
for Roebling wire. It is doubtful if today the company owns a complete
list of the wire it has made for special and even eccentric purposes,
or knows within many thousands the things that are manufactured from
its wire product after it leaves the shipping room.
[Sidenote: COATING AND FINISHING]
Use determines much in the finishing of wire, and of wire rope as well,
as not alone concerning the chemistry of the inside, but the covering
of the outside. Material that is made for service out of doors, under
water or under ground, to ensure long life needs an exposed surface
more resistant to moisture than the naked steel. Copper is proof, but
the pure wire is expensive for most uses and where severe strains are
incurred it lacks in strength. Modern science has been too busy to
recover the art of hardening copper which the ancient Egyptians lost.
Zinc, in its best application, makes steel wire weatherproof for many
years and the apparently simple process of galvanizing, the fixing of a
coating of zinc on the steel has multiplied many fold the utility of
steel wire in places where it could ill be spared. But there is
galvanizing and "galvanizing." The first is worth the money it costs.
There are other coated wires, too. The aeroplane strands and cords are
tinned. There is a bronze enamel, and a copper coating which looks as
if it were applied for protection but is really the incidental result
of a dip in sulphate of copper, for other purposes in the course of
fabrication. The coating of wires is chiefly done in the wire works of
the Kinkora Mills, though a galvanizing house is maintained also at the
Upper Works. For wire that is to be made into galvanized ropes and
cords, the galvanic treatment is given before it goes to be made up.
[Sidenote: JOURNEYING THROUGH THE ROEBLING PLANTS]
For exercise, a journey through any one of the Roebling plants, and
especially the great Upper Works, is as good as thirty-six holes of
golf. It is upstairs and downstairs, over an interminable number of
thousands of square feet, through the mazes of a picture that is always
changing its detail and its rate of speed, but which is all centered on
one idea, to keep the stream of wire and wire rope, of all sizes, kinds
and colors, moving toward the shipping room. It all seems so easy in
its progress, so free from friction or any trace of confusion, that the
layman does not stop to consider how many problems have bobbed up along
the way of production, even of the most modest wires and rope. Wire is
a trade involving intimate knowledge of many lines of business and
manufacture, since the character of wire required differs in nearly all.
[Illustration: HOISTING FULLY COMPLETED LOCOMOTIVE WITH WIRE ROPE SLING]
To the novice, wire is wire. Here he learns that what is wire for one
thing is valueless for another and wire that looks to the unpracticed
eye as if it were ready for market always has to undergo a few more
processes before it is up to demands. Wherever, however far, you travel
in this succession of high-roofed, airy buildings, you come always upon
some new regiment of machines, some new container of chemical or metal,
with a long line of reels unwinding wire to undergo some additional
treatment. And always moving among the buildings are cars, big and
little, packing wire or material from one place to another, to feed the
wheels and furnaces. The tonnage from plant to plant and from house to
house in the Roebling works would make a first-class annual business
for many a modest railroad, even if it carried nothing else.
[Sidenote: INSULATION]
But when wire is finished it isn't always finished. Since electricity
spread itself over the earth in a million services, insulation in
various forms has come to be almost as important as the wire itself.
Insulation in its more advanced forms is a complex affair, gauged to
accord with specific conditions and multiplying processes to secure the
maximum of protection, both from electric current to life and property
and from dampness and abrasion to the wire itself. In the making of
wire screens the wire men have taken a leaf from the cloth-mill book,
but in weaving a casing of cotton or other fibre around the wire for
insulation the process is strongly reminiscent of some of the New
England textile mills. Long rows of machines, black and silent and
swift, reaching upward toward the ceiling, revolving rapidly on an
upright shaft; long arms trailing downward, with wheels and bobbins
like fingers plying dizzily but swiftly in and out around the wire
which unwinds from its spool and keeps forever climbing. It is all like
a Maypole, and the bobbins go in and out like children carrying each
its ribbon. As the wire climbs, the whirling fingers braid around it a
coating, tight fitting and impervious. Sometimes, where double
insulation is required, there are two sets of arms, one above the
other, the upper one putting on a second covering outside the first, of
cotton of one color or another, or hemp or whatever else the
experimentalists have found best for the purpose. You wonder how the
bellcord in the railroad train can ever stand the pulling and jerking
and wear and tear it gets. It is simple. It is just a perfectly made
and highly tinned wire rope, with a double coat of braided cotton over
it. The jacket may wear off in time, but the Roebling rope inside will
never fail in a lifetime to get the message to the engineer.
When these snug coverings are finished the wire for certain uses is
taken to another part of the works where it is unwound once more to
pass through a bath of asphalt compound. After this process, which
leaves a dull, dirty-looking surface, the spools of treated wire are
put aside for drying, and then a final surfacing applied. The next
journey is to the packing room.
[Sidenote: TELEPHONE CABLES]
Insulation is a wide range business. It cases wire in asbestos to
prevent fire from stopping its work; but perhaps the highest phase is
reached in the great cables of copper wires used in telephone service.
For these the individual wires are covered with paper of various
colors, which serves not only for protection but enables men at the
opposite ends of a long cable to pick out unerringly the wires with
which connection is to be made. Colors are few but possible
combinations are many. The machining of this is more than ever like the
Maypole, with pink and blue and yellow strips of paper flashing in the
shadows. When the wires, paper covered, are brought together in the
cable, sometimes three or four hundred of them altogether, the whole
goes through the taping machines, which apply one or two suits of what
may be called "underwear," for after it has been covered with two or
three different materials there remains a suit of lead to be fitted,
and this is a big work done deftly.
Who has not seen men in the streets dragging huge pipes of lead through
the open manholes from big wooden spools? These are the cables you talk
over. They have been papered and clothed--and tarred and feathered,
maybe--and then encased in lead by a process that is so easy as to be
laughable, and yet as ingenious as any one thing the wire miller does.
Unrolling slowly from its spool, the heavy cable moves up to a machine
built strong and four-legged from the floor. In the mid height of this,
a few feet above the floor, is a square chamber containing molten lead.
The cable passes in at the rear and upward. It requires some credulity
to believe that it is the movement of the molten lead that carries the
cable along, but in any case when it emerges from the "box," through an
aperture that trims the soft metal down to uniformity, it has a solid
lead covering as even as lead pipe, and at the point of egress cold
water playing from just above cools it. Then it passes on through a
long tank of water for final hardening and is wound slowly, clean and
shining, on the great spools that are to carry it to market.
Many astonishing things are done in wire works, but done so swiftly,
and smoothly and in such volume that they look easy. The man in the
street, hurrying about his own business, never even takes time to
wonder to himself how they are accomplished.
CHAPTER V
WIRE ROPE--THE GIANT
"Pig" and "ore" and melting materials, with a condiment of carbon, are
the body and bones of steel wire. Their virtues, combined and
intensified by tireless processes, and tested unsparingly at every
stage, are united in wire rope; and wire rope, when all is said and
done, is the mighty backbone of the wire industry.
Wire rope to the multitude is simply wire rope. But one rope is no more
like another than Jones is like Brown or Smith like Robinson. Wire rope
is a combination of twisted wires, just as men are bipeds. That is
where the similarity ends. In outward appearance as well as inward
character, habit, tendencies and behavior in emergencies, wire ropes
differ as widely as do people, and each has a meaning of its own.
Each also is the fruit of long study and repeated test of the work it
is to do not alone on machines and in the laboratory, but under actual
conditions of operation. The wire rope engineer will tell you every
rope has temperament. He spends his life knowing other people's
business--rope business--and working out their rope problems. The
answers to these problems are the four hundred different sizes and
kinds of rope that the Roebling Company manufactures on its regular
schedules. The rest are specials. Go where you will in the world
nowadays, you will find wire rope doing the work.
[Sidenote: WIRE ROPE PROBLEMS AND THE ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT]
With the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Roebling Company
withdrew from competitive fields of contract engineering, but it
maintains a large engineering department and is ceaselessly busy with
construction and installation problems from all over the world. In its
files there is exhaustive record of every contract of magnitude, for
construction, haulage, mine work, ship work--for any sort of work where
rope is used and where the problems are difficult. Roebling engineers
are always on the go, studying conditions where rope is to be used, to
prescribe the fabric that will meet the need.
[Illustration: THE AEROPLANE--A WIRE ROPE CREATION]
There is, to begin with, a questionnaire of ninety-three questions, to
be filled out by the master mechanic or engineer on any special work
for which rope is to be recommended and manufactured. When these are
answered the engineer is ready to begin work, which starts with the
selection of materials and does not end till the man who is to use it
has had specific instruction as to its peculiarities and care and
protection.
For this service the Roebling Company maintains a large corps of
specialized engineers busily engaged solving the problems of wire rope
usage, and making suggestions to effect economies in wire rope
operation.
In fact, it doesn't end there. It is a saying in the Roebling
establishment that a rope is never sold until it's worn out.
[Sidenote: THE "LAY" OF THE ROPE]
The cut ends of a diversified lot of wire ropes resemble, more than
anything else, the eccentric forms of snow flakes, in their regularity
and the grouping of their parts around a center. But there is nothing
haphazard about the formations. Even the core is figured in the number
of days it will add to the rope's life under varying conditions. The
wide difference in ropes consists not only in the materials employed,
which have much to do with their resistance to divers strains and the
manner of their use, but in skillful selection of sizes in the wire and
arrangement in the strands of which they are composed; again in the
distribution in the strands, the twists of the strands themselves and
the "lay" or manner in which these are twisted to make the rope. It is
all the result of careful calculation.
[Sidenote: THE CORE]
A paramount factor too is the core, in securing the maximum of wear.
Its mission, in most ropes, is not to add strength, but pliability, and
to serve as a cushion to absorb the impact which the strands make under
the tension of service. The fibre cores, for this reason, are usually
treated with some lubricant. In the majority of ropes hemp is used for
a core but in those intended for stationary service the core may be of
steel. This will add from seven to ten per cent to strength and very
largely to rigidity.
When we speak of wire rope most of us have a mental picture of a round
fabric, but there are flat ropes as well, for use in mines or quarries
where the haul is from great depths and twisting is to be avoided.
These are made in all widths and thicknesses, and are constructed by
placing several strands together, side by side, and sewing them
together with soft iron wire. But it is the round rope that supplies
the great demand.
[Sidenote: THE STRAND]
In considering rope, one may start with the strand. Strands, as may be
seen from the pictures of transverse sections of ropes, vary infinitely
in character, but always with a purpose. They are made up in ordinary
practice, of four, seven, twelve, nineteen or thirty-seven wires,
according to the work the rope is meant to do. In the rope mills you
come upon long, low "stranding machines," reaching down a long room and
carrying in horizontal arrangement, wide apart but in circular
formation, the wires that are to form the strand. At a point carefully
determined with reference to the strain on each wire, in order to
preserve uniformity, all these wires come together and pass through one
opening in a twisting machine which whirls them into a unit. The
finished strand is wound on bobbins.
The direction of the twist, whether to right or left, is of moment in
determining the character of the finished product.
[Sidenote: "STANDARD" OR GENERAL PURPOSE ROPE]
"Standard rope," so called, the general purpose rope, is composed of
six wire strands and a hemp core, all being practically of the same
size; but to secure particular results the number of strands may be
four, five, eight, twelve or whatever may be desired. Already it will
be apparent that there is wide latitude in rope making for the exercise
of skill and the utilization of experimental record. This freedom in
selection and adjustment extends through almost every process. For
example, in the twists: when wires in the strands and strands in the
rope are twisted in the same direction, which ordinarily they are not,
the rope has what is known as a "Lang lay," after a rope man who
devised the system. The twist, whether in strand or rope, has distinct
effect in service. It may be long or short. If it is long the rope will
be stronger and more rigid, if short, it will gain in flexibility. When
it comes to the short twist rope, one sees the particular value of the
twisting tests which were applied and recorded away back in the wire
stage.
[Sidenote: TESTING THE ROPE]
It is singular, but it is true, that the aggregate strength of all the
wires that go to make up a rope cannot be retained in the rope, at
least in the laboratory on the testing machines. When the rope is
tested for breaking strength it is found that no sample will show more
than ninety per cent of the total, and the average is about eighty-two.
Part of this failure is due to the angle of wires in the strand, with a
resultant stress on wires in excess of applied load; therefore, the
greater the number of wires in the rope, the lower the efficiency. The
other reason is that the contiguous strands in the rope nick each other
under high tension, and so are weakened. This, however, may not be
important in ordinary working loads under service conditions. These
casual truths show with what multiplicity of tendencies the rope maker
has to deal in devising a product to give service and safety in the
often ticklish jobs it has to do, with great weights in hand, and human
lives at stake.
[Illustration: THE STEAM SHOVEL SHOVELS BY MEANS OF A WIRE ROPE]
From molecular condition, as revealed by the microscope, down to the
last petty detail in the plan of construction, there is never an end to
the problems, and gravity has to be figured into the lifetime of a rope
as surely as the elusive trace of sulphuric and muriatic acid producing
hydrogen occlusion. Wire rope is a business of exactitude and eternal
vigilance. You have to deal with breaking strengths of from 40,000 to
340,000 pounds to the square inch of transverse section, but the wire
that will lift weights at the rate of more than a hundred tons has
entirely different characteristics than the lower strength material.
And the why of that must be traced back to the treatment of the steel
when it was passing through the wire stage. Rope makers dealt with
molecules once and thought they were taking pains. They found they had
to go back to atoms to handle their problems. Today the secret seems to
lurk in the electron.
[Sidenote: FITTING THE ROPE TO ITS WORK]
Of the tricks in making ropes, there is no end. They are fitted for
their work like a soldier or a gymnast, and built for it. A tiller rope
must be flexible to the last degree, but it must be strong enough so it
will stand up under the swift tensions of a storm or in the lightning
manoeuvers of a race. Therefore, like a few ropes built for other
purposes, the composite parts are not mere strands of wire, but little
ropes in themselves, complete in all parts. And again, while ropes
exposed to weather and stationary, like ships' standing riggings, are
galvanized, those that are subjected to constant bending are not. For
every variation, there's a reason.
To the average man or woman, the elevators in tall buildings suggest
danger. The rope engineer counts them highly safe because each elevator
is equipped with a multiplicity of ropes and safety devices. What taxes
his conscience and spurs him to the last possible effort, is the rope
that goes to the "deep shaft" service, where the lives of men going up
and down in five thousand feet or more of subterranean darkness, hang
on the accuracy of his calculation.
Only now, the Roebling engineers will tell you, is wire rope being
perfected. Much of it is in what seem to be small details of
construction, which nevertheless go down into the basic principles that
make for efficiency. Rope making has been treated as an exact science,
because it dealt with materials that were more or less standardized.
They are learning now that rope has a large unknown quantity that
defies formula past a certain point. For the lack of a better term,
they call it "personality." The labor of today, and many years to come,
is to identify these intangible factors and bring them where they can
be computed to the end of securing greater endurance and safety.
In the Roebling shops there are men working who got their jobs almost
by heredity. Their fathers and grandfathers worked for John A. Roebling.
"You ask them," said the Chief Engineer, "why they do a thing a certain
way. They tell you simply that 'that's the way to do it.'" In the old
days John A. Roebling figured out the way, and gave it to his workmen
in the shape of orders--today somewhat different methods are utilized.
To the cumulative experience of over eighty years of wire-rope making,
the Roeblings have always availed themselves of the latest engineering
skill. With up-to-date research, chemical and metallurgical
laboratories, every progress in the art has been incorporated in their
product.
[Sidenote: FOLLOWING THE ROPE AND ITS USES]
The Roebling people say that wire rope is their "baby." They give it
the utmost of skill and care and caution in the making, and then to see
that these are not wasted, they follow it into the field, where it is
to serve, with personal attention to its installation and with the most
detailed instruction for its protection and use, figuring out with
nicety the speeds to be maintained, the size of the sheaves or drums
around which it should travel to minimize the strain, prescribing its
lubrication, providing printed warnings against all forms of misuse or
neglect, with pictures to show the reason why, and other instructions
and pictures to aid in detection of the first signs of trouble or
exhaustion, and the reasons therefor. Study of the Roebling method,
from the ore yard to the field of operation, makes clear the reason why
Roebling rope, from the very beginning of the manufacture, has been
accounted standard for quality.
A Roebling catalogue is never complete. It cannot list and illustrate,
without competing in size with the unabridged, more than a small part
of the uses for which rope--and much of it special rope--is made, or
the infinite number of attachments and accessories provided for
installation and use on the job.
[Sidenote: WIRE ROPE AND ITS WORK]
There is the transmission of power by means of a round, endless rope,
running at high velocity over a series of sheaves or pulleys, carrying
power to a distance of three miles; there is underground haulage, for
which five distinct types of rope are used, enabling the engineer to
make light of grades, even with staggering loads; logging, in which, in
the primeval forests of the Northwest, the horse or ox is a pigmy, and
where the giant trunks, seven, eight or nine feet in diameter, are
whisked up at the sides of mountains, hoisted into the air and
deposited on cars, to be run down to the rivers on steep inclines,
again operated by rope of great size and strength. There is quarrying,
where rope is used in quantity for guying, and for hoisting the blocks
of stone out of their beds, and then on aerial cable ways, to carry
them on high over long distances to be loaded; there are the oil
fields, in which just now, in the mad search for petroleum to supply
the world's shortage, interminable miles of wire rope are being used,
some of it an inch thick or over, to carry the drills, or for casing
and sand lines. There is shipping--the battleship and the merchantman
and the liner; the yacht, the riverman and the tug--all strung with
wire rope from stem to stern, and some of them from truck to keel as
well--not to mention mooring lines which have their own plan and
formula; there is towing, to which wire rope brought new possibilities
and freedom from old troubles and old perils--witness the towing of the
dry dock "Dewey" from Chesapeake Bay to the Philippines, thirteen
thousand miles, on a pair of 1200 foot Roebling hawsers, which stuck to
their jobs without interruption, through all sorts of weather, and
lugged their burden into the harbor of Olongapo without a sign of
weakness or exhaustion; there is dredging, for which wire rope has
largely supplanted the old and cumbrous chain which was never any
stronger than its weakest link. There is hardly an important harbor in
the world today where these stout ropes are not busy clearing pathway
and anchorage for marine commerce.
[Sidenote: MORE USES OF WIRE ROPE]
The list does not end. There are incline railways, in the mountains of
East and West alike, as well as in foreign countries, which have made
mountain climbing a primitive form of sport, and enabled one-legged men
with perfect ease to get the view from towering peaks which otherwise
would have been accessible only to the hardy mountain climber; there
are cable railways with which engineers have been able to run cars out
on an aerial roadbed of wire, over impassable gorges and morasses, to
make fills for railway or other construction; cableways, the forms and
uses of which, in transferring materials, are without number; tramways
and traction systems, which have now, save in particular instances,
given way to trolley, and the copper wire for this, again, comes in
large and continuous tonnage from the Roebling mills; there is the
perfect litter of hoisting slings, all over creation, for wherever men
are doing work or business of any kind, there is a load to lift, and
the wire rope, with its special appliances for quick hitch and release,
is fast relegating the old time chain to the category of antiquities.
In 1862 the first of elevator ropes was made. Today millions are in use.
* * * * *
It is a long story, and one variety of rope is never just like another,
save for the general purpose product before referred to, which figures
in the schedules as "Standard." But in the making of all the many
hundred kinds, the process, to outward appearance, is the same, and
impressive in the simplicity to which it has been reduced. From the
tiny specimen, made for some finical scientific experiment, to the
three-inch monster that contains single wires nearly a quarter of an
inch in diameter, and drags half a million pounds of ore, with the aid
of powerful machinery, at the Spanish American Iron Company's mines in
Cuba, the general principle of manufacture and the mechanism used in
the making are all alike.
[Sidenote: ROPE-MAKING MACHINES]
In the several rope mills of the Roebling works are a large number of
machines, some of which, built by John A. Roebling in the early days of
his rope making, are still turning out rope, and good rope. His first
product was made by hand in the old "rope walk" way. Today the ground
where he did it is covered with buildings full of speeding machinery
that has little rest--devices that stand in long rows, eating up the
strand that unwinds from the whirling bobbins to feed it, and turning
off steadily the completed rope, which passes to spools, large or
small, in proportion to its weight and size.
Simply described, the rope machine pictures itself as a hollow column
cylinder, strongly framed and braced steel from the base of which arms
extend, like the lower branches of a spruce tree. At the ends of these
the bobbins are rigged, carrying the strands which are to be twisted
into rope. These are led from the bobbins in toward the center, and
pass into the column, which carries also the core and which in its
turning twists the strands together. The complete rope passes out over
a pulley on to the spools. Machines for the smaller sizes of rope are
strung out in a long file. The larger ones require elbow room; each of
those for the making of the largest rope has a room to itself and is
installed on a foundation of steel and concrete.
[Illustration: HOISTING A HUGE NAVAL GUN WITH WIRE ROPE SLING]
When the mechanism is at work it suggests somehow the solar rotations.
The bobbins have a triple motion. On the ends of the arms to which they
are attached they travel around the column, at a rate of speed which of
course is determined by the "lay" required, but they are unwinding as
the strand pays out and also turn completely end for end, at
predetermined intervals. In the more modern machines there are two sets
of arms or "branches" above the first, for the purpose of carrying a
greater number of strands. In this type the arms carrying the bobbins
are somewhat shorter, allowing for a great rate of speed. There is
something mysterious in the sight of these flying reels of steel, or
copper maybe, for many ropes of substantial size are made of copper for
marine use, whizzing round and round like indefatigable moths around a
big steel candle, or a dervish round his own spinal column on a spot of
ground the size of a dinner plate, and the rope, hard, shining, round,
packed around its core of hemp or steel, noiselessly gathering all this
strength and energy into itself for use in the days of need. When you
see it on the spool at the side, shining with its coating of lubricant,
ready for work and able to do it, it is a little hard to associate so
respectable and dignified a fabric with the rusty heap of iron that lay
in the Kinkora yard.
[Sidenote: SPECIAL CONSTRUCTION]
There are records in the Roebling offices that tell interesting tales
of special constructions, and pictures of enormous spools of rope,
thousands of feet, in big diameters, running from spool to spool and
since one spool is an ample carload, from one flat car to another, when
loaded for shipment. Such were the huge street railway cables, made for
Australia, for Kansas City, for Chicago and New York. There is an
amusing story of the New York street railway engineer who insisted that
the cable be made in one section, 33,000 feet in length, but who
changed his mind about the beauty of it when he got the goods and saw
the elephantine spools of packed metal caving in the manholes in the
city streets on their way to the point of installation. A gigantic rope
machine was built in the Roebling plant to twist this mammoth.
The cars that carry these heavy cables were made specially for the
purpose. An ordinary car would crumble under the load, but the machine
and the cars are still in use, and busy.
When cables for street railways were discarded in favor of trolley,
wire rope men thought the day of doom had come, but the field for wire
rope for other uses has widened so fast and so far, in a rapidly
widening world, that the cable orders, big as they were, have never
been missed. It furnishes a significant index of the growth in all
industrial activity, for there is no new phase of development or
manufacture or work of any kind in which wire rope, or wire in some
form or other, does not play an indispensable part.
[Sidenote: POWER IN THE ROEBLING PLANTS]
In the three Roebling plants there are four electric power stations,
aggregating over 16,000 horse-power, and more than 150 boilers with
25,000 horse-power. The coal consumption on the three plants is
approximately 1000 tons a day, and the fuel oil consumption about
20,000,000 gallons per year. In the Kinkora plant at Roebling there are
thirteen miles of standard gauge railroad track.
CHAPTER VI
WORKING FOR UNCLE SAM
Of the load that war laid on productive industry, it is beyond question
that wire, the country over, carried its share. In the retrospect,
every man and every organization tries consciously or unconsciously to
figure out what part individual effort contributed to the big result.
Fortunately, perhaps, the question of relative accomplishment and of
everybody's share in the outcome is one of the things that can never be
settled, but in the picture war has left on the memory of those who
lived it, wire and wire rope can never be very far away.
As wire pervades every industry of peace and every department of
living, so in the headlong rush of war, whether by land or sea or in
the air, it was the handy and dependable agent that made a thousand
other things possible. Wire did its work not only up in the smoke and
the agony of the western front, not only where the fleets battled
against the lurking death, but along every line of plain toil by which
the unhalting supply of materials, both for battle and sustenance, was
kept flowing to the point of need.
When the big order for multiplication of output came, wire rope
manufacturers were not told to make one thing and a lot of it, as so
many industries were. The demands of war, on the contrary, added
diversity to what was already one of the most diversified of products.
Everything was special. Every day's new load was a brand new problem in
manufacture and in construction as well--something that had not been
produced before, or at very best a new adaptation which required
special manufacture and new organization; this in a skilled industry,
at a time when skilled labor of any kind was scarce.
[Sidenote: A STORY THAT WILL NEVER BE TOLD]
The story of this period will never be told in its entirety. The Army
cannot tell it, nor the Navy. They never knew it. All they did was to
call for the stuff and get it. The wire makers will never tell it
because they are too busy supplying the demands of peace--the
rebuilding of a wrecked world and the development of a new one. Already
the picture, big and thrilling as it was, is growing dim, its detail
disappearing in the hurry of industrial production, the solving of new
problems, the supplying of demand. They look back over the old
requisitions and specifications of the feverish days of 1917 and 1918
and are surprised to see that dust has gathered on them already; they
count the figures of overwhelming volume which are their "war history"
and wonder how in the world they ever did it.
[Sidenote: THE DOUBLE BURDEN UPON WIRE'S BACK]
What doubled the burden on wire's back was that every existing industry
for which it had been making rope was "essential." The wire men looked
around to find what they could cut out. There was nothing. To maintain
the supply of oil, of coal, of ores, of food, to keep all kinds of
transportation in full swing, to see that elevators kept running so
that activity should not cease--these and a thousand other things were
all essential to unity of effort and increase of production. Altogether
the saving was trivial. They all had to be supplied, most of them
double, and the Allies had been piling in orders. On top of this burly
task came our own Government's great and variegated and undeniable
demands for war supplies.
In the carrying of such a load the wire industry was hampered by the
fewness of its plants and their distribution over the States, some of
them far from points of ocean shipment. It was plain when America
entered the war that only the most thorough co-ordination and
centralized control of operation could make success possible; only the
most economical arrangement of forces and distribution of materials.
The Iron and Steel Institute, at the request of the Government, formed
a committee to manage the production and distribution of wire rope, and
from the fifteenth of May, 1917, this committee had on its shoulders
the making of wire necessary to keep the country's work going at full
speed and to supply the needs for war, of whose extent or character
nobody had any clear idea. Karl G. Roebling, of John A. Roebling's Sons
Co., was made chairman of the committee.
[Sidenote: THE WAR--ONE LONG COMMITTEE MEETING]
Throughout the war, the Roebling offices in Trenton were headquarters
for the entire business of wire rope supply. It was one long committee
meeting, with production going on at utmost intensity all the time.
Here came all the orders for wire rope from the several Government
departments and the bureaus in those departments, each with its long
array of specifications, all requiring shipment to divers points. Much
of the work required also a great labor of cutting and attaching, and
fittings by the hundreds of thousands, and all, without an exception
that stands out in anybody's memory, wanted in the minimum of time.
It is the proud record of that committee that when the fighting ended
in November of 1918 every order had been filled and delivery made on
time. Industry has no story of accomplishment to tell that can be more
creditable than this. The Roebling plants, near to the seaboard and
equipped for specialization, were devoted almost wholly to the
manufacture of war stuff, domestic industrial orders being transferred
to inland factories.
[Sidenote: THE RECORD OF PRODUCTION FOR WAR PURPOSES]
The record of production, for war purposes alone, shows that the
Roebling Company manufactured a very large percentage of the whole,
which ran to unconscionable millions of feet. During the war the
productive capacity of the plant was increased as much as seventy-five
per cent, and the list of the employed at times ran close to ten
thousand men. The numerical increase in men did not equal the growth in
output. Here as well as in almost every line of industry the war
furnished a revelation of the capacity of men for work. New lines of
production, requiring skill, developed in common laborers, the only
kind that at times could be obtained, a facility in production that
before the pressure of war came to discover it would have been thought
impossible.
In looking back over the war work it is plain that the service rendered
by the company in manufacturing material for the Allies, prior to
America's entrance into hostilities, was of large value in
familiarizing it with forms of production afterward required for our
own Army and Navy. Another thing which aided in meeting a vast demand
was the unremitting attention which the company had given to the
perfection of aircraft material, from the first successful flight of
the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903. At that time study and
experiment had been started in the Roebling factories looking to the
production of aircraft wire and strand and cord for all the different
parts involved, which should combine the utmost strength with the
minimum of weight, with special reference to the stresses peculiar to
aviation work.
When the hour of need came, Roebling aircraft products had reached a
stage of perfection which saved a world of hurried experimentation and
development. It was a demonstration in preparedness, although up to
1914 the work had been done solely to keep industrial pace with a new
and important development of mechanical science.
[Sidenote: THE GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHMENTS THAT CALLED FOR WIRE AND ROPE]
It is a fairly long list of Government establishments that is shown on
the Roebling records as calling for war supply of wire rope. It
includes, in the Navy Department, the Bureau of Steam Engineering,
Bureau of Construction and Repair, Bureau of Ordnance, the Bureau of
Yards and Docks and the Naval Aircraft Factory.
In the War Department were the following: Office of the Chief of
Ordnance, Depot Quartermaster, Chief Signal Officer, Chief of
Engineers, the Army Transport Service, the Quartermaster General's
Office, the Signal Corps, the Aircraft Production Bureau, United States
Engineer's Office, General Engineer Depot, Bureau of Insular Affairs,
Procurement Division, the Balloon Department of the Aircraft Production
Board, and the Director General of Military Railways.
Always there were the United States Shipping Board, the Emergency Fleet
Corporation, and the demands for these alone were a business. In
addition to all this the Committee made allocation of orders for the
Argentine Naval Commission, the British War Commission, the Imperial
Munitions Board, the Italian Commission and the Belgian Government.
It doesn't seem such a large roster, but it took a world of wire to go
around it. A few figures out of the total allocations will suggest what
the total demand was and the task that it involved.
[Sidenote: SOME OF THE BIG DEMANDS]
The first big call on the wire rope producers was for submarine nets to
protect the fleet bases and harbors. There were supplied to the Navy,
for this purpose, 2,820,520 feet of rope, and it was regular rope that
was required in this service, for the German submarines had developed a
way of slashing through the earlier and lighter nets. For the new type
the rope ranged from an inch and a half to three-quarters of an inch;
but it wasn't merely a matter of shipping reels of rope. Almost all of
it had to be cut into lengths and attachments made, for these barriers
were designed in sections. This necessitated, for the Navy order,
153,000 fittings. The Army Ordnance Bureau used nearly a million feet
of rope for nettings, which was shipped to various coast forts. The
whole volume of wire rope for nettings was furnished within four months.
[Illustration: CUP CHALLENGERS, DEFENDERS AND SAILING VESSELS OF ALL
TYPES SECURE THEIR RIGGING WITH WIRE ROPE]
Another interesting order was from the Quartermaster's Department,
which called for 6,852,500 feet of rope and the manufacture of 300,000
pairs of traces, requiring 3,000,000 splices. These are what are called
thimble splices, and, while fitting one of them is ordinarily half an
hour's work, the Roebling plant, with a force chiefly of men who were
utterly unskilled, was turning off ten thousand pairs of traces a day
at the peak of production on this order. This harness, for artillery
purposes, was on English designs, adopted after considerable delay, but
by means of which a horse, when shot down, could be eliminated from the
gun team in half a minute.
The Spruce Production Bureau took over 8,000,000 feet of rope, the
Emergency Fleet more than 12,000,000 and the Fuel Administration drew
on at the rate of 2,500 tons a month. And all the time the mines and
mills and ordnance plants, locomotives, cranes and all other
manufactures kept getting largely increased supplies of rope to carry
on their own war-driven work. Altogether the orders come to a figure
that is hard to visualize.
[Sidenote: 84,000,000 FEET OF ROPE AND A HALF MILLION FITTINGS]
But the climax, the call that taxed the wire rope makers most heavily
and kept the arc lights burning in the mills was for the 84,000,000 and
odd feet of rope and half million fittings which were required by the
Naval Establishment for the North Sea Mine Barrage, which put a prompt
and distinguished shackle on the German submarines. The fitting of this
rope was a task of moment, calling as it did for delivery of the rope
in lengths and made up ready for attachment on the ingenious plan which
the mine involved. It was all done with time to spare.
The Adriatic Barrage, an even more ambitious project since it dealt
with a depth of 3,000 instead of 900 feet, was all ready to be laid
when the Armistice was signed. This took over 12,000,000 feet of rope.
When the fighting stopped, there was a perfectly good mine barrage in
the North Sea that had to be taken up and put out of commission. This
called for 616,000 feet more of rope, with fittings to make it of use.
Every mine was cancelled without a mishap, and there are now more than
eighty million feet of "A No. 1" wire rope reposing at the bottom of
the North Sea. But it did its work, capturing no less than seventeen
German submarines in the first week.
[Sidenote: AND MORE THAN WIRE ROPE WAS ASKED FOR]
The Roebling plant, for the time, was given over to the manufacture of
war necessities, hence its problems of material were made easy by the
Director of Steel Supply. But the Roebling output for war purposes did
not end with wire rope. In May, 1918, the company was employing close
to ten thousand men, and in addition to rope making they were busy with
the manufacture of immense quantities of steel strand, strand for
outpost cables, copper strand, telephone wire, copper wire and
miscellaneous wires of all descriptions, which were needed in the
service at home and abroad.
A material part of the war work was the manufacture of wire especially
for the field telegraph and telephone systems of the Signal Corps in
Europe, where the American Army communications were the admiration of
Europeans. This material possessed certain peculiar characteristics,
and while speed in its production was an essential yet it was necessary
that every strand be perfect, for the fate of armies rested upon it.
The manufacture of this wire involved a great deal of detail and
intimate knowledge of all sorts of materials, for while copper is used
for electrical transmission there is an exterior protection of other
metals and materials, each of which has its peculiar manufacturing
difficulties.
[Sidenote: THE COMPOSITE STEEL AND COPPER STRAND]
For example, the "Composite Steel and Copper Strand" wire used by the
Army was made up as follows: There was a center wire of tinned copper
with ten outside wires of tinned steel. This wire had a maximum weight
of 75 pounds a mile with a maximum breaking weight of 300 pounds. Other
types of wire were silk wrapped, covered with a rubber compound or with
a covering of cotton braid treated with a waterproofing compound.
[Sidenote: TO MEET THE SIGNAL CORPS' REQUIREMENTS]
Take one type of the thousands manufactured by the Roebling Company and
see what must be done to make the finished product for the Signal
Corps. This process, which includes both the manufacture of steel wire
for the outer protection and copper wire for transmission, may be
divided into the following parts:
All steel materials are analyzed and inspected. Acid open hearth steel
is made in ingot form in special furnaces. The steel is classified, and
the ingots are reheated and rolled into billets, which are cropped to
eliminate all segregation. The steel billets are reheated and rolled
into rods of about 3/16 inch diameter. The rods are then tempered for
wire drawing. Then comes an inspection and testing for physical
characteristics of the metal, and the rods are cleaned in acid, washed,
lime coated and left to dry.
These rods are then drawn cold through dies to intermediate sizes
requiring a repetition of the tempering, inspecting and cleaning
operations. There is another series of drawing and then the final one
through the hardest and toughest dies obtainable to a diameter of
12/100 inch. At this diameter one foot of the original rod has been
extended to about 350 feet.
Then comes another inspection and test of the mechanical properties.
The wire is next cleaned in alkaline and acid solutions to remove all
trace of the lubricants used in the wire drawing, and the wire is
subjected to a bath in pure hot tin. Finally there is a Government
inspection and test.
So much for the manufacture of steel wire. The copper first appears in
bars, which are inspected and tested for their metallic purity. The
bars are heated and rolled into rods of about 3/8 inch diameter. These
rods are cleaned in acid baths to remove all scale, and the wire drawn
with the necessary annealing and cleaning until wire that is only .0285
of an inch in diameter is the result.
The final drawing of this wire requires the use of diamond dies with
the necessary equipment and great skill of the wire drawers in piercing
these minute openings. The copper wire then is annealed free from all
scale and discoloration, and the tin coat applied by means of a liquid
tin bath. Then the Government inspectors test the copper wire.
Ten strands of the steel wire are twisted about the one copper wire,
and the Government inspectors again make tests to see if the inner
copper wire is intact and properly protected by steel wire. All grease
is removed from the strand, and tussah silk wrapped over the whole. To
this is applied a compound with 30 per cent rubber, which is later
vulcanized. Then come inspections for mechanical injuries and
electrical characteristics. The single conductors are braided, the
braid waterproofed, polished, twined, inspected, reeled for shipment,
inspected by the Government agents, packed, inspected again by the
Government agents and finally shipped.
All this is done with a great deal of rapidity but with no less care,
the skill obtained by the workmen only by years of experience and by
the technical men only by years of study. It required a thorough
knowledge of steel and of the materials entering into the manufacture
of steel, such as ore, pig iron and fuel, as well as of the properties
and tests and manufacture of copper, tin, rubber, cotton, and various
lubricants. And in the more general use of wire and wire rope, a
thoroughly comprehensive knowledge of many other materials, all
mechanical and electrical phenomena in fact, are essential.
CHAPTER VII
A CITY BUILT OUT OF HAND
All up and down the Delaware, between Trenton and Philadelphia, the
"quality folks" in olden times used to build stately homes, with broad
acres at their backs and looking lordly, with their Grecian porticos,
out from the high banks that command the stream. You may see some of
them yet, faded and old and full of family history, most of which was
not so important as it seemed to the builders. In the little towns that
you pass on the trolley and the Camden and Amboy road, there is a
certain Eighteenth Century somnolence, and a dingy pride of priority.
They sleep on, as if it were creditable not to be busy. Bordentown, a
few minutes' ride from Trenton, sits complacent amid its memories of
the Bonapartes. It is there you change for Roebling.
[Sidenote: ROEBLING, THE TOWN, A STORY IN ITSELF]
Roebling--the town, not the plant--to which some attention has been
given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the
quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry
bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation
communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to
discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor's pathway
broad and bright. There's a town superintendent to look after things
and he earns his pay.
[Sidenote: BUILT TO MAKE WIRE AND ROPE]
The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the
wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful
notions about "welfare work." The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty,
accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means
plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the
big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their
families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool
breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases
to be lovely.
In both the city plants, as business grew, building followed building.
A compact and populous section had grown up at Trenton. More buildings
could not be crowded into the original ground space. More land was
needed, and as usual in such cases, men with land to sell all along to
the south of the Upper Works, saw the company's need and had a brain
storm about what the footage was worth.
The Roeblings tried a little farther down stream. But down stream
didn't mean down price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles down
the river was a little old station called Kinkora, where the real
estate infection had not appeared. There was land well up above high
water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very cheap down there, as
compared with Trenton city water rates, to a concern that used as much
water as all the rest of the city put together.
[Sidenote: A LIKELY PLACE FOR A WIRE MILL]
It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a dozen strangers had
struck Kinkora on the same evening the town would have had trouble to
find beds for them all. It meant twenty miles rail travel a day for the
workmen to live in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. Charles
G. Roebling was then alive. The new site and the planning and building
of the town were his charge. But, again, they didn't go looking for any
welfare engineers. The whole job of planning plant and town alike was
done in the long engineering room of the Roebling offices. At first
they called the plant the Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the
mills were a little below the station, and when the new venture was
well under way, and the machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and
perhaps a hundred brick houses of various types had been erected, the
place had to have a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad said
it was Roebling, and stamped the tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing
off. It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. Between it
and Roebling there are a mile or so of distance and a whole century of
time.
The name "Kinkora" harks back to the year 1000, when King "Brian Boru"
of Ireland lost his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace was
named "Kinkora." In 1836 an ambitious Irishman named Rockefeller (not
John D.) conceived the idea of an air line railroad from this spot
where Roebling now stands to Atlantic City. In fond remembrance of
Erin's Isle he named the terminus on the Delaware "Kinkora."
The enterprise itself died an early death.
The Roebling Company has more than 200 acres of land in the new
settlement, enough, in all conscience, to accommodate as big a business
as almost anyone would want to do, and houses to shelter all its
workmen. If the company should ever find it good business to shake the
dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether it certainly has a place to
go.
[Sidenote: NO TIME TO LET THE GRASS GROW]
From the day when the thing was decided on, no grass grew under
anybody's feet. There was sand along that bucolic and undeveloped river
bank, sand that ran well back, getting more and more like loam as you
left the river. It was broken and uneven. The freshets of centuries had
left hollows here and hummocks there. They were levelled. The
knolls--dunes they would call them along Lake Michigan--were scraped
down and dumped into the swales, and the excess was thrown into a sedgy
morass along the river front, to make it into solid ground and give a
clean, healthy shore, which is now one of the chief charms of the
place. For the sections where grass was meant to grow--for dooryards
and the like--tons upon tons of "top soil" were brought in to give a
fertile surface.
The mill buildings went up first, on a broad space of one hundred acres
levelled off for them, and then the town began to grow. That was
sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. Every year sees a lot of
new houses, of various values, and one and all well built and comely.
And in all grades they are better houses than a workman, or a mill boss
either, can get anywhere else in America for the same money.
[Sidenote: TO MAKE A PROFIT BUT TO SHOW A SAVING]
That has been the doctrine from the beginning. Charles G. Roebling said
at the time something to the effect that every workingman was a free
moral agent, and didn't want to be tied to anybody's apron-strings,
that he wanted a square deal and a chance to live his own life out of
business hours, and to get the worth of his money when he spent it. "We
purpose," he said, "to make a fair profit on our investment, but we can
do that and still show a man a saving. And we stop there."
It doesn't take long to realize that the Roeblings are living up to the
original schedule. The rents, the figures on all sorts of commodities
at the "village store," which sells everything from a pork chop to a
piano, and the drug store, which is just as "Riker-Hegeman" as any live
town could wish, are all below the current price scale in the rest of
the country, by a margin sufficient to mean something to a family when
they "tote up" at the year's end.
Electric light, coal and the other things a man has to pay for in any
town are charged for here, but it doesn't take a legislative fight or a
big row in the newspapers to keep the price down where a man can afford
to pay it. Water is supplied free. The idea is that the man owes the
company nothing but good work in return for his pay. After quitting
time he's his own boss. The company tries to make life in the town
pleasant enough so that he'll be glad to live there, and think he has a
good job. And it recognizes that life has many sides.
[Sidenote: AND THE TOWN HAD A BAR]
It was in pursuance of the general thesis that when the town opened it
had a hotel with a bar. "There's no use," they said, "in trying to make
a mollycoddle out of a mill man. When he wants a drink he's going to
get it, especially the foreign born. We don't propose to pick his
drinks for him. If he wants whiskey it's a good sight better for us
that he should be able to get it here like a human being than to trail
into Trenton and take a chance with the stuff that goes over the bars
where a workingman drinks. The whiskey here isn't gilt-edged, but it's
decent, and it's worth what it costs."
Prohibition settled the drink question, but while the cafe lasted in
Roebling it kept the men from going to town to battle with the
"embalming fluid," and not showing up for the customary three days.
That too was good business.
[Sidenote: FIRE, POLICE, BANKS, STREETS]
After the dirt and noise and disorder of a city street, it is like a
sedative to slip from the train into the peace and the wide spaces of
Roebling. The tidy station is at one side, at the other, beyond the
switch tracks, the little gate-house which gives ingress to the mill
enclosure--if you have the proper kind of pass. From here a trim
concrete walk leads on past the ground of the plant and its fence of
tall pickets, toward the river, and the town. As you go, you meet with
courtesy. It is not drawing the long bow to say everybody in
Roebling--outwardly at least--is civil and good natured. Just beyond
the mill grounds you come upon the police office, with trig coppers who
seem to have very little to do. Like the shining fire engines, which
stand in the adjoining building ready for service either in town or
plant, they seem to be maintained chiefly for insurance and ornament.
But they are practical organizations at that. The Roebling Company
learned what fire was during the war, when two of the biggest buildings
in the Upper Works were destroyed.
From this point the streets lead away, broad, clean streets with the
best of sidewalks, and drainage. The town has spread out now so that it
looks no more like a toy city. The streets are 80 feet wide, with the
exception of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, which are 100 feet wide.
Trees have been planted which already make it attractive. In front of
every house is a dooryard, a patch of green grass to remind a man that
God made the world.
[Sidenote: HOUSES]
Adjoining fire and police houses, there was formerly a trim little bank
whose business has expanded to such an extent that it has been enabled
to move to the centre of the business section of the town in an
attractive and up-to-date building of its own.
The houses, while of widely different types, are for the most part made
of brick. In order to avoid fire danger, the minimum of wood is used in
all the buildings of the town. The houses are all constructed on the
most improved plan of sanitation and hygiene. Through the block, giving
access to the back-doors, run clean alleys, wide enough to allow wagons
to pass for the delivery of coal, foodstuffs and other commodities, and
for the collection of waste. The company is now halting between the
erection of an incinerator plant to consume the garbage for its 700 and
odd homes, or a "hog farm" as part of its three or four hundred acres,
which without difficulty could turn out 1,000 to 2,000 head of swine a
year, and further reduce the cost of living. It is possible, too, that
it may some day produce its own milk.
There is a marked difference between some of the houses first erected
and those of more recent construction. At present the "bungalow" type
is in great favor, since it facilitates the labor of housekeeping. More
pretentious dwellings, for the men holding important positions in the
plant, are sufficient to make a rent-ridden, janitor-jaded, bell-boy
bossed New Yorker wonder what he is being punished for. One handsome
colonial home just built for a superintendent in one of the wire mills
would be a credit to any commuter town.
[Sidenote: BASEBALL, RECREATION BUILDING, THEATRE, BALLROOM]
Always as you pass through airy Roebling you encounter some new
institution built to make it seem like a regular place. There is a
baseball ground which would be a credit to any city, with its tidy
green grandstand and its carefully manicured diamond. The Wire Works
team is now prominent in one of the State Leagues. There is a
recreation building, with billiard and pool tables and the best bowling
alleys that can be built. There is a spacious assembly hall, with
theatre stage and a scrumptious curtain bearing a picture of the
Roebling Brooklyn Bridge. The gallery is commodious. The seats are
removable, leaving a ballroom of impressive size, and adjoining rooms
are equipped with ranges, refrigerators and dishes for the preparation
and service of suppers or of dinners great and small.
Take notice of the hotel, the boarding houses where single men live
well and cheaply, of the public school, the hospital, the doctors, the
nurses, the dispensary. And these last are busy functionaries.
[Sidenote: VERY LITTLE SICKNESS, VERY MANY BABIES]
There is very little sickness in Roebling. The sanitation is studiously
good, but when you are sick there they look after you, which is also
"good business," and babies are a favorite form of diversion. This is
impressively true. You sense it wherever you go. There are children
everywhere--good looking wholesome "kids." And something makes them
glad to live here, too.
[Sidenote: BEING A BOY SCOUT AT ROEBLING]
To be a boy scout in Roebling is about as good fun as a boy could have.
For a long time the company gave the boys too much. Then it woke up to
the fact that half the sport of being a boy scout was to do things. So
the Scouts were told if they wanted to keep the perfectly corking club
house on the river bank, with its big meeting room, its open mouthed
fireplace, its mounted deer heads, and banners, and books and guns and
spears and swords and all the other junk the boy soul loves, they'd
have to work for it. Goodness knows they do. The grounds around that
shack in spring are turned up like a golf links. What they have done in
the way of white birch rustic railings along the winding walks that
lead to the grounds would make a Chippewa Indian sick with envy. This
year they are to help build a long float from the club house to the
water, to launch their canoes on.
To the medical equipment is added a hospital for contagious diseases,
standing away out in the fields. And in the outskirts also is land set
apart for gardens, where the millworkers have allotted plots of ground
for the raising of their own vegetables. The manure from the stables,
where sixty horses are kept, helps to make gardening worth while. Even
to be a mule in Roebling is comfortable. There are old mules there--you
see them just wandering around the paddocks, eating and growing
older--that will never see thirty-five or forty again. Nobody ever will
send them down the long trail. They have worked hard for the Roebling
Company. It will feed them till they simply lie down and die of their
own accord.
Feeding--whether mules or people--is habitual. When John A. Roebling
first made rope, he had three or four men working with him. They had a
table in the shop. As the business has grown, this custom has
continued. Today the entire office force at the headquarters in
Trenton--some 230 persons of all ranks--gets a dinner every day that
for sheer quality cannot be equalled in any of the city hotels. It may
be a fad to feed that whole crowd fresh yellow cream brought in every
morning from the Roebling farms, but--it's good business.
[Sidenote: THE PARK]
The high land on the bluff overlooking the river at Roebling is a park,
with trees and benches, and a place where the band can play while the
folks sit taking the air on a hot summer night. In a neat enclosure of
Roebling wire, convenient to all parts of the town, are tennis courts,
for general use. There is a sanitary barber shop, where five shining
chairs are always full. Roebling has the best barbered lot of
foreign-born workmen in America.
[Sidenote: HOW THE FOREIGNER LIVES IN ROEBLING]
In a town like this are lessons for those who like to try to translate
the foreigner for the good of American industry. There are those who
cherish a superstition that the foreign workman in the United States
lives poorly. In Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner who
is the best customer in groceries and butcher's meat. He buys chickens
instead of beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and three. It is
he also who buys the Hood River apples and the best grape fruit.
And as for bread--you should see the bakery. "Sunny Jim" would sing to
see it--clean and shining, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs
besides the big round red-blond loaves of "European bread," which they
say "has the strength" in it. The baker's wagon, loaded to the very top
of the canvas cover, goes through the town and the workers' little
children run homeward from it with two, three, four loaves altogether
as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which cost a nickel at a French
bakery in New York, are sold here for two cents apiece.
So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side are the negro quarters.
They have everything anybody else has including a recreation house--and
when they recreate, they just recreate.
* * * * *
If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so any longer. It is full of
comfortable people, and in seventy years the Roebling theory as to what
a workman wants and how he should be treated has never proved itself
more conclusively than here. It is a suggestive fact that in all that
time, save for some insignificant incidents, the Roeblings have been
free from the nightmare of "labor troubles." It may be because its
workmen have nothing worth while to complain of. Every effort is made
to make them comfortable without making them feel like dependents.
It is the outworking of a great business theory. In these times it is
of impressive significance.
End of Project Gutenberg's Outspinning the Spider, by John Kimberly Mumford
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