Handle-bar of bicycle in steel-tubing.
A sulky in steel tubing.
A pneumatic hammer, steel tubing.
Fishing-rod in steel tubing.
Bridge of steel pipe.
With like advantage seamless tubing is adopted for a broad variety of purposes. It builds bicycles and sulkies which far out-speed vehicles of solid frames; it is worked up into elevator cages, mangle rolls, pneumatic tools, fishing-rods, magazine-rifle tubes, inking rollers, farm machinery, poles, masts and much else where strength and lightness are to be united. Steel tubing is readily bent into any needed contour, even when of considerable diameter. Mr. Egbert P. Watson has pointed out its availability for highway bridges of about forty feet span, no professional bridge-builders being needed for their construction. Near Saxonville, Massachusetts, a pipe-arch bridge, eighty feet long, provides a roadway across the Sudbury River, while carrying within its pipe a stream which forms part of the Boston water system. A bridge of similar form, 200 feet long, spans Rock Creek in the City of Washington. The Eads bridge crossing the Mississippi, at St. Louis, employs for each span eight steel tubes of nine inches exterior diameter. Tubes large and small have been strengthened by adopting the model of an old-fashioned fire-lighter, or spill, a bit of paper rolled spirally as a hollow tube. Blow sharply into it and you but tighten its joints. In like manner tubes and pipes of metal are all the tighter when their seams are spiral instead of longitudinal. An eager quest for combined strength and lightness in the bicycle has ended in the choice of tubes spirally welded.