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.
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.
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.
THE “LAY” OF THE ROPE