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.
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.
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.
ROPE-MAKING MACHINES