Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire Rope

by John Kimberly Mumford

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.

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.

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.

POWER IN THE ROEBLING PLANTS