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.
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.
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.