A TWELVE MILLION POUND DEVELOPMENT FROM A FIFTY POUND BEGINNING
“I’ve come to see,” said an old man at the Roebling offices one day, “if you’d go to the trouble on a very small order to find out just what composition I need in a wire for a patent I’ve got.”
And they did. It took the chemists and the experts some time to work out the problem of resistances, and the old man ordered fifty pounds. The next year he ordered a hundred more. There was no profit in it, but they made it and looked pleasant. They were specialists in wire and they were simply keeping faith with their job.
The following year the visitor called again. “I don’t want any more of that wire,” he grinned, “I’ve sold my patent to So-and-So,” naming one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, “but I want to see some royalties and I made it a condition of the sale that they order this wire from you on the formula that I got.”
In a recent 12 months period Roeblings fabricated more than 5,000,000 pounds of that wire.
If it’s wire, the Roeblings make it. All that was in the mind of the man who seventy years ago was twisting the first rope in Saxonburg. He was more than an engineer; he was a sane and far-seeing mind in business. As soon as possible after establishing the factory in Trenton he added a mill for the manufacture of his own wire. It gave him a product that he knew from the pig iron up, and it saved a profit, besides extending to a marked degree the scope of the business. He knew, when he put the cable on the Portage haulway in 1840, that the mission of wire, in the world that was then making, would be boundless, and from the very start he was the explorer in new fields for wire, a builder, a seeker for problems that wire might solve, archapostle of the power of wire, in one form or another, to do the heaviest labor of mankind.
Wire rope, spreading its field of utility ever wider and wider, carried with ease and safety loads that had broken the back of hemp; it took the place of solid steel in numerous phases of construction, and when its adaptability was proven new tasks were devised for it. Wire rope was the forerunner of “Safety First.” It cancelled large burdens of expense; it set a new record in facility of construction.
AMERICA’S FIRST WIRE CABLEWAY
Persistently militant, from the day of his first achievement, in the promotion of wire rope, John A. Roebling was the first engineer to introduce into America the novelty of a wire cableway, which with an ingenious carriage he employed to transport across a river the materials he needed in the construction of a bridge. This method of haulage, over streams and gorges, down from high mountains to cars or boats in the valley below, up from the deep-sunken beds of rich placers—everywhere and in all sorts of places where Nature seemed to have set up impassable defense against those who would take away her treasures—came forthwith into widespread use, and is among the handy tools of engineers throughout the world today. The Roebling Company established these cableways in many countries. It had in operation around the globe no less than twenty different types, including log rigs and gravity planes for mountain railways, and the demand for wire rope was increased thereby a thousand fold before the new century had come in.