"Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one
one-thousandth--one record after another was passed.
At last a wire was drawn that measured one
four-thousandth of an inch in diameter--twelve
times finer than the hair on your head.
The spider, so long counted a master workman, had
been outdone."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: John A. Roebling
FOUNDER OF JOHN A. ROEBLING'S SONS COMPANY]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
OUTSPINNING THE SPIDER
THE STORY OF WIRE AND WIRE ROPE
By
John Kimberly Mumford
PUBLISHED BY
Robert L. Stillson Co.
New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1921, by
ROBERT L. STILLSON COMPANY
NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outspinning the Spider
CHAPTER I
WIRE AND MODERN LIFE
It is the wire age.
Modern life, in all its intricate bearings, runs on wire. Wire
everywhere; in the heavens above, the earth beneath and the waters
under the earth. In all the legerdemain of science, which has put
nature in bondage, wire is the indispensable agent.
A curious, slow, finical little trade at which the smiths of forgotten
races toiled and pottered and ruined their eyesight for unnumbered
thousands of years has become, within less than a century, under the
spur of modern need and modern driving power, the pack-bearer of the
world and the mainspring of every activity from the cradle to the grave.
Wire still makes toys and gewgaws as it always did, but it is no longer
the plaything of vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and their
concomitant, "flat wire," from the inventory of human assets tomorrow,
and the world would stop stock-still.
[Sidenote: "WIRE AND THE COMMUTER"]
This is not hyperbole. Picture yourself starting for business in the
morning if there were no wire and see what the verdict would be by
quitting time. Considering the vital part that wire plays in the
growing and transportation of food for man and beast, it is likely you
would go breakfastless after sleeping on a bed without springs or the
luxury of a woven wire mattress. But that would be only the beginning
of sorrow. The trolley would stand dead. Perhaps you are a commuter and
journey to town by steam road. The ferry would hug its slip, and where
is the railroader who in these days of congestion and short headway
would dare to send a train out without the protection of the little
lengths of bonding wire between the rails, that articulate the block
signal system?
You could telephone the office? How and over what unless wire were
used? Wireless? Without the coils and armatures that keep the
instruments going or the aerials that seize the word wave in its
flight, there would be no wireless.
[Illustration: WITHOUT WIRE--NO WIRELESS]
Suppose you managed to get there. Without wire rope no insurance
company would let an elevator get higher than the second story, and you
couldn't signal the elevator anyway, for the annunciator operates only
by an ingenious system of wires, and the control is even more complex.
You can climb the stairs, but the door key is flat wire and the shank
on which the knob turns is square wire and half the lock is wire. More
trouble. The buttons on your suit are flat wire; so are your garters.
As for the stenographer, if she got there at all--for she is as
completely wired as a telegraph system, from her hat to her shoes--the
index files and office books and letter hooks and much of the other
equipment of the office would fall to pieces without wire, and the
machine which is her pride and the symbol of her dominion is about all
wire of one kind or another, except the frame.
Distinctly, it would not be your busy day. You might spend it looking
out of the window at the ships going down the river, but unhappily, the
majestic liner is compact of wire, from her glistening trucks to the
deepest shadows of the engine room; or airplanes soaring and swaying
above the teeming town and far-stretched waterways. But an airplane
lives by wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor even hold together if
its frame were not strung with wire and its wings and ailerons and
fuselage bound and braced and its machinery vitalized by divers forms
of wire and wire strand and woven wire cord.
Far over the town and across the Jerseys you would see columns of smoke
rising from busy factories--save that the mines of coal and the wells
of oil are both dependent for every atom of their product on wire rope,
and the lumber and metals which are the bases of industrial manufacture
are in the same boat. And as for electric light--you might linger till
dark but turning the switch wouldn't help, for the big subterranean
cables and the multitude of littler wires that make a pathway for the
current, even the dynamos with their masses of wire, they were all dead
long ago.
Gas? Made of coal and oil. There would be nothing left to do but to
grope hungry through dark streets and, if you could find a wireless
bridge, go back to Lonelyhurst, where you would learn that without wire
there is no domestic joy in this earthly tabernacle, for from cellar to
roof, from the bale and rim of the coal-scuttle and the binding of the
broom, from the cooking pots, the dishpan and all other culinary
utensils to the baby's toys and mother's corset and hairpins and
needles and safety pins and pins, it is all wire one way or another.
The family would never know what time you got home, for the watches and
clocks are largely wire; and there would be no possible relief in going
to the club, for nobody would have a car that would run--or a
cork-screw, even in the dark.
[Sidenote: WIRE HOLDS THE WORLD TOGETHER]
It is wire that has brought the world together and holds it together,
and when the wire mills stop, as even they would have to do if there
were no wire, modern civilization might as well be dead, and it would
be. Even war would peter out. Populations might perish from hunger and
probably would, but they'd have to stop killing each other except by
primitive methods, for without wire, which controls the movement of
ships and airplanes and submarines, and permits by telegraph and
telephone the manoeuvering of prodigious armies and binds the shining
bodies of great guns and makes most of the instruments of precision for
aiming them, war would no longer offer much chance for machine-made
glory. As a guarantee of perpetual and worldwide peace no League of
Nations could begin to compare with the elimination of wire from the
world's catalogue of weapons.
Wire is an influential member of that family of material giants which
have come into greatness within a relatively short time but which none
the less weigh heavily in the destinies of mankind. It is old, too, but
until a new demon of material ambition began to stir in crowding
populations it had little purpose except to adorn the raiment of the
great or add richness to ancient arts. People whose vision of man's
past is bounded by the encyclopedia have been told times enough that
Aaron's robe had gold wire threads in it, that there was wire in the
pyramids, that Nineveh was beating out wire eight hundred years before
the tragedy of Calvary, and that metal heads with hair of wire were
found in the ruins of Herculaneum and are now again entombed in the
showcases of the Portici Museum.
[Sidenote: THE AGE-LONG USE OF WIRE]
In a world chasing the present and future dollar ethnology moves
slowly; the encyclopedias have not yet told that pre-Inca Peru, hiding
in its tombs the secrets of a vanished civilization, has now given up
garments gleaming with woven metal, which show their makers to have
been past masters ages ago in the wire-beater's art, and to have spun
the wire on woolen filaments in the self same way of lamination in
which Paris does it for the uniforms of haughty major generals today.
And yet, down to the century when the popes were ruling from Avignon,
when Rienzi was raising hob in the streets of Rome and titles of
nobility were being won on the bloody fields of Crécy and Poictiers and
Bannockburn, none of the many metal workers, through all the ages and
in all the lands, ever had a notion he could draw metal through a die
to make a wire. They hammered and hammered through the ages and sliced
the filaments off as a cobbler cuts leather shoestrings--or used to.
And then it was a German that did it, for the ancient records of
Nuremberg and Augsberg tell of a "wire drawer" and later on one Rudolf
had a wire mill at Nuremberg. The chances are that Rudolf was a
capitalist and that the inventor sold him the invention for a pot of
beer, and grumbled for the rest of his medieval days after the manner
of his kind.
Six centuries have gone since then, and in a world of wire it is safe
to say, on the strength of some inquiry, that ninety per cent of the
people whose lives and well being hang on wire from one year's end to
another have no more knowledge of how drawn wire is made than the
Egyptian who hammered out his quota in the days of old Rameses.
[Sidenote: THE BEGINNING OF THE WIRE AGE]
England and France, quick to see what the process meant, even to the
slow commerce of those times, fussed away for another three hundred
years, trying to perfect methods of wire drawing to the point of
independence in the trade, but it was a stern chase. "Iron wire," for
all utility wire in the beginning was drawn from Swedish iron, was
beginning to take up a share of the white man's burden. Gold and silver
and platinum and bronze were still favored in ornamental use, but for
practical purposes iron refused to be displaced. Great Britain essayed
in 1750 the making of wire from steel for musical purposes, but to 1769
Broadwood was still sticking to German iron and even in 1790 was still
buying wire from Pohlman in Nuremberg. So Bavaria, where first the idea
of drawing metal had been hatched, was still leading the world in its
craft.
Little by little, for the tide of industrial activity had barely begun
to rise, new uses were found for wire. In one field after another it
supplanted vegetable fibre where strength and durability were
essential. As the world began to feel the Nineteenth Century surge of
mechanical impulse, as life developed new facets and new needs, science
sought new means of meeting them, and in the quest itself grew.
Producing methods advanced with the new demands of invention. Always
the wire makers spun their filaments a little finer. Men were weighing
zephyrs and measuring the infinitesimal, and needed tools of increasing
delicacy. Wire was the answer.
[Illustration: DREDGING]
Electricity, so long hidden from understanding, was led captive by a
wire, not by a chain--and with its development wire has found a new and
increasingly important role. The ductility of metals was at last being
tested to the full. Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one
one-thousandth--one record after another was passed. At last, by way of
curiosity, a wire was drawn that measured one four-thousandth of an
inch in diameter--twelve times finer than the hair on your head. The
spider, so long counted a master workman, had been undone.
The wire age was arriving--big wires to carry the world's heavy loads;
fine wire to solve its molecular problems. The day of the hammer was
done.