THE PIONEER
Since Columbus the centuries have been gathering speed. At first it
came slowly, for the need was not yet. Today a thought is born and
tomorrow it is a giant, parting seas and moving mountains. The waste of
yesterday is turned into the raw material of new manufacture, with its
million wheels moving faster and faster. But back of it all, inevitably
and eternally, is a busy human brain and unsatisfied energy.
Wire rope had lingered, waiting for civilization's loads to grow. The
artisans of old had woven cut wires together to make the trinkets of
their time, little dreaming of the might that lay hidden in the fibres
of the iron, and their world went on hoisting stone for its pyramids by
prodigious multiplication of garlic-fed man-power. It seems strange to
the high-speed mind of today that five hundred years could have passed,
after the drawing of wire was invented, before necessity put it into
the mind of a wire-drawer that with wire, as with other things,
strength lay in union. And yet the human race had been making rope
since the morning stars sang together.
In 1831, when France was picking herself up from the dirt and disorder
of another revolution and the German princes were strangling in the
universities the growing call for "liberty and union," young men of
brains and ambition began to leave the German states for America, where
there was free air and elbow room.
[Sidenote: JOHN A. ROEBLING COMES TO AMERICA]
In a company of such, John A. Roebling journeyed from Muhlhausen in
Saxony, and took up a tract of land in western Pennsylvania. He carried
a degree of civil engineer from the Royal University in Berlin; but
there were "back-to-the-landers" even in those days, and he set about
farming in the thrifty German way, founding for nucleus a little town
which at first was named Germania, but afterward came to be called
Saxonburg.
Fate seems to have ordained that Roebling's engineering skill should
not remain fettered to a Pennsylvania plow handle. The system of canals
and portages which afterward evolved and merged and built itself into
the Pennsylvania Railroad was digging its ditches and dams and building
haulways through the obstinate distances of that hard-ribbed state,
past the hopeful hamlet of Saxonburg and fatefully under the eyes of
the young German engineer. The result was never in doubt. He abandoned
the plow to his compatriots and plunged into the problems of
construction, where he belonged.
[Sidenote: HAULING CANAL BOATS UP THE PORTAGE RAILWAY]
The skeptic who scoffs at fatalism will find it difficult to explain
why the particular engineering work that was brought to Roebling's door
should involve the weary hauling of the Pennsylvania Canal's boats up
the Portage Railway, which Bertrand, one of Napoleon's generals, had
built to overcome the Pennsylvania ridges; or why, just as the bulk and
clumsiness and inefficiency of the huge hemp cables were eating into
his active mind, a casual paper from Germany should convey the fact
that some fellow in Freiburg in Saxony--where wire drawing had
birth--had made a strong rope by twisting wires together.
What man had done man could do. If there was a place to test the
efficacy of wire rope with its increased strength and diminishing size,
it was the Portage Railway. So the Saxonburg wheatfield was turned into
a ropewalk. Ceres made way for Vulcan. The neighbors, as soon as
material could be shipped in from the Falls of the Beaver River, where
wire drawing was done, found themselves under young Roebling's
direction twisting wires, with rude appliances for torsion, into a
fabric which had never been made or seen or probably heard of in
America before, but which was destined, in a comparatively short time,
to change the face of industry.
[Sidenote: WIRE ROPE PROVES ITS PULLING POWER]
It is easy to imagine the caustic comments of the Pennsylvania
countryside, and the forebodings with which the pioneer installed his
cables on what was then a conspicuous engineering labor. But it worked.
Engineering audacity, plus scientific skill and native faculty for
doing things, solved the problem of the Portage, but it did far more
than that. The fame of it was soon broadcast and the orders for wire
rope came flooding from all that fast opening country. Roebling had
found his job. Destiny had him by the collar and he bade farming
good-bye.
[Illustration: HOISTING A BATTLESHIP TOWER WITH WIRE ROPE]
It was in 1840 that the first Roebling rope was finished. Eight years
later, the year when the revolution burst forth in the Teutonic
empires, he moved his plant and its business to Trenton, and began
forthwith to build the foremost wire rope factory in the world.
Nothing can be more amusing or reveal more clearly what brains and
energy have been able to accomplish in the arena of American
opportunity than to contrast the picture of the first Roebling factory
in Trenton, which suggests the rudest of farmsteads, with the
sky-piercing chimneys and the mile or more of many-windowed brick
buildings in and around the Jersey capital today, where the Roebling
work is done.
The three big factory groups which have grown from the shabby little
buildings of 1848 are the fruit of intelligence and ceaseless endeavor,
but they are reared primarily on a basis of manufacturing honor, and
ruled by the general thesis that forever and ever quality comes before
price. This means keeping faith with the structural iron worker,
swinging pigmy-small five hundred feet above the din of the city
streets; with the sailor, the miner, the rigger; with the hurrying
multitude that packs the elevators in tall buildings, and with the
aviator, to whom a breaking wire may spell death.
That is the reason the Roebling Company has outgrown the limits of
Trenton in the last decade and a half and with its overflow founded a
city of its own; that is the reason why Roebling has almost got into
the Thesaurus as a synonym for wire in every civilized language under
the sun.
It is wire, from the huge three-inch cable that pulls the loads of
mountain haulways or moves the thousand cars of a city transit system,
down to the gossamer that jingles the bell in the telephone or the
infinitesimal hair that in the eyepiece of a telescope helps the
astronomer to mark the movement of a distant world. There is hardly a
thing in the nature of wire, round, flat or irregular, that the
Roeblings do not manufacture or have not at some time manufactured,
whether for the world's standard uses or the numberless special
purposes hidden in inventive minds.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: ROEBLING TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO BRIDGES]
The age of wire was marching rapidly, but John A. Roebling had set a
distant mark. In the mountains of Peru, India and other lands for ages
the natives have made use of bridges made of vines, to cross appalling
chasms. As time went on and arts progressed the principle was applied
through the agency of hemp ropes and chains, and men of small
imagination thought that in these the limit had been attained. But
Roebling's faith was as the faith of the Moslem in the Prophet. He
believed that in wire the solution of all the pesky problems of
bridge-building had been found. In a small way the thing was obvious,
but his ambition never stopped there. He believed, and had believed
ever since he made the first rope, that a major bridge made up of wires
of scrupulously high quality, constructed with rigorous regard for
scientific tenets, would carry with ease and indefinitely any
reasonable traffic that might be imposed on it.
Famous engineers said he was a visionary and a hobbyist; still with
force and tenacity he urged his contention until at last the
engineering world was compelled to give heed to him. In the face of
such opposition, and in view of the centuries that had dragged by
before wires were twisted into rope, it is remarkable that so soon
after his initial experiment he should have worked out in practical
entirety the plan of bridge construction which came to its climax in
the spanning of the East River.
Between 1840, when he made his first rope, and 1844, he had not only
perfected his theory of wire bridges but in spite of furious opposition
had built one as an aqueduct for the old Pennsylvania Canal, the basins
of which were at Pittsburg. This was followed by four more suspension
aqueducts for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Co. Having espoused a
theory he let no grass grow under his feet. He cast about vigorously
for bridges to build. He found an opening in Cincinnati.
[Sidenote: THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGE AT CINCINNATI]
River traffic along the Ohio, in the forties, was still a big factor in
business but was contesting tooth and nail the advance of the railways,
and fought bitterly against the right of the invaders to build bridges
over the waterways. The steamboat men said bridge piers would be a
peril to navigation, but the cities of Cincinnati and Covington, facing
each other across the river, cried for the bridge. The rivermen were on
top in 1846 when Roebling came along, fresh from the building of the
wire bridge in Pennsylvania and with his head full of wire bridges, and
offered to throw a wire span across the Ohio with a length of 1057 feet
and a floor height above the water of 103 feet.
[Illustration: LOGGING--HANDLING BIG FELLOWS WITH WIRE ROPE]
For just ten years the steamboat faction staved it off. It was not
begun till 1856, just after the Niagara Bridge was opened. The panic of
1857 and then the Civil War kept the project at a standstill until
1863. On Easter Day in 1867 the bridge was opened. Colonel Washington
A. Roebling, son of the pioneer, was the first to cross on its cable.
In the meantime John A. Roebling had completed not alone the Niagara
Bridge, but the Alleghany Bridge over the Alleghany River at Pittsburg.
The last named differed from the Niagara, Ohio and later East River
bridges in that it had several piers in the streamway, after the manner
of the old type structures, but in principle it conformed to the plan
which had been in his mind from the beginning. His son, Washington, was
his only assistant.
[Sidenote: BRIDGING NIAGARA GORGE]
In all the world, perhaps, no place could have been found where the
building of a simon pure "Suspension Bridge" would have been a more
spectacular accomplishment than over Niagara Gorge, with the Falls
thundering a little way upstream, and the waters lashing and fuming
underneath; no place where its slender beauty could have had such stern
and impressive background. The idea of carrying railroad trains over
that turmoil of waters on a web apparently so frail, evoked a storm of
protest from well-nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. But
Roebling was a practical man as well as a stubborn one. After all, he
was dealing with rock and wire and he knew what they would do. He built
the bridge, the first of its kind to carry railroad traffic. All the
world of that day knew, but most of it now has forgotten, how he flew a
kite across the gorge to get his first wire over, and from that built
up his cables. On March 16, 1855, the first train passed over it. With
one remodeling it continued to carry increasingly heavy loads until
nearly half a century later it was replaced by a larger structure,
better calculated to bear the burden of modern equipment.
[Sidenote: THE "SUSPENSION BRIDGE" PROVES ITSELF]
"Suspension Bridge" not alone proved itself in point of service, but it
demonstrated the soundness of Mr. Roebling's claims for the wire
structure. The Ohio structure, which followed, outdid Suspension
Bridges in length of span; in economy of material, in simplicity and
charm of outline it clearly foreshadowed the still greater work, the
designing of which was to be the crowning accomplishment of his life.
He was working with a practiced hand now. The doubts, if he ever had
any, were behind him. Behind him, also, was a producing plant tuned to
turn out at speed the materials he needed, with certainty of their
quality.
He had proved that the making of big bridges with wire was feasible,
and that it was simple, as most great things are after they have been
done. There were only three basic parts to a suspension bridge after
all--towers, cables and anchorage. Suspending the roadway, which to the
average man seems the vital part of the creation, is, from the
engineering standpoint, only an accessory work. John A. Roebling had
concentrated his life's effort, not on mere methods of commercial
production, but rather on the proving of his contentions. He needed the
right kind of wire rope to prove them, so like a wise man he made it
himself.
* * * * *
He came to the summit of his achievement with the acceptance of his
plans for the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, his faith
vindicated, his theory, which he had fought so hard to sustain,
endorsed by boards of noted engineers and acclaimed by the public,
starting out on the realization of his long dream--the building of the
Eighth Wonder of the World, a comparatively slight accident, the
bungled docking of a ferryboat, which crushed his foot and brought on
tetanus, put out the steady candle of his life.
It was the very whimsy of fate. His work was done. He had created, out
of imagination and energy, the finished designs for a wonder fabric,
ready for the labor of an intenser age. He did not live to see the
spider structures hung like wisps of gossamer above the restless
waterways of New York, but his name is woven into the very steel of
them.