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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
The Iron and Steel Institute, at the request of the Government, formed
a committee to manage the production and distribution of wire rope, and
from the fifteenth of May, 1917, this committee had on its shoulders
the making of wire necessary to keep the country's work going at full
speed and to supply the needs for war, of whose extent or character
nobody had any clear idea. Karl G. Roebling, of John A. Roebling's Sons
Co., was made chairman of the committee.
[Sidenote: THE WAR--ONE LONG COMMITTEE MEETING]
Throughout the war, the Roebling offices in Trenton were headquarters
for the entire business of wire rope supply. It was one long committee
meeting, with production going on at utmost intensity all the time.
Here came all the orders for wire rope from the several Government
departments and the bureaus in those departments, each with its long
array of specifications, all requiring shipment to divers points. Much
of the work required also a great labor of cutting and attaching, and
fittings by the hundreds of thousands, and all, without an exception
that stands out in anybody's memory, wanted in the minimum of time.
It is the proud record of that committee that when the fighting ended
in November of 1918 every order had been filled and delivery made on
time. Industry has no story of accomplishment to tell that can be more
creditable than this. The Roebling plants, near to the seaboard and
equipped for specialization, were devoted almost wholly to the
manufacture of war stuff, domestic industrial orders being transferred
to inland factories.
[Sidenote: THE RECORD OF PRODUCTION FOR WAR PURPOSES]
The record of production, for war purposes alone, shows that the
Roebling Company manufactured a very large percentage of the whole,
which ran to unconscionable millions of feet. During the war the
productive capacity of the plant was increased as much as seventy-five
per cent, and the list of the employed at times ran close to ten
thousand men. The numerical increase in men did not equal the growth in
output. Here as well as in almost every line of industry the war
furnished a revelation of the capacity of men for work. New lines of
production, requiring skill, developed in common laborers, the only
kind that at times could be obtained, a facility in production that
before the pressure of war came to discover it would have been thought
impossible.
In looking back over the war work it is plain that the service rendered
by the company in manufacturing material for the Allies, prior to
America's entrance into hostilities, was of large value in
familiarizing it with forms of production afterward required for our
own Army and Navy. Another thing which aided in meeting a vast demand
was the unremitting attention which the company had given to the
perfection of aircraft material, from the first successful flight of
the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903. At that time study and
experiment had been started in the Roebling factories looking to the
production of aircraft wire and strand and cord for all the different
parts involved, which should combine the utmost strength with the
minimum of weight, with special reference to the stresses peculiar to
aviation work.
When the hour of need came, Roebling aircraft products had reached a
stage of perfection which saved a world of hurried experimentation and
development. It was a demonstration in preparedness, although up to
1914 the work had been done solely to keep industrial pace with a new
and important development of mechanical science.
[Sidenote: THE GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHMENTS THAT CALLED FOR WIRE AND ROPE]
It is a fairly long list of Government establishments that is shown on
the Roebling records as calling for war supply of wire rope. It
includes, in the Navy Department, the Bureau of Steam Engineering,
Bureau of Construction and Repair, Bureau of Ordnance, the Bureau of
Yards and Docks and the Naval Aircraft Factory.
In the War Department were the following: Office of the Chief of
Ordnance, Depot Quartermaster, Chief Signal Officer, Chief of
Engineers, the Army Transport Service, the Quartermaster General's
Office, the Signal Corps, the Aircraft Production Bureau, United States
Engineer's Office, General Engineer Depot, Bureau of Insular Affairs,
Procurement Division, the Balloon Department of the Aircraft Production
Board, and the Director General of Military Railways.
Always there were the United States Shipping Board, the Emergency Fleet
Corporation, and the demands for these alone were a business. In
addition to all this the Committee made allocation of orders for the
Argentine Naval Commission, the British War Commission, the Imperial
Munitions Board, the Italian Commission and the Belgian Government.
It doesn't seem such a large roster, but it took a world of wire to go
around it. A few figures out of the total allocations will suggest what
the total demand was and the task that it involved.
[Sidenote: SOME OF THE BIG DEMANDS]
The first big call on the wire rope producers was for submarine nets to
protect the fleet bases and harbors. There were supplied to the Navy,
for this purpose, 2,820,520 feet of rope, and it was regular rope that
was required in this service, for the German submarines had developed a
way of slashing through the earlier and lighter nets. For the new type
the rope ranged from an inch and a half to three-quarters of an inch;
but it wasn't merely a matter of shipping reels of rope. Almost all of
it had to be cut into lengths and attachments made, for these barriers
were designed in sections. This necessitated, for the Navy order,
153,000 fittings. The Army Ordnance Bureau used nearly a million feet
of rope for nettings, which was shipped to various coast forts. The
whole volume of wire rope for nettings was furnished within four months.
[Illustration: CUP CHALLENGERS, DEFENDERS AND SAILING VESSELS OF ALL
TYPES SECURE THEIR RIGGING WITH WIRE ROPE]
Another interesting order was from the Quartermaster's Department,
which called for 6,852,500 feet of rope and the manufacture of 300,000
pairs of traces, requiring 3,000,000 splices. These are what are called
thimble splices, and, while fitting one of them is ordinarily half an
hour's work, the Roebling plant, with a force chiefly of men who were
utterly unskilled, was turning off ten thousand pairs of traces a day
at the peak of production on this order. This harness, for artillery
purposes, was on English designs, adopted after considerable delay, but
by means of which a horse, when shot down, could be eliminated from the
gun team in half a minute.
The Spruce Production Bureau took over 8,000,000 feet of rope, the
Emergency Fleet more than 12,000,000 and the Fuel Administration drew
on at the rate of 2,500 tons a month. And all the time the mines and
mills and ordnance plants, locomotives, cranes and all other
manufactures kept getting largely increased supplies of rope to carry
on their own war-driven work. Altogether the orders come to a figure
that is hard to visualize.
[Sidenote: 84,000,000 FEET OF ROPE AND A HALF MILLION FITTINGS]
But the climax, the call that taxed the wire rope makers most heavily
and kept the arc lights burning in the mills was for the 84,000,000 and
odd feet of rope and half million fittings which were required by the
Naval Establishment for the North Sea Mine Barrage, which put a prompt
and distinguished shackle on the German submarines. The fitting of this
rope was a task of moment, calling as it did for delivery of the rope
in lengths and made up ready for attachment on the ingenious plan which
the mine involved. It was all done with time to spare.
The Adriatic Barrage, an even more ambitious project since it dealt
with a depth of 3,000 instead of 900 feet, was all ready to be laid
when the Armistice was signed. This took over 12,000,000 feet of rope.
When the fighting stopped, there was a perfectly good mine barrage in
the North Sea that had to be taken up and put out of commission. This
called for 616,000 feet more of rope, with fittings to make it of use.
Every mine was cancelled without a mishap, and there are now more than
eighty million feet of "A No. 1" wire rope reposing at the bottom of
the North Sea. But it did its work, capturing no less than seventeen
German submarines in the first week.
[Sidenote: AND MORE THAN WIRE ROPE WAS ASKED FOR]
The Roebling plant, for the time, was given over to the manufacture of
war necessities, hence its problems of material were made easy by the
Director of Steel Supply. But the Roebling output for war purposes did
not end with wire rope. In May, 1918, the company was employing close
to ten thousand men, and in addition to rope making they were busy with
the manufacture of immense quantities of steel strand, strand for
outpost cables, copper strand, telephone wire, copper wire and
miscellaneous wires of all descriptions, which were needed in the
service at home and abroad.
A material part of the war work was the manufacture of wire especially
for the field telegraph and telephone systems of the Signal Corps in
Europe, where the American Army communications were the admiration of
Europeans. This material possessed certain peculiar characteristics,
and while speed in its production was an essential yet it was necessary
that every strand be perfect, for the fate of armies rested upon it.
The manufacture of this wire involved a great deal of detail and
intimate knowledge of all sorts of materials, for while copper is used
for electrical transmission there is an exterior protection of other
metals and materials, each of which has its peculiar manufacturing
difficulties.
[Sidenote: THE COMPOSITE STEEL AND COPPER STRAND]
For example, the "Composite Steel and Copper Strand" wire used by the
Army was made up as follows: There was a center wire of tinned copper
with ten outside wires of tinned steel. This wire had a maximum weight
of 75 pounds a mile with a maximum breaking weight of 300 pounds. Other
types of wire were silk wrapped, covered with a rubber compound or with
a covering of cotton braid treated with a waterproofing compound.
[Sidenote: TO MEET THE SIGNAL CORPS' REQUIREMENTS]
Take one type of the thousands manufactured by the Roebling Company and
see what must be done to make the finished product for the Signal
Corps. This process, which includes both the manufacture of steel wire
for the outer protection and copper wire for transmission, may be
divided into the following parts:
All steel materials are analyzed and inspected. Acid open hearth steel
is made in ingot form in special furnaces. The steel is classified, and
the ingots are reheated and rolled into billets, which are cropped to
eliminate all segregation. The steel billets are reheated and rolled
into rods of about 3/16 inch diameter. The rods are then tempered for
wire drawing. Then comes an inspection and testing for physical
characteristics of the metal, and the rods are cleaned in acid, washed,
lime coated and left to dry.
These rods are then drawn cold through dies to intermediate sizes
requiring a repetition of the tempering, inspecting and cleaning
operations. There is another series of drawing and then the final one
through the hardest and toughest dies obtainable to a diameter of
12/100 inch. At this diameter one foot of the original rod has been
extended to about 350 feet.
Then comes another inspection and test of the mechanical properties.
The wire is next cleaned in alkaline and acid solutions to remove all
trace of the lubricants used in the wire drawing, and the wire is
subjected to a bath in pure hot tin. Finally there is a Government
inspection and test.
So much for the manufacture of steel wire. The copper first appears in
bars, which are inspected and tested for their metallic purity. The
bars are heated and rolled into rods of about 3/8 inch diameter. These
rods are cleaned in acid baths to remove all scale, and the wire drawn
with the necessary annealing and cleaning until wire that is only .0285
of an inch in diameter is the result.
The final drawing of this wire requires the use of diamond dies with
the necessary equipment and great skill of the wire drawers in piercing
these minute openings. The copper wire then is annealed free from all
scale and discoloration, and the tin coat applied by means of a liquid
tin bath. Then the Government inspectors test the copper wire.
Ten strands of the steel wire are twisted about the one copper wire,
and the Government inspectors again make tests to see if the inner
copper wire is intact and properly protected by steel wire. All grease
is removed from the strand, and tussah silk wrapped over the whole. To
this is applied a compound with 30 per cent rubber, which is later
vulcanized. Then come inspections for mechanical injuries and
electrical characteristics. The single conductors are braided, the
braid waterproofed, polished, twined, inspected, reeled for shipment,
inspected by the Government agents, packed, inspected again by the
Government agents and finally shipped.
All this is done with a great deal of rapidity but with no less care,
the skill obtained by the workmen only by years of experience and by
the technical men only by years of study. It required a thorough
knowledge of steel and of the materials entering into the manufacture
of steel, such as ore, pig iron and fuel, as well as of the properties
and tests and manufacture of copper, tin, rubber, cotton, and various
lubricants. And in the more general use of wire and wire rope, a
thoroughly comprehensive knowledge of many other materials, all
mechanical and electrical phenomena in fact, are essential.