John Kimberly Mumford

“ These bridges are bigger than the Brooklyn Bridge with which the troublesome river was first overcome, but it will be many a day before the glamour that surrounded the earlier creation will have worn away, or people the world over cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps, can build a wire bridge now; perhaps, too, somebody some day can build one with more of simple grace and slender beauty, but it is certain nobody ever has. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was an astonishing sentiment, coming from the president of so many corporations. It is talk of this kind that makes Earle a puzzle to many men. With millions of dollars profitably invested, with an estate that is little short of ducal, lying almost within one of the greatest and richest cities of the country; with a penchant for golf, cricket, and motoring, a mania for collecting old coins and old masters—an aristocrat, if there be any such thing in America—he is still not only an every-day man, but at times he utters sentiments that fall nothing short of socialism. ”

“ BUILT TO MAKE WIRE AND ROPE The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful notions about “welfare work.” The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty, accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases to be lovely. ”

“ It is an ingot—many ingots—and when removed from the mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away on its journey. When in due course the ingot comes to the “blooming mill” it is fourteen inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated again, it is marched up on a steel rollway, also controlled by a “man higher up,” and into the hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in sheer humility to a diameter of four inches and with a very long face—some forty-eight feet to be exact. ”

“ On the first day new deposits to the amount of nearly a million dollars were taken in, and financial Philadelphia smiled again.
If the good-will was worth two millions, as it turned out to be, Earle's brains and courage were worth several millions more. The two and a half millions which the directors had put up to save their reputation and that of Philadelphia banking, turned out to be the best investment they had ever known. To-day they are held up as models to the young. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In brushing Segal from its path, Earle discovered, the trust had enmeshed Hipple, who had looted the bank in hope of saving Segal's skin and his own. The building, and a vacant safe therein, were all that the receiver had to work with when he set out to tow into harbor a scuttled, dismantled, and dangerous derelict.
From the beginning of his singular career, Earle's plans of reorganization have been novel in that they were not framed for his own profit, and unique in that plain men could understand them. To the gentle art of professional receivership his method has been a sad blow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ROEBLING, THE TOWN, A STORY IN ITSELF Roebling—the town, not the plant—to which some attention has been given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor’s pathway broad and bright. There’s a town superintendent to look after things and he earns his pay. ”

“ THE WORK OF THE WIRE DOCTORS Never think that the tall chimney of a manufacturing plant tells the story of all that goes on in its shadow. It isn’t all coarse work. If you could see the things that are done to a block of steel, and the brains that are mixed with it, in the Roebling plant, before it comes out and goes on its way, they would make you take off your hat to a piece of wire for the rest of your natural life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CUTTING THE DIES But by and by the time comes when the wire is so fine it cuts the steel of the die and loses its rotundity. Then a harder material is needed and the wire drawer goes the whole figure and uses a diamond. Cutting the steel dies is a cunning craft enough, but the expert, who, with a hair-like drill and a dab of diamond dust can penetrate a diamond with an opening that will be regular and measure to a thousandth of an inch, is a man who would think it no trick at all to pass a well fed camel through the needle’s eye. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is all like a Maypole, and the bobbins go in and out like children carrying each its ribbon. As the wire climbs, the whirling fingers braid around it a coating, tight fitting and impervious. Sometimes, where double insulation is required, there are two sets of arms, one above the other, the upper one putting on a second covering outside the first, of cotton of one color or another, or hemp or whatever else the experimentalists have found best for the purpose. You wonder how the bellcord in the railroad train can ever stand the pulling and jerking and wear and tear it gets. ”

“ Who has not seen men in the streets dragging huge pipes of lead through the open manholes from big wooden spools? These are the cables you talk over. They have been papered and clothed—and tarred and feathered, maybe—and then encased in lead by a process that is so easy as to be laughable, and yet as ingenious as any one thing the wire miller does. Unrolling slowly from its spool, the heavy cable moves up to a machine built strong and four-legged from the floor. ”

“ Any foot of wire that passes through the shipping room on the way to market has a clean bill of health, ample for the use to which it is destined, and the amount of material that is scrapped for faults, where work is on stringent specifications, would be sudden death to a business that hadn’t a wide range of uses for product of whatever quality. Fortunately for the users of high-grade wire the market for the lower grades is always hungry and crying for more. ”

“ THE MILE A MINUTE JOURNEY INTO WIRE Wire goes the whole distance, whisking along through the murky, half dark mill, up and down at a mile a minute, like flaming serpents flirting fiery tails, as the men, armed with tongs, seize and whip them from one pair of rolls to another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a wonder that grows as you watch it and yet it seems so simple. To see that steel, of tremendous strength and hardness, drawn through a tiny hole as if it were molasses candy—and yet it may have a tensile strength of two or three hundred thousand pounds to the square inch. ”

“ There was a recognized agent in the world strong enough, with engineering guidance, to shoulder its most staggering burdens, and the name of Roebling began to weave itself in letters of wire through the whole web of modern industry. Thirty-seven years have come and gone since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished and thrown open to the swarming people. ”

“ 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 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. ”