Guy wire

“ Upon the side were various electric switches, and from the centre of the box a thick silk-covered wire terminated in a gleaming apparatus of vulcanite and steel which the operator held in his hand.
Proctor tucked a towel round his client's neck, rubbed some sweet-smelling cream all over his face and turned a switch in the side of the pedestal. ”

“ If we were discovered, we were like rats in a trap. Our way was cut off unless we ran along the wire to the narrow lane we had cut through. With our hearts in our mouths we waited for the three-tap signal to rush the German trench. Three taps had gotten about halfway down the line when suddenly about ten to twenty German star shells were fired all along the trench and landed in the barbed wire in rear of us, turning night into day and silhouetting us against the wall of light made by the flares. ”

“ I was scared stiff as it is ticklish work cutting your way through wire when about thirty feet in front of you there is a line of Boches looking out into No Man's Land with their rifles lying across the parapet, straining every sense to see or hear what is going on in No Man's Land; because at night, Fritz never knows when a bomb with his name and number on it will come hurtling through the air aimed in the direction of Berlin. The man on the right, one man in the center, and myself on the extreme left were equipped with wire cutters. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a Tommy should see one of these little spurts in front of him, he would tell the nurse about it later. The crossing of No Man's Land remains a blank to me.
Men on my right and left would stumble and fall. Some would try to get up, while others remained huddled and motionless. Then smashed-up barbed wire came into view and seemed carried on a tide to the rear. Suddenly, in front of me loomed a bashed-in trench about four feet wide. Queer-looking forms like mud turtles were scrambling up its wall. One of these forms seemed to slip and then rolled to the bottom of the trench. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lord Hayle had been writing to his father, the duke saw that at once, but he was not perturbed. He had made his resolve. He was master of his own fate, captain of his own soul—what did anything else matter? What was to be done was to be done, come what might. One must be true to oneself!
As the weary, excited audience began at last to press out of the stalls and boxes, there was a tap upon the door of the duke's, and Mr. Goodrick, the editor of the Daily Wire, entered. The little man's face was flushed with excitement, and he was smiling with pleasure. ”

“ Save for the strange apparatus in all its intricacy of brass and vulcanite, coiled wire and glass, there was more than a suggestion of the school-room in which the pupils are entertained by a magic-lantern exhibition. ”

“ In the darkness they lost their bearings and crawled toward the English trenches. They reached the barbed wire and were suddenly challenged by our sentry. Being too drunk to realize that the challenge was in English, the Captain refused to crawl back. Finally the Unteroffizier convinced his superior that they were in front of the English wire. Realizing this too late, the Captain drew his revolver and with a muttered curse crept blindly toward our trench. His bullet no doubt killed our Captain.
Then the bomb came over and there he was, dying, -- and a good job too, we thought. ”

“ The piles of this equipment, waiting shipment in the Roebling storerooms, give proof that the satire of the cartoonist and the mockery of the funny writer cannot destroy an ancient faith.
The telephone and telegraph companies use uncountable miles of copper wire in line service and other miles in fine sizes for instrument coils and divers other functions. Electricity as an agent would be a halting cripple without wire. The dynamo would have little more utility than a washtub. Armatures, frames for which are formed from flat steel wire, are wound in the Roebling plant in impressive number. ”

“ Down on my right, a tussle took place among the blokes crouching on the firestep and suddenly a form loomed over the parapet and I saw Jerry's brother running high through a lane in the wire. He came to the wounded man who, seeing him, tried to crawl away. Jerry's brother stopped and, standing erect, stretched both arms in the direction of the Lone Tree. Just then a Boche machine-gun turned loose. The bullets knocked up the dirt all around the two. ”

“ To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is almost the universally used conductor of the current. ”

“ Harold Spence was left alone in the chambers at Lincoln's Inn. The journalist found himself discontented, lonely, and bored. He had not realised before how much Basil's society had contributed to his happiness during the past few months. It had grown to be a necessity to him gradually, and, as is the case with all gradual processes, the lack of it surprised him with its sense of incompleteness and loss.
He had spent a hard summer and autumn over very uncongenial work. For months there had been a curious lull and calm in the news-world. Yet day by day the Daily Wire had to be filled. ”

“ HOW THE GREAT CABLES WERE MADE Each of these cables consists of nineteen strands of about two hundred and seventy-eight No. 8 B. W. G. wires each, and each wire is continuous in its strand, like the yarns in a skein, traveling eternally to Brooklyn and back, up over the top of one tower, down in a long curve above the tideway, up to the other tower and down again, to be gripped and carried by links, like a chain, down to the everlasting clutch of the rock and concrete-bound anchorage. Each skein is a million feet long—nearly two hundred miles—and still men talk of “Oriental patience.” ”

“ At last, turning to me, he said:
"'Wilson, this army is a blankety blank washout. What's the use of having artillery if it is not allowed to fire? The government at home ought to be hanged with some of their red tape. It's through them that we have no shells!'
"I answered, 'Yes sir,' and started sending this opinion over the wire to Cassell, but the Captain interrupted me with:
'Keep those infernal fingers still. What's the matter, getting the nerves? ”

“ Then, when it was round, it would always go slack before I could get it tied up tightly.
It sounds so easy, laying a wire. But I swear it is the most wearying business in the world—punching holes in the ground with a 16-lb. hammer, running up poles that won't go straight, unhooking wire that has caught in a branch or in the eaves of a house, taking the strain of a cable to prevent man and ladder and wire coming on top of you, when the man who pays out has forgotten to pay. ”

“ After covering my sector I quietly crawled back. I had gotten about half-way, when I noticed that my revolver was missing. It was pitch dark. I turned about to see if I could find it; it couldn't be far away, because about three or four minutes previously I had felt the butt in the holster. I crawled around in circles and at last found it, then started on my way back to our trenches, as I thought.
Pretty soon I reached barbed wire, and was just going to give the password, when something told me not to. I put out my hand and touched one of the barbed wire stakes. It was iron. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The man who invented barbed wire is as heartily cursed by soldiers as by dairy farmers. The sudden cry of "wire" sends a shiver down the spine of the most seasoned. For wherever wire is, machine guns are placed to enfilade it. The Turk was a great believer in wire. It was of German manufacture, and very skilfully and strongly placed. In order to make it effective, it must be made very secure. ”

“ In the making of wire screens the wire men have taken a leaf from the cloth-mill book, but in weaving a casing of cotton or other fibre around the wire for insulation the process is strongly reminiscent of some of the New England textile mills. Long rows of machines, black and silent and swift, reaching upward toward the ceiling, revolving rapidly on an upright shaft; long arms trailing downward, with wheels and bobbins like fingers plying dizzily but swiftly in and out around the wire which unwinds from its spool and keeps forever climbing. ”

“ You were lying in No Man's Land in that bally hole for a day and a half. It's a wonder you are alive." He also told me that out of the twenty that were in the raiding party, seventeen were killed. The officer died of wounds in crawling back to our trench and I was severely wounded, but one fellow returned without a scratch without any prisoners. No doubt this chap was the one who had sneezed and improperly cut the barbed wire. ”

“ Right at the back of this house is a wire, a power-circuit, alive with more than two hundred times that voltage, with power in plenty—a little condensed Niagara of power—asking to be taken off and made use of!”
“But what use?”
“I can capture and tame and control that power, Frank. I can make it my slave, and carry it along with me, almost in my pocket, on a mere thread of copper. I can make it a living, iron-eating otter, with a dozen fangs—in the shape of quarter-inch drills, gnawing and biting and eating through that armor-plate door about the same as a rat would gnaw through a wooden lath. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is no twist in these ponderous cables, as there is in a wire rope. Every reach of wire lies flat and separate, and when all were in place they were laboriously bound together, first the strands, then when all the strands were up, the whole fabric, into cylindrical form. There are other strange things about these cables; one is that they make practically no strain on the towers save to sustain their weight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It all seems so easy in its progress, so free from friction or any trace of confusion, that the layman does not stop to consider how many problems have bobbed up along the way of production, even of the most modest wires and rope. Wire is a trade involving intimate knowledge of many lines of business and manufacture, since the character of wire required differs in nearly all. ”

“ If this is done, be the wire even as small as a silk thread, and made of copper, all electric communication is effectually conducted off its channel. Each current, or wave, or signal, sent from either side of this wire will take the short cut and follow it to the ground, where it becomes lost. Neither side can converse or signal over such an obstruction, and they do not know the character or location of the trouble, as the wire works as usual. Of course each operator will wonder why the other does not respond to his signals, and absence is taken for granted as the reason. ”

“ Getting to one side of the bushes, I easily got hold of the wire from my position on the ground, and, hauling it as far as possible to one side, after hastily glancing up and down the road to see that no one was near to observe me, I "yanked," or by a dexterous "twist of the wrist," which a wire-man understands, I was able to break the wire, which, the minute the tension was removed, suddenly flew apart, making the adjoining poles resound with the vibration. ”