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.