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.