Little by little, for the tide of industrial activity had barely begun to rise, new uses were found for wire. In one field after another it supplanted vegetable fibre where strength and durability were essential. As the world began to feel the Nineteenth Century surge of mechanical impulse, as life developed new facets and new needs, science sought new means of meeting them, and in the quest itself grew. Producing methods advanced with the new demands of invention. Always the wire makers spun their filaments a little finer. Men were weighing zephyrs and measuring the infinitesimal, and needed tools of increasing delicacy. Wire was the answer.
Electricity, so long hidden from understanding, was led captive by a wire, not by a chain--and with its development wire has found a new and increasingly important role. The ductility of metals was at last being tested to the full. Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one one-thousandth--one record after another was passed. At last, by way of curiosity, a wire was drawn that measured one four-thousandth of an inch in diameter--twelve times finer than the hair on your head. The spider, so long counted a master workman, had been undone.
The wire age was arriving--big wires to carry the world's heavy loads; fine wire to solve its molecular problems. The day of the hammer was done.
Since Columbus the centuries have been gathering speed. At first it came slowly, for the need was not yet. 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. 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.