Outspinning the Spider: The Story of Wire and Wire Rope

the wi

heavens above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth. In all the legerd

esight for unnumbered thousands of years has become, within less than a century, under the spur of modern need and m

ing of vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and their concomitant, "flat wire,"

ND THE

is likely you would go breakfastless after sleeping on a bed without springs or the luxury of a woven wire mattress. But that would be only the beginning of sorrow. The trolley would stand dead. Perhaps you are a commuter and journey to town by steam road. T

eless? Without the coils and armatures that keep the instruments going or th

WIRE-NO

or get higher than the second story, and you couldn't signal the elevator anyway, for the an

our garters. As for the stenographer, if she got there at all-for she is as completely wired as a telegraph system, from her hat to her shoes-the index files and office books and letter hooks and mu

cks to the deepest shadows of the engine room; or airplanes soaring and swaying above the teeming town and far-stretched waterways. But an airplane lives by wire. It could neither fly nor steer nor ev

product on wire rope, and the lumber and metals which are the bases of industrial manufacture are in the same boat. And as for electric light-you might linger till dark but turning the switch

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 a

S THE WOR

bly would, but they'd have to stop killing each other except by primitive methods, for without wire, which controls the movement of ships and airplanes and submarines, and permits by telegraph and telephone the man?uvering of prodigious armies and binds the shining bodies of great gun

r in crowding populations it had little purpose except to adorn the raiment of the great or add richness to ancient arts. People whose vision of man's past is bounded by the encyclopedia have been told times enough that Aaron's robe had gold wire threads in it, th

LONG USE

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'

all the lands, ever had a notion he could draw metal through a die to make a wire. They hammered and hammered through the ages and sliced the filaments off as a cobbler cuts leather shoestrings-or used to. And then it was a German that did it, for the ancient records of Nurembe

hat ninety per cent of the people whose lives and well being hang on wire from one year's end to another have no

NING OF T

ty wire in the beginning was drawn from Swedish iron, was beginning to take up a share of the white man's burden. Gold and silver and platinum and bronze were still favored in ornamental use, but for practical purposes iron refused to be displaced. Great Britain essayed in 1750 th

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 advanc

ED

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

world's heavy loads; fine wire to solve its mol