omorrow it is a giant, parting seas and moving mountains. The waste of yesterday is turned into the raw material of new manufacture, wit

, 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

man princes were strangling in the universities the growing call for "liberty and union," young men of b

BLING COMES

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 farm

uilt 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

BOATS UP THE P

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

ewalk. 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 w

ROVES ITS P

abor. But it worked. Engineering audacity, plus scientific skill and native faculty for doing things, solved the problem of the Portage, but it did far more than that. The fame of it w

TLESHIP TOWER

en the revolution burst forth in the Teutonic empires, he moved his plant and its busine

ity than to contrast the picture of the first Roebling factory in Trenton, which suggests the rudest of farmsteads, with the sky-piercin

honor, and ruled by the general thesis that forever and ever quality comes before price. This means keeping faith with the structural iron worker, swinging pigmy-small five hundred feet above the d

and a half and with its overflow founded a city of its own; that is the reason why Roebling ha

lephone 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

D DEVELOPMENT FROM A

day, "if you'd go to the trouble on a very small order to find o

old man ordered fifty pounds. The next year he ordered a hundred more. There was no profit in it, but they

patent to So-and-So," naming one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, "but I want to see some

oeblings fabricated more than

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

took the place of solid steel in numerous phases of construction, and when its adaptability was proven new tasks were devised for it.

FIRST WI

, over streams and gorges, down from high mountains to cars or boats in the valley below, up from the deep-sunken beds of rich placers-everywhere and in all sorts of places where Nature seemed to have set up impassable defense against those who would take away her treasures-came forthwith into widespread use, and is among the handy tools of

S HIS ATTENTI

opes and chains, and men of small imagination thought that in these the limit had been attained. But Roebling's faith was as the faith of the Moslem in the Prophet. He believed that in wire the solution of all the pesky problems of bridge-building had been found. In a small way the thing was obvious, but his

ve heed to him. In the face of such opposition, and in view of the centuries that had dragged by before wires were twisted into rope, it is remarkable that so soon af

an aqueduct for the old Pennsylvania Canal, the basins of which were at Pittsburg. This was followed by four more suspension aqueducts for the Delaware and Hu

VER BRIDGE

rways. The steamboat men said bridge piers would be a peril to navigation, but the cities of Cincinnati and Covington, facing each other across the river, cried for the bridge. The rivermen were on top in 1846 when Roebling came

NG BIG FELLOWS

el Washington A. Roebling, son of the pioneer, was the first to cross on its cable. In the meantime John A. Roebling had completed not alone the Niagara Bridge, but the Alleghany Bridge over the Alleghany River at Pittsburg. The last named differed from the Niag

G NIAGA

ng railroad trains over that turmoil of waters on a web apparently so frail, evoked a storm of protest from well-nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. But Roebling was a practical man as well as a stubborn one. After all, he was dealing with rock and wire and he knew what they would do. He built the bridge, the first of its kind to carry railroad traffic. All the world of that d

ION BRIDGE"

s in length of span; in economy of material, in simplicity and charm of outline it clearly foreshadowed the still greater work, the designing of which was to be the crowning accomplishment of his life. He was

all-towers, cables and anchorage. Suspending the roadway, which to the average man seems the vital part of the creation, is, from the engineering standpoint, only an accessory work. John A. Roebling had conce

fought so hard to sustain, endorsed by boards of noted engineers and acclaimed by the public, starting out on the realization of his long dream-the building of the Eighth W

gns for a wonder fabric, ready for the labor of an intenser age. He did not live to see the spider structures hung