CHAPTER IV
WHERE WIRE IS MADE
To measure the growth of wire, with its many forms and composites, during the last forty years would be to trace in detail not alone the progress of science, invention and mechanical industry, but the myriad conceits that have come ostensibly to facilitate the process of living. In the search for new comforts, for means of avoiding physical exertion, the world has been littered with novelties, and most of them depend on wire. Personal life as well as commerce and industry is interlaced with wire. With the opening of new countries, the increase of populations, the flocking of outland people to the cities and the consequent lack of farm labor, ingenuity has been more heavily taxed to find the quick and easy way of doing the world’s work and keeping food in its mouths. Wire, so adaptable to the heaviest as well as the lightest tasks, has labored from year to year under an increasing demand.
It is not surprising therefore that a company which in such an impressive way had fixed itself in recognition as the first exponent of wire’s usefulness should have grown in this period from modest commercial stature to a high place in its field and to the enjoyment of large production.
When the sons of John A. Roebling took up control of the business he had established, about one hundred men were employed and the product of their industry approximated $250,000 annually. Just before the beginning of the war more than eight thousand employees were engaged in the manufacture of Roebling products and the value of the output ran far into the millions. The factory which was so meagre and so humble in 1848 has spread its buildings not only over the surrounding acres, but across what were then neighboring farm lands until, constrained not alone by the pyramiding demand for its products but by the soaring values of the city that had grown up around it, and of which it had been in some measure the creator, it went pioneering again, sixteen years ago, down the Delaware, and established a new nucleus, which will suffice for a long period to come.
With the erection of the cables for the Williamsburg Bridge, the Roebling firm withdrew from the competitive field of engineering contracts and concentrated all its energies in the perfection of its product—wire.
In view of the more distinctly industrial character of the Roebling enterprise under the later dispensation, it is of interest that the varied activities of John A. Roebling, as a scientist, a master of materials and a peculiarly astute mind in affairs, have been carried on severally among his sons and grandsons. Colonel Washington A. Roebling, the president of the company, who executed the plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, is an engineer of well-known ability. His intimate contact with all the affairs of the company during such a long period of development, his kindly and generous support to constructive achievements, has been a source of pride and invaluable assistance to the younger generation of the Roebling fraternity. His two brothers, Charles and Ferdinand, now dead, were both intensely active during their lives. Charles G. Roebling’s talents as a builder of plants and machinery and an unusual gift of turning out a product of the highest excellence, were, in a large measure, the cornerstone for the tremendous success of the Roebling Company. It was during the period of his direction that the manufacturing capacity grew so rapidly.
The simultaneous expansion of the commercial field was the life work of the other brother, Ferdinand W. Roebling, who carried the Roebling products to all corners of the globe. A clear and far vision, an uncanny ability to go straight to the point and a keen knowledge of human nature, were a few of the strong traits of his mentality. Under his control of financial and ethical matters the John A. Roebling’s Sons Company established a worldwide and enviable reputation for stability and fair dealing.
Ferdinand, although an indulgent father, brought up his two sons, Karl and Ferdinand, Jr., in the old-fashioned way. They were taught from early boyhood that theirs would be no bed of roses, that manhood was an estate where responsibility must be accepted and assumed, and with this teaching ringing in their ears the mantle of the presidency of the company fell upon Karl G. Roebling, and the secretaryship and treasurership upon the shoulders of Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr.
Both sons upon leaving college were given a rigid training in all branches of the business and early in their careers exhibited the executive ability and keen business foresight which their father had in so large a measure developed. Karl’s talents lay principally in the gift he had of drawing from his associates their whole-hearted fidelity and devotion to the cause of the Roebling prestige. His death at the early age of forty-eight was a shock to the industry, and a great personal loss to those associated with him in the conduct of the business.
While all of the Roeblings have possessed, in a great degree, the qualities of leadership, yet they have always recognized the necessity of surrounding themselves with a strong organization capable of carrying on this great industry after they had ceased their earthly activities.
It was particularly under the regime of Karl Roebling that the strong foundation was laid for the present powerful organization—each department highly specialized and in charge of experienced well-trained heads, ably aided by a corps of competent assistants, all functioning smoothly like a well-balanced machine. Karl left this as his heritage to the business. He never did things by halves. His working day was long and intense, but to one so constituted it could not be otherwise. During the world war and its aftermath the added responsibilities he so cheerfully assumed, contributed largely toward bringing to an end a life full of early accomplishments.
Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr., the remaining son, now vice-president and treasurer, is an able engineer. His early training with the company was entirely in the manufacturing and engineering side of the business. In more recent years, however, he has devoted his attention to its financial affairs. His close contact with his father and brother, his thorough knowledge of the company’s policies, have well fitted him to sustain the Roebling name and all it represents in the business world.
The main or first plant of the company centers around the site of the original buildings. Its structures, yards and tracks cover more than thirty-five acres of ground about a mile from the center of the city. The Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Trenton Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad pass along its western boundary and directly before the door of the offices. The office building was erected in 1857 by John A. Roebling as a residence and later, as manufacture crowded in around, it was given over to business uses. The spur tracks of the Pennsylvania traverse the company enclosure.
Nearest to the office building are some of the structures that Mr. Roebling built in the first periods of business expansion, among them the old rope shop, where by methods of his own devising he strove to meet the growing demands for rope. Some of the machinery he built is still in service in production of standard lines, showing how swiftly and how far, from crude beginnings, his active mind advanced along the road to better production, and how efficient management can prolong the life of a mechanism that is honestly built in the beginning.
The second or Buckthorn plant lies half a mile farther to the south, also facing the railroad and the canal.
The third, which was christened Kinkora, after a neighboring village on the railroad, but is now Roebling, with a station of its own, is ten miles farther down the Delaware. All told, there are probably a hundred buildings in the three plants, many of them of immense size and manufacturing capacity.
From the wide diversity of its products, the men in the Roebling establishment have come to refer to it as a department store. The problem therefore of distributing its operations and keeping track of its large volume of moving stock and its equipment is a substantial one. While in some lines there is activity partitioned among all three plants, in the main the various divisions of labor are well concentrated. For the most part the Upper Works, though a considerable quantity of wire is made there, is devoted to what is termed “finished product.” In the same manner the Buckthorn plant, while turning out some rope in small sizes, specializes in all forms of insulation and the manufacture of lead-cased cables.
The Kinkora or Roebling establishment, carrying the production of the subsidiary New Jersey Wire Cloth Company, making wire netting, window screens and other forms of wire cloth, is given over most largely to the making of steel wire and the fundamental work of wire and steel production. With the company’s large acreage at this location, its townsite and the facility of river transportation as well as rail, with unlimited water, of which this plant uses more than is pumped by the city of Trenton itself, the situation offers large opportunity for expansion and profitable centralization of operation. At the present time, while shipments of wire are made direct from Roebling to manufacturers who use it in production of their own commodities, by far the greater part of the output goes to the other plants to be finished into rope and specialties.
Inside the tall palings that enclose the great mill buildings at Roebling, there is an open space, broad and long as a drill ground, threaded by spur tracks and heaped endlessly with stacks of pig iron and steel-making materials. It seems as though some giant had dumped there the salvage of a hundred battlefields. It lies there sadly rusting under the weather, waiting the moment when the mills shall stretch forth hands and hurry it in, rush it like a neophyte through the fierce initiation of heat and chemistry, and having changed the very fibre of it by strange processes, send it singing forth, shining in great coils, twisted into cords and cables small and great, bare or insulated, bronzed or coppered, galvanized or enameled, huge and bulky or spun to hair-like tenuousness, to do its work in a busy world.
Of course, the making of steel is no new story, but this is wire steel—the high carbon, the tough, the sinewy, the resilient, that must carry in itself as it moves along through these interminable buildings the analytically measured proportions of this or that, which fit it to bear up the traffic of a giant bridge or convey a whisper of telephonic sound or register split seconds in an Elgin timepiece. It is “pig,” and ore and “scrap,” but just what kind and just how much of “scrap” and ore and “pig,” these are subtle questions. It costs a lot of time and money sometimes to answer them.
When the thirty-five hundred and odd degrees of heat in the long rows of open hearth furnaces have brought this stubborn mixture to bubbling and seething like a busy kettle of soup—a workman adding a little manganese or other ingredient to the broth now and then, grimy men with long handled steel dippers take out a few thimblefuls from time to time and hurry the sample away to the chemist, who, like a chef, tests the quality and prescribes the seasoning. By and by it is run off, from an opening in the bottom of the furnace into a huge caldron they call a “ladle.” A fifty-ton crane conveys it down the long, shadowy building, to halt above a group of tall moulds. A wizard up in the gloom under the roof moves it from mould to mould, a few inches at a time, while the liquid steel is drawn from the bottom into one after another. The moulds are left to cool.
Its history is now begun. It is an ingot—many ingots—and when removed from the mould is loaded on steel cars and borne away on its journey. When in due course the ingot comes to the “blooming mill” it is fourteen inches thick each way and five feet long. Heated again, it is marched up on a steel rollway, also controlled by a “man higher up,” and into the hungry jaws of a machine that, after a series of swallowings, disgorges it at last, shrunken in sheer humility to a diameter of four inches and with a very long face—some forty-eight feet to be exact. And no wonder. In the process it has been kneaded into a dozen different phases of flatness and squareness, and put in a way to profit by the everlasting squeezing and stretching it is to undergo. Now it is a bloom.
Again it is passed on, and from some subterranean blackness you see it rushed out and up to a sort of guillotine that first cuts off the flawy ends, where the impurities accumulated in its ingot state, and sends them to the “scrap” heap, then lops the bloom as a man saws firewood, but a great deal faster, into billets varying from one to four hundred pounds in weight. They are “billets” now, and at last are counted the raw material of wire, even after such an inferno of cooking.
A steel loader gathers them up, carries them away in bunches and, by a trick of wire pulling, deposits them on other cars in rows as regular as the pickets on an old fashioned fence.
Along with the copper billets they are stacked in thousands and thousands of tons in the stockyard outside the doors of the rolling mill, each in its group according to physical and chemical character, waiting the next purgatory of change. One pile is marked for one mission, one for another, ranging through all the uses wire can be put to. These piles are forever vanishing, forever being replaced, as the wide world calls for wire. They disappear into the darkness of the mill and they are never billets again.
Marshaled on cars and jammed by hydraulic force into big reheating furnaces like a Brobdignagian bakery, fired with fuel gas, they come out glowing again and start on the next stage of reduction. The passage through the rolling mill is a short life and a merry one. If they were kneaded in the blooming mill it was a mild experience. Here they are mauled and manhandled and masticated by swift, continuous and looping mills that are born with a huge appetite for the largest billets, and make rods of great length. Down they go, under the gripping of relentless fingers that squeeze them first square, then oval, then square again, and pass them on, always smaller, toward the journey’s end. Sometimes it’s half an inch, sometimes more, according to the needs of trade.
Wire goes the whole distance, whisking along through the murky, half dark mill, up and down at a mile a minute, like flaming serpents flirting fiery tails, as the men, armed with tongs, seize and whip them from one pair of rolls to another. In they go, around the grooved repeater and out again to be grabbed with a motion swift as the dash of a pickerel, and thrust once more into the next set of rolls. Always the lightning speed and always the long tail, red hot and smaller than before, and longer, playing “snap the whip” down the steel grooves to the bottom of the “pit,” then straight away up the incline, a flash of fire in the darkness, and on from roll to roll. The men who handle these rods hold their ticklish posts only twenty or thirty minutes at a time. A straight eight hour day, if a man came through it alive, would send him to an asylum with a conviction that he was great grandson to Medusa. At the finishing pass where the man stands, a stream of four rods is going by him continually at lightning speed, about a mile a minute; hundreds of tons in twenty-four hours looping the loops through the rolls and finishing in red coils of quarter inch, lying innocent and rosy and round on the metal floor.
To the novice they look like wire; to the cognoscenti they are only rods, and in order to be wire some day are hustled off to the cleaning house and in bunches plunged into a bath of acid. This takes off the scale the rolling left on them. But acid in wire steel is like heresy in the church. It has to be purged away. This is done by immersion and then by a coating of lime to neutralize by chemical action whatever taint may remain. The steel is then baked from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to remove the hydrogen.
Wire making has just begun. From this time on it is a wonder-work to the novice, a mechanical sleight of hand performance by which hundreds of shadowy men and other hundreds of whirling wheels spin the rod down ever smaller and smaller till what was once a stodgy four foot billet is perhaps a thousandth of an inch thick, fifteen odd thousand miles long, weighs less than a quarter of an ounce to the mile, and has to be looked for with your best reading glasses. It is just three times as fine as the hair on your head.
Never think that the tall chimney of a manufacturing plant tells the story of all that goes on in its shadow. It isn’t all coarse work. If you could see the things that are done to a block of steel, and the brains that are mixed with it, in the Roebling plant, before it comes out and goes on its way, they would make you take off your hat to a piece of wire for the rest of your natural life. But it isn’t all, what happens to the outside. There are wire doctors who follow the changing symptoms of the metal through its many processes, with diagnostic eye as keen as any medico’s for traces of typhoid or mumps. Through all the process there are reheatings and coolings, at carefully specified temperatures, to give temper and then to take it away, to keep the ductility without sacrificing endurance. It is one business where you simply have to eat the cake and keep it, too.
There is wet drawn wire and dry drawn wire, and chemical reasons for drawing wire wet, and divers ways of drying wet wire to attain certain conditions; there is lubrication by means of dry materials as well as oil, and soap suds, funny things that also act on the material itself in mysterious ways. But this is no text book.
No thinkable effort is omitted that will help to make the wire material perfect in quality and service condition, but the proof of the pudding in the making of wire is in the Olsen machines—miraculous things that will smash a big wire rope or snap a hair of wire and register to a decimal the breaking strength of each. There are tests for tensile strength, for torsion to show how many twists a piece of wire will stand, and for bending. There are microscopic tests for molecular condition and men who will almost tell you from a microscopic section the maximum service of which the rope made from a given wire is capable. Any bundle of wire that doesn’t pass the test for the job on hand is discarded and used for something else, and a record of it all is kept with scrupulous care. Any foot of wire that passes through the shipping room on the way to market has a clean bill of health, ample for the use to which it is destined, and the amount of material that is scrapped for faults, where work is on stringent specifications, would be sudden death to a business that hadn’t a wide range of uses for product of whatever quality. Fortunately for the users of high-grade wire the market for the lower grades is always hungry and crying for more.
There are complexities without end in the making and finishing of wire, but the real wonder of it lies after all in the initial principle which the German inventor in Bavaria gave to the world six hundred years ago—the simple but even now almost incredible fact that a rod of cold steel of the hardest quality—plow steel is the convincing name for it—can be seized by its sharpened end with a clamp they call a dog and drawn through a smaller hole, in a still harder piece of steel, three or four feet until it can be fastened to a drum, and then be wound off in miles almost without interruption. It is a wonder that grows as you watch it and yet it seems so simple. To see that steel, of tremendous strength and hardness, drawn through a tiny hole as if it were molasses candy—and yet it may have a tensile strength of two or three hundred thousand pounds to the square inch.
There is nothing spectacular about the wire mill where this is done. On long benches the die-holding appliances are set up and the dies set into them. The wire—or at first the rod—is run from a portable bobbin they call a swift, that stands on the floor, and the wire, after it has been given the hole, passes to a bobbin they call a block. Then it is taken on to a still smaller die and the same process repeated, with occasional reheatings, until it has the diameter of a thread.
But by and by the time comes when the wire is so fine it cuts the steel of the die and loses its rotundity. Then a harder material is needed and the wire drawer goes the whole figure and uses a diamond. Cutting the steel dies is a cunning craft enough, but the expert, who, with a hair-like drill and a dab of diamond dust can penetrate a diamond with an opening that will be regular and measure to a thousandth of an inch, is a man who would think it no trick at all to pass a well fed camel through the needle’s eye.
It would take a larger book than this to tell all the things that are done in the making of wire for various uses. In the main, the entire volume produced either goes to market as wire of one sort and another, to be applied to its various objects or for sale, or else it is twisted into rope, of which the Roebling Company manufactures four hundred kinds, sizes and many qualities. The common fence wires are not among the Roebling specialties, but wire nettings are manufactured from a soft variety of basic steel which lends itself to the weaving process with almost the ease of animal and vegetable fibres.
The “flat wire,” which has now attained immense volume of production, is, for the most part, rolled down from the round, in many qualities, and shipped as material to the makers of many things. There are wide, thin, beautiful ribbons which find their way to the shoestring factories and are cut and clinched to the laces as tips. The list of novelties and parts that are made from various forms and widths of flat wire is as long as the list of Smiths in a New York directory. In the novelty shop, which does a million things, wires are cut and mechanically bent in hundreds of thousands of shapes, for clothes hangers, pail ear staples, daubers for bottles, meat skewers, hog rings, thread guards for textile machinery, basket fasteners, shackles for car seals, saddlery parts, Welsbach mantles, clips and links for bedsprings, wiring for toys of all descriptions—and so on and on and on. And all this novelty business is a side line, like the square and triangular wires that are used by oil well drillers to keep the sand from getting into the oil.
The special shapes of high quality wire that are made to order, to provide hard-wearing parts for typewriters and many other machines, are almost without number.
With the increasing cost of labor and materials effort has been made to salvage and make use of “mill ends” of wire, running sometimes to large quantity, which formerly were accounted waste. These are now passed through a straightening machine, which lays them out in uniform bundles of some ten feet in length, which again may be cut to shorter lengths for special purposes. In the buildings where this is done, at the Upper Plant, are piles of neat bundles of all shapes and sizes and grades, which once went to the scrap for reworking but now are utilized without additional cost.
Copper wire is manufactured by the Roebling mills in very large quantities and in many sizes and forms, principally for electrical use and for service where water corrosion shortens the life of steel. The little bond wires that link the rails of railways to perfect the carriage of current in the block signal system are mostly steel, but copper is used at stations and on sidings where the leakage from standing cars is apt to contain acids. Copper wire of all sizes down to the very fine is spooled and sold for use in arts and manufactures. For marine uses a deal of copper rope is made, and copper strand is twisted for lightning rods, the fixtures and supports of which, in turn, are manufactured from round and flat steel wire. The piles of this equipment, waiting shipment in the Roebling storerooms, give proof that the satire of the cartoonist and the mockery of the funny writer cannot destroy an ancient faith.
The telephone and telegraph companies use uncountable miles of copper wire in line service and other miles in fine sizes for instrument coils and divers other functions. Electricity as an agent would be a halting cripple without wire. The dynamo would have little more utility than a washtub. Armatures, frames for which are formed from flat steel wire, are wound in the Roebling plant in impressive number.
One of the largest fields for copper is trolley wires, which are of great size and of many eccentric shapes.
This is merely a glimpse at the utilities that go to make up the field for Roebling wire. It is doubtful if today the company owns a complete list of the wire it has made for special and even eccentric purposes, or knows within many thousands the things that are manufactured from its wire product after it leaves the shipping room.
Use determines much in the finishing of wire, and of wire rope as well, as not alone concerning the chemistry of the inside, but the covering of the outside. Material that is made for service out of doors, under water or under ground, to ensure long life needs an exposed surface more resistant to moisture than the naked steel. Copper is proof, but the pure wire is expensive for most uses and where severe strains are incurred it lacks in strength. Modern science has been too busy to recover the art of hardening copper which the ancient Egyptians lost.
Zinc, in its best application, makes steel wire weatherproof for many years and the apparently simple process of galvanizing, the fixing of a coating of zinc on the steel has multiplied many fold the utility of steel wire in places where it could ill be spared. But there is galvanizing and “galvanizing.” The first is worth the money it costs.
There are other coated wires, too. The aeroplane strands and cords are tinned. There is a bronze enamel, and a copper coating which looks as if it were applied for protection but is really the incidental result of a dip in sulphate of copper, for other purposes in the course of fabrication. The coating of wires is chiefly done in the wire works of the Kinkora Mills, though a galvanizing house is maintained also at the Upper Works. For wire that is to be made into galvanized ropes and cords, the galvanic treatment is given before it goes to be made up.
For exercise, a journey through any one of the Roebling plants, and especially the great Upper Works, is as good as thirty-six holes of golf. It is upstairs and downstairs, over an interminable number of thousands of square feet, through the mazes of a picture that is always changing its detail and its rate of speed, but which is all centered on one idea, to keep the stream of wire and wire rope, of all sizes, kinds and colors, moving toward the shipping room. It all seems so easy in its progress, so free from friction or any trace of confusion, that the layman does not stop to consider how many problems have bobbed up along the way of production, even of the most modest wires and rope. Wire is a trade involving intimate knowledge of many lines of business and manufacture, since the character of wire required differs in nearly all.
To the novice, wire is wire. Here he learns that what is wire for one thing is valueless for another and wire that looks to the unpracticed eye as if it were ready for market always has to undergo a few more processes before it is up to demands. Wherever, however far, you travel in this succession of high-roofed, airy buildings, you come always upon some new regiment of machines, some new container of chemical or metal, with a long line of reels unwinding wire to undergo some additional treatment. And always moving among the buildings are cars, big and little, packing wire or material from one place to another, to feed the wheels and furnaces. The tonnage from plant to plant and from house to house in the Roebling works would make a first-class annual business for many a modest railroad, even if it carried nothing else.
But when wire is finished it isn’t always finished. Since electricity spread itself over the earth in a million services, insulation in various forms has come to be almost as important as the wire itself. Insulation in its more advanced forms is a complex affair, gauged to accord with specific conditions and multiplying processes to secure the maximum of protection, both from electric current to life and property and from dampness and abrasion to the wire itself. In the making of wire screens the wire men have taken a leaf from the cloth-mill book, but in weaving a casing of cotton or other fibre around the wire for insulation the process is strongly reminiscent of some of the New England textile mills. Long rows of machines, black and silent and swift, reaching upward toward the ceiling, revolving rapidly on an upright shaft; long arms trailing downward, with wheels and bobbins like fingers plying dizzily but swiftly in and out around the wire which unwinds from its spool and keeps forever climbing. It is all like a Maypole, and the bobbins go in and out like children carrying each its ribbon. As the wire climbs, the whirling fingers braid around it a coating, tight fitting and impervious. Sometimes, where double insulation is required, there are two sets of arms, one above the other, the upper one putting on a second covering outside the first, of cotton of one color or another, or hemp or whatever else the experimentalists have found best for the purpose. You wonder how the bellcord in the railroad train can ever stand the pulling and jerking and wear and tear it gets. It is simple. It is just a perfectly made and highly tinned wire rope, with a double coat of braided cotton over it. The jacket may wear off in time, but the Roebling rope inside will never fail in a lifetime to get the message to the engineer.
When these snug coverings are finished the wire for certain uses is taken to another part of the works where it is unwound once more to pass through a bath of asphalt compound. After this process, which leaves a dull, dirty-looking surface, the spools of treated wire are put aside for drying, and then a final surfacing applied. The next journey is to the packing room.
Insulation is a wide range business. It cases wire in asbestos to prevent fire from stopping its work; but perhaps the highest phase is reached in the great cables of copper wires used in telephone service. For these the individual wires are covered with paper of various colors, which serves not only for protection but enables men at the opposite ends of a long cable to pick out unerringly the wires with which connection is to be made. Colors are few but possible combinations are many. The machining of this is more than ever like the Maypole, with pink and blue and yellow strips of paper flashing in the shadows. When the wires, paper covered, are brought together in the cable, sometimes three or four hundred of them altogether, the whole goes through the taping machines, which apply one or two suits of what may be called “underwear,” for after it has been covered with two or three different materials there remains a suit of lead to be fitted, and this is a big work done deftly.
Who has not seen men in the streets dragging huge pipes of lead through the open manholes from big wooden spools? These are the cables you talk over. They have been papered and clothed—and tarred and feathered, maybe—and then encased in lead by a process that is so easy as to be laughable, and yet as ingenious as any one thing the wire miller does. Unrolling slowly from its spool, the heavy cable moves up to a machine built strong and four-legged from the floor. In the mid height of this, a few feet above the floor, is a square chamber containing molten lead. The cable passes in at the rear and upward. It requires some credulity to believe that it is the movement of the molten lead that carries the cable along, but in any case when it emerges from the “box,” through an aperture that trims the soft metal down to uniformity, it has a solid lead covering as even as lead pipe, and at the point of egress cold water playing from just above cools it. Then it passes on through a long tank of water for final hardening and is wound slowly, clean and shining, on the great spools that are to carry it to market.
Many astonishing things are done in wire works, but done so swiftly, and smoothly and in such volume that they look easy. The man in the street, hurrying about his own business, never even takes time to wonder to himself how they are accomplished.