“Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one one-thousandth—one record after another was passed.

At last 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 outdone.”

John A. Roebling
FOUNDER OF JOHN A. ROEBLING’S SONS COMPANY

It is the wire age.

Modern life, in all its intricate bearings, runs on wire. Wire everywhere; in the heavens above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth. In all the legerdemain of science, which has put nature in bondage, wire is the indispensable agent.

A curious, slow, finical little trade at which the smiths of forgotten races toiled and pottered and ruined their eyesight for unnumbered thousands of years has become, within less than a century, under the spur of modern need and modern driving power, the pack-bearer of the world and the mainspring of every activity from the cradle to the grave.

Wire still makes toys and gewgaws as it always did, but it is no longer the plaything of vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and their concomitant, “flat wire,” from the inventory of human assets tomorrow, and the world would stop stock-still.

This is not hyperbole. Picture yourself starting for business in the morning if there were no wire and see what the verdict would be by quitting time. Considering the vital part that wire plays in the growing and transportation of food for man and beast, it 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. The ferry would hug its slip, and where is the railroader who in these days of congestion and short headway would dare to send a train out without the protection of the little lengths of bonding wire between the rails, that articulate the block signal system?

You could telephone the office? How and over what unless wire were used? Wireless? Without the coils and armatures that keep the instruments going or the aerials that seize the word wave in its flight, there would be no wireless.