world’s catalogue of weapons.

Wire is an influential member of that family of material giants which have come into greatness within a relatively short time but which none the less weigh heavily in the destinies of mankind. It is old, too, but until a new demon of material ambition began to stir 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, that there was wire in the pyramids, that Nineveh was beating out wire eight hundred years before the tragedy of Calvary, and that metal heads with hair of wire were found in the ruins of Herculaneum and are now again entombed in the showcases of the Portici Museum.

In a world chasing the present and future dollar ethnology moves slowly; the encyclopedias have not yet told that pre-Inca Peru, hiding in its tombs the secrets 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’s art, and to have spun the wire on woolen filaments in the self same way of lamination in which Paris does it for the uniforms of haughty major generals today.

And yet, down to the century when the popes were ruling from Avignon, when Rienzi was raising hob in the streets of Rome and titles of nobility were being won on the bloody fields of Crécy and Poictiers and Bannockburn, none of the many metal workers, through all the ages and in 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 Nuremberg and Augsberg tell of a “wire drawer” and later on one Rudolf had a wire mill at Nuremberg. The chances are that Rudolf was a capitalist and that the inventor sold him the invention for a pot of beer, and grumbled for the rest of his medieval days after the manner of his kind.

Six centuries have gone since then, and in a world of wire it is safe to say, on the strength of some inquiry, that ninety per cent of the people whose lives and well being hang on wire from one year’s end to another have no more knowledge of how drawn wire is made than the Egyptian who hammered out his quota in the days of old Rameses.

England and France, quick to see what the process meant, even to the slow commerce of those times, fussed away for another three hundred years, trying to perfect methods of wire drawing to the point of independence in the trade, but it was a stern chase. “Iron wire,” for all utility 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 the making of wire from steel for musical purposes, but to 1769 Broadwood was still sticking to German iron and even in 1790 was still buying wire from Pohlman in Nuremberg. So Bavaria, where first the idea of drawing metal had been hatched, was still leading the world in its craft.

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