![]() In 1857 Hallidie left the Mother Lode and returned to San Francisco where he set up a factory on the corner of Mason and Chestnut Streets to manufacture wire rope. Hallidie manufactured rope for this project consisting of three spliced pieces one-eighth of an inch thick, 1200 feet long, which lasted for two years as opposed to 75 days for the previous type used. ![]() The cars operated along Hallidie's wire rope, which replaced regular rope, by gravity, the loaded cars pulling empty ones up to the mill as they went down. A year later he built a flume near Gray Eagle Bar that transported ore to a quartz mill 1100 feet up a hill. ![]() Then in 1855, young Hallidie built a wire suspension bridge and aqueduct 220 feet long at Horse Shoe Bar on the Middle Fork of the American River. Hallide developed the first successful aerial tramways in the West, after a few years of drifting from camp to camp working claims, narrowly avoiding disasters both natural and manmade, and briefly running a restaurant at Michigan Bluff in the Mother Lode. One of Roebling's friends and competitors, Peter Cooper, began dabbling in aerial tramways to transport materials for factories on the East Coast. Roebling's company expanded, as did the demand for wire rope, until it became one of the largest producers of iron and steel rope used in building bridges during the 19th century. Roebling, who would later build the Brooklyn Bridge, was manufacturing wire rope at his factory in Pennsylvania, in 1840. Binks was joined shortly after by Andrew Smith, a Scot, who held patents on several improved varieties of wire rope and was incidentally the father of young Andrew, who took the name Hallidie from his godfather Sir Andrew Hallidie, royal physician to the court of Queen Victoria.Īcross the water in the United States, John A. The first commercial success of wire rope was in England when, in 1830, George Binks convinced the Royal Navy to replace hemp rope on its fleet of ships with wire rope. Woven much like hemp rope but much stronger, it ranged in gauges from the thickness of a hair to a finger, and was used to transport ore from the mines, equipment and supplies to the mines, and occasionally passengers as well, who both trembled and wondered at the breathtaking views they saw from the aerial trams operating on the wire ropes. Wire rope served a number of purposes in the mines of California, Nevada and other western mining centers in the latter half of the 19th century. Hallidie and his father both held several patents for the manufacture and use of cable, or wire rope as it was called. ![]() Andrew Hallidie is considered the father of the cable car, although he was not the only inventor to dabble in the use of cable as a means of transportation. ![]()
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