GREATER TRENTON SECTION
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has designated as
a Landmark, the Roebling 80-Ton Wire Rope Machine not only for
its individual engineering merit, but also as a symbol of the
achievements of the Roebling family and their company.
It is indeed fortunate that the planning of the Trenton Roebling
Community Development Corporation and DKM Properties Corporation
for the redevelopment of the John A. Roebling's Sons Company historic
industrial complex has included preservation of the Roebling 80-Ton
Wire Rope machine as a centerpiece of their efforts. Otherwise
this only remaining Roebling machine would be lost to posterity.
The Roebling family and the wire rope company they created achieved international recognition for the design and construction of our nation's greatest suspension bridges. John Augustus Roebling was a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur who established his firm in Trenton in 1849. His three equally brilliant and industrious sons, Washington, Ferdinand, and Charles, built the company into a major manufacturing business that designed and produced wire rope and related products for a world market.
The Roebling legacy is embodied today not only in the Cincinnati,
Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Manhattan, Bear Mountain, George Washington,
and Golden Gate Bridges, but also in two manufacturing plants,
in Trenton and in Roebling, New Jersey. Constantly anticipating
technological change, the Roebling's wire rope products contributed
to the development of shipping, railroading, elevators, telegraphs,
electricity, mining, cable cars, construction, tramways, and airplanes.
John A. Roebling, who immigrated to America from Germany in 1831,
had studied bridge engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic Institute.
After trying his hand at farming in Saxonburg, near Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, John worked as an assistant engineer building a
canal across the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania.
In the mid-1830's, canal boats were hauled over the mountains
on inclined railways with hemp hawsers, which rapidly wore out.
Having seen wire used in cables in his native country, Roebling
experimented with twisting wires by hand and developed a wire
rope to replace the hemp hawsers. Its immediate success brought
orders for more wire rope, which he continued to make on a rope
walk on his farm for a number of years.
Recognizing the potential of the wire rope manufacturing business
and the need to be near transportation and eastern markets, Roebling
established a manufacturing plant along the Delaware & Raritan
Canal in the Chambersburg section of Trenton in 1849. During the
1850's and 60's, he designed and built suspension bridges utilizing
his wire rope and cable technology over the Niagara River at Niagara
Falls, over the Allegheny River at Pittsburgh, and over the Ohio
River at Cincinnati.
Roebling then turned his attention to the design of the crowning
achievement of his career, the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River
between New York and Brooklyn. In 1869 while surveying for the
bridge location, his foot was crushed by a ferryboat in a tragic
accident which resulted in his death ten days later from lockjaw.
This left the construction of the bridge to his son and assistant
Washington Augustus Roebling, who had studied engineering at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute
Washington Roebling (1837- 1926) spent the next decade and a half completing the Brooklyn Bridge. With his health nearly shattered at the end of this endeavor, he spent most of the rest of his life in semi-retirement in Trenton. In 1921, at the age of 84, he assumed the presidency of the Roebling Company, which he held until his death in 1926.
His brothers, Ferdinand Wilhelm Roebling (1842-1917) and Charles
Gustavus Roebling (1849-1918), took over their father's business
and built it into a company employing 10,000 people at its peak.
Despite his afflictions, Washington played a key role in making
business decisions, but he was not involved in the day-to-day
affairs until after the death of his brothers and nephew, Karl,
who was president in 1921.
Ferdinand, known as F.W., oversaw the financial, marketing, and
sales portions of the business. Charles oversaw the production
portion of the business, and like his father, personally supervised
the design and construction of the buildings and machinery required
to meet the ever burgeoning demand for wire rope.
In the early 1870's, the brothers took over the company from Charles
Swan, their father's loyal manager. At the time it had 85 male
employees, ten of which were children under sixteen. In the next
decade the company produced wire and wire rope for bridges, shipping,
and the recently developed technologies of the elevator and the
telegraph. In the 1880's the brothers established the Electric
Wire Division to produce galvanized and copper strands for municipal
electrification and the many growing uses of electric power and
communications.
By the 1890's, the cable car business had ushered in ''a prosperous
period of rope making" as Washington noted in his memoirs.
The demand for ever longer cable car ropes led Charles to design
and build the 80-Ton Rope Machine to produce 30,000 foot-long
ropes. Between 1904 and 1914 JARSCO produced enormous quantities
of wire rope for the tramways and digging operations needed to
build the Panama Canal.
The turn of the century brought the Roeblings back into the bridge business, with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, while demand for electrical wire continued to soar. Having built their Chambersburg plant to its capacity, in 1902 the brothers constructed a new plant for the Electrical Wire Division one mile south along the canal in Trenton.
When the company needed to separate its supply of rod for wire
from the vagaries of foreign sources, it built a huge plant, with
blast furnaces and rod mills, along the Delaware River in Kinkora,
ten miles south of Trenton. In the absence of housing for its
workers, JARSCO built an entire town, with nearly 800 houses,
shopping, a school, a hotel, and recreational facilities. As time
progressed, the town came to be known as Roebling, New Jersey.
With the advent of the First World War, the company became a major
producer of submarine netting used in the English Channel, as
well as fine wires for airplane rigging and controls. By the end
of the War, both Charles and Ferdinand had died. Their nearly
fifty years of efforts in the family business had transformed
JARSCO from a local firm with less than 100 employees in 1870
to over 8,000 employees during the First World War. The annual
sales of JARSCO products had likewise soared from $250,000 to
over $47,000,000 in 1918.
In the 1920's and 30's, with Washington and then the third generation
of Roeblings in control, JARSCO manufactured and installed the
main cables and suspender ropes and cables for the Bear Mountain
Bridge and their greatest bridges, the George Washington (opened
1932) and the Golden Gate (1937). During the early 1940's JARSCO
again became a major supplier of wire rope products for the war
effort.
In 1952 the Roeblings sold JARSCO to the Colorado Fuel and Iron
Company (CF&I), with headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado. CF&I
ran the Roebling plants until the early 1970's when foreign suppliers
with lower labor costs made the domestic production of wire rope
uncompetitive.
From his earliest attempts at manufacturing wire rope, John Roebling
had to design and develop the necessary machinery. He received
his first patent in 1842 for a method of spinning wire rope which
maintained uniform tension on all the strands, one of the key
aspects of producing a quality rope.
John meticulously drew cross sections, plans, and details of wire
rope machines, their components and drive mechanisms, and the
buildings to house them. His earliest surviving drawings are for
a "Twist Carriage" he designed in 1848 for the first
wire rope walk in Trenton. These and dozens of his other machine
drawings in the Roebling Collection at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute illustrate his prodigious output in the 1850's and 60's
despite his bridge building and management activities.
By 1855 Roebling had developed a design for a vertical rope spinning
machine that became a prototype for the company's future vertical
machines. The "7 x 19 Rope Machine" he designed by November
1855 spun six 19-wire strands around a core strand to produce
"fine rope" for flexible applications. Nearly all the
later vertical machines designed either by him or by his son Charles
followed the same basic design. In 1885 Charles designed and built
a 30-ton rope machine. Because of its size, he had to overcome
friction problems at the base with a pressurized lubrication system.
Charles Gustavus Roebling was born on Dec. 9, 1849 in Trenton,
only two months after John Roebling had moved his family from
Saxonburg, Pa., to the property where he was building his new
rope factory. Charles was the third son, after Washington and
Ferdinand.
Charles G. Roebling, c. 1905:
Trentoniana Collection, Trenton Public Library.
Charles attended public school in Trenton and private school on Staten Island. He followed Washington to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated as a civil engineer in 1871. Like his two older brothers, Charles had inherited 30% of the Roebling Company from his father following his tragic death in 1869. A fourth brother, Edmund, who was involved in the business for only a short time, inherited the other 10%.
Upon graduation, Charles immediately returned to Trenton to assume
the manufacturing reins from Charles Swan, his father's longtime
manager. During the next five decades Charles devoted his life
to running the engineering and manufacturing departments of the
company. In the late 1870's he assumed the presidency of the company,
which he held for the rest of his life.
During his tenure, Charles supervised all the construction and outfitting for manufacturing the company's wire rope and related products. He expanded the company's original location in Chambersburg to over twenty-five acres, built two new plants in Trenton, and the huge plant in Roebling, N.J., ten miles south of Trenton.
In 1905 Charles personally supervised the design and construction
of the village at Roebling for the company's employees and their
families. While disclaiming suggestions that he was building an
"ideal" town, Charles designed the buildings, street
layout, and landscaping with exceptional care. The town included
an assembly hall, a school, a fire house, a boy scout lodge, an
inn, athletic fields, a bakery and other shops, all of which the
company built or contributed to.
Besides his work at the mill, Charles built the Oil City, Pa., suspension bridge, and supervised the installation of the main cables for the Williamsburg Bridge in (1903).
Charles was an accomplished pianist, and he amassed a large collection
of orchids in his home conservatory, including several species
which he personally developed. For most of his life he lived in
a large house at 330 West State Street in Trenton, within a block
of Washington's and Ferdinand's houses. At the time of his death
in 1918, he was reputed to be the wealthiest of the Roebling brothers.
Charles' son Washington perished on the Titanic in 1912, and two
other children died in infancy. His grandson by one of his two
surviving daughters, Charles Roebling Tyson, became president
of the company in the 1940's, the position his grandfather held
for over 40 years.
By the early 1890's, cable cars had become a popular means of
street transportation in many cities. As usual, the Roeblings
had moved quickly to produce wire rope for this new market. Ferdinand's
marketing and sales efforts were so successful that for a while
the company captured all of the business. The increase in orders
outstripped the capacity of the new rope shop that Charles had
built in the mid 1880's.
The cable car companies needed exceptionally long ropes with as
few splices as possible. In 1893 Charles designed a vertical machine
to lay up to 30,000 feet of 1.5 inch rope. It was called the 80-Ton
Rope Machine because 80 tons was the total weight of the strand
that could be mounted on the machine for one spinning. To house
this mammoth, he built a square building on the end of his 1880s
rope shop. Because of the machine's size, Charles had to design
the machine and the building as an integral unit (see cover illustration).
He gave the building a Mansard roof to match the 1885 section
of the rope shop which housed the 30Ton machine. Both of these
"rope rooms" are extant today within a larger rope shop
that the company built in the 1930's.
Spindle and strand reels on 80-Ton Rope Machine, 1987: Jet Lowe,
Historic American Engineering Record, for TRCDC.
As in the earlier vertical machines, six spools of wire or strand
are mounted on yokes which are arranged in a circle on a horizontal
frame called a spider. The reels were kept tight on the carriages
by means of a hemp rope which could be adjusted for greater or
lesser tension by a ratchet. The spider weighed 10 1/2 tons, while
the loaded reels weighed just over 10 tons each.
The spider is mounted on a long vertical shaft, or spindle, which
is hollow to accommodate the core strand, which comes up from
below. The yokes turned in the opposite direction from the spindle
as they rotated around it. This prevented the twist in the strands
that would otherwise progressively accumulate from the revolution
of the spindle.
At the top of the spindle the strands passed through a preforming
head which gave them a slight helix or kink. This enabled them
to be rayed tightly together around the core strand within the
closing die above the preforming head.
The finished rope passed over a sheave, or wheel, above the spindle and then passes several times around a pair of pullout drums or wheels. It is the turning of the pullout drums that actually pulled the rope off the spools and through the closing apparatus. The drums were eight feet in diameter and were originally powered by leather belts.
The rope passed over another sheave and down to the floor level
where it was wound around a shop spool for handling within the
plant. A "fleeting device" moved the rope back and forth
across the width of the spool. After cutting to the required lengths
and installing special fittings such as end sockets, the finished
rope was spun onto shipping reels.
The 80-ton machine is 49 feet tall above the floor, and 64 feet in overall height. The spider, or platform, which supports
the strand reels is 20 feet in diameter. The strand reels are 70 inches in diameter, while the take-up reel is ten feet in diameter.
In a 27 feet wide pit that reaches 15 feet below the floor level,
there is a series of bevel gears and pinions which turned the
spindle and the spools. The primary power for the machine was
originally transferred through leather belts to a drum which turned
a 5 1/2 inch horizontal shaft. This shaft turned a bevel gear
nearly seven feet wide and a pinion 3 1/2, feet wide. The gears
could be adjusted to vary the turning of the spools relative to
the turning of the spindle, this enabled the machine to produce
ropes of different lays, the "lay" being the length
that one strand requires to make one turn around the rope. Different
applications require different lays. Elevators, for example, require
flexible rope with a relatively short lay, while cable cars require
ropes of longer lay. John Roebling had developed these various
capacities on his earliest vertical machines in the 1850's.
Drive mechanism in underground pit on 80-Ton Rope Machine, 1987:
Jet Lowe, Historic American Record for TRCDC.
Although the Roebling tradition was to manufacture machine components
on site, they jobbed out certain parts to specialty manufacturers.
The molded gearing was made by Robert Poole & Son Co. of Baltimore,
the spindle and carriages were made by the Bush Hill Iron Works
in Philadelphia, the spider was made by the Southwark Foundry
and Machine Company in Philadelphia, and the pullout drums and
frame were made by the Walker Manufacturing Co. in Cleveland,
Ohio.
After the decline of the cable car business, the company used the machine to produce wire ropes for a variety of purposes. In 1968, the company modified the machine to manufacture its last product: five-inch wire rope, the largest ever made at that time.
The rope operated the boom crane and bucket on a ''4250W"
dragline machine made by Bucyrus-Erie for a surface mining and
land reclamation operation in southern Ohio. Billed as the world's
largest land machine, it was 410 feet long and could hoist material
to a height of 18 stories. The bucket had a capacity of 220 cubic
yards, or 325 tons of material.
The company set up the machine to make 1300-foot lengths of five-inch
wire rope. At 46 pounds per foot, each length weighed 59,800 pounds.
The five-inch rope had a breaking strength of 1,080 tons. The
company manufactured this rope for five years, and then leased
the machine to the American Steel & Wire Company (AS&W),
a Division of U.S. Steel which occupied the site across the former
canal from the Roebling works. The basic configuration of the
machine today exists as it was for the manufacture of this five-inch
rope.
Preforming head and closing die for 5" wire rope on 80-Ton Wire
Rope Machine, 1968: John A. Roebling's Sons Co., Division of
Colorado Fuel & Iron Company.
Schematic Drawing Showing Operation of 80-Ton Wire Rope Machine