It is interesting to compare our modern hoisting derrick with the apparatus used to raise the stones for the monument. The derrick of today consists of a guyed, vertical mast, an adjustable boom hinged to the base of the mast, with boom falls, and hoist falls, each with their cables and pulleys, or blocks. At the base of the mast, a bull ring serves to turn the mast by power. The whole combination is called the derrick. When we get accustomed to the old English or American custom of calling the mast the post or derrick, and the boom either the gaff or derrick, a little study enables us to comprehend how the monument was built. The lower courses were raised by the “Holmes Hoisting Apparatus,” designed by a practical seaman of Boston. This device could command a circle 100 feet in diameter. Except that it had no bull ring to turn the mast, it appears much like the derrick of today. With steam power available for the upper courses, Savage seems to have modified the boom of Holmes to serve as a nearly horizontal “lever,” on which a “wheel carriage” drew the stone inward, to its desired position for placement. In other words, apparently, the boom became today’s monorail. A somewhat obscure, English description of the means used to hoist masonry 100 years ago, tells of two devices. One was a “movable derrick crane,” with a vertical post, supported by two timber backstays, and a movable hinged “jib or derrick,” which could be today’s boom. This assembly, of course, corresponded to today’s stiff-leg derrick, in which the back guys are replaced by timber members. The other English device for raising stones was practically exactly like today’s traveling crane, and that was the name it went by in England, 100 years ago. Our construction forebears of over a century ago had to use ropes and chains for all purposes; there were no wire ropes. About the time Savage set his first stone, John A. Roebling was making the first American wire rope cable, in a largely outdoor plant located on a level meadow on his farm in Saxonburg, Pa. Wire rope had real advantages in construction work, because of its superior strength and its much less stretch under load. A crude sketch, dated 1837, shows that the derrick for the monument was guyed by chains, which attached to the top of the mast and passed over timber brackets at the staging level, and thence vertically down to weights at the ground. In his long length, the stretching and shrinking of a rope under rain, load, and temperature changes would be difficult to control.