There are records in the Roebling offices that tell interesting tales of special constructions, and pictures of enormous spools of rope, thousands of feet, in big diameters, running from spool to spool and since one spool is an ample carload, from one flat car to another, when loaded for shipment. Such were the huge street railway cables, made for Australia, for Kansas City, for Chicago and New York. There is an amusing story of the New York street railway engineer who insisted that the cable be made in one section, 33,000 feet in length, but who changed his mind about the beauty of it when he got the goods and saw the elephantine spools of packed metal caving in the manholes in the city streets on their way to the point of installation. A gigantic rope machine was built in the Roebling plant to twist this mammoth. The cars that carry these heavy cables were made specially for the purpose. An ordinary car would crumble under the load, but the machine and the cars are still in use, and busy. When cables for street railways were discarded in favor of trolley, wire rope men thought the day of doom had come, but the field for wire rope for other uses has widened so fast and so far, in a rapidly widening world, that the cable orders, big as they were, have never been missed. It furnishes a significant index of the growth in all industrial activity, for there is no new phase of development or manufacture or work of any kind in which wire rope, or wire in some form or other, does not play an indispensable part. [Sidenote: POWER IN THE ROEBLING PLANTS] In the three Roebling plants there are four electric power stations, aggregating over 16,000 horse-power, and more than 150 boilers with 25,000 horse-power. The coal consumption on the three plants is approximately 1000 tons a day, and the fuel oil consumption about 20,000,000 gallons per year. In the Kinkora plant at Roebling there are thirteen miles of standard gauge railroad track. CHAPTER VI WORKING FOR UNCLE SAM Of the load that war laid on productive industry, it is beyond question that wire, the country over, carried its share. In the retrospect, every man and every organization tries consciously or unconsciously to figure out what part individual effort contributed to the big result. Fortunately, perhaps, the question of relative accomplishment and of everybody's share in the outcome is one of the things that can never be settled, but in the picture war has left on the memory of those who lived it, wire and wire rope can never be very far away.