In looking back over the war work it is plain that the service rendered by the company in manufacturing material for the Allies, prior to America's entrance into hostilities, was of large value in familiarizing it with forms of production afterward required for our own Army and Navy. Another thing which aided in meeting a vast demand was the unremitting attention which the company had given to the perfection of aircraft material, from the first successful flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903. At that time study and experiment had been started in the Roebling factories looking to the production of aircraft wire and strand and cord for all the different parts involved, which should combine the utmost strength with the minimum of weight, with special reference to the stresses peculiar to aviation work. When the hour of need came, Roebling aircraft products had reached a stage of perfection which saved a world of hurried experimentation and development. It was a demonstration in preparedness, although up to 1914 the work had been done solely to keep industrial pace with a new and important development of mechanical science. [Sidenote: THE GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHMENTS THAT CALLED FOR WIRE AND ROPE] It is a fairly long list of Government establishments that is shown on the Roebling records as calling for war supply of wire rope. It includes, in the Navy Department, the Bureau of Steam Engineering, Bureau of Construction and Repair, Bureau of Ordnance, the Bureau of Yards and Docks and the Naval Aircraft Factory. In the War Department were the following: Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Depot Quartermaster, Chief Signal Officer, Chief of Engineers, the Army Transport Service, the Quartermaster General's Office, the Signal Corps, the Aircraft Production Bureau, United States Engineer's Office, General Engineer Depot, Bureau of Insular Affairs, Procurement Division, the Balloon Department of the Aircraft Production Board, and the Director General of Military Railways. Always there were the United States Shipping Board, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and the demands for these alone were a business. In addition to all this the Committee made allocation of orders for the Argentine Naval Commission, the British War Commission, the Imperial Munitions Board, the Italian Commission and the Belgian Government. It doesn't seem such a large roster, but it took a world of wire to go around it. A few figures out of the total allocations will suggest what the total demand was and the task that it involved. [Sidenote: SOME OF THE BIG DEMANDS]