All this is done with a great deal of rapidity but with no less care, the skill obtained by the workmen only by years of experience and by the technical men only by years of study. It required a thorough knowledge of steel and of the materials entering into the manufacture of steel, such as ore, pig iron and fuel, as well as of the properties and tests and manufacture of copper, tin, rubber, cotton, and various lubricants. And in the more general use of wire and wire rope, a thoroughly comprehensive knowledge of many other materials, all mechanical and electrical phenomena in fact, are essential. CHAPTER VII A CITY BUILT OUT OF HAND All up and down the Delaware, between Trenton and Philadelphia, the "quality folks" in olden times used to build stately homes, with broad acres at their backs and looking lordly, with their Grecian porticos, out from the high banks that command the stream. You may see some of them yet, faded and old and full of family history, most of which was not so important as it seemed to the builders. In the little towns that you pass on the trolley and the Camden and Amboy road, there is a certain Eighteenth Century somnolence, and a dingy pride of priority. They sleep on, as if it were creditable not to be busy. Bordentown, a few minutes' ride from Trenton, sits complacent amid its memories of the Bonapartes. It is there you change for Roebling. [Sidenote: ROEBLING, THE TOWN, A STORY IN ITSELF] Roebling--the town, not the plant--to which some attention has been given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor's pathway broad and bright. There's a town superintendent to look after things and he earns his pay. [Sidenote: BUILT TO MAKE WIRE AND ROPE] The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful notions about "welfare work." The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty, accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases to be lovely.