England and France, quick to see what the process meant, even to the slow commerce of those times, fussed away for another three hundred years, trying to perfect methods of wire drawing to the point of independence in the trade, but it was a stern chase. "Iron wire," for all utility wire in the beginning was drawn from Swedish iron, was beginning to take up a share of the white man's burden. Gold and silver and platinum and bronze were still favored in ornamental use, but for practical purposes iron refused to be displaced. Great Britain essayed in 1750 the making of wire from steel for musical purposes, but to 1769 Broadwood was still sticking to German iron and even in 1790 was still buying wire from Pohlman in Nuremberg. So Bavaria, where first the idea of drawing metal had been hatched, was still leading the world in its craft. Little by little, for the tide of industrial activity had barely begun to rise, new uses were found for wire. In one field after another it supplanted vegetable fibre where strength and durability were essential. As the world began to feel the Nineteenth Century surge of mechanical impulse, as life developed new facets and new needs, science sought new means of meeting them, and in the quest itself grew. Producing methods advanced with the new demands of invention. Always the wire makers spun their filaments a little finer. Men were weighing zephyrs and measuring the infinitesimal, and needed tools of increasing delicacy. Wire was the answer. [Illustration: DREDGING] Electricity, so long hidden from understanding, was led captive by a wire, not by a chain--and with its development wire has found a new and increasingly important role. The ductility of metals was at last being tested to the full. Seven one-thousandths, three one-thousandths, one one-thousandth--one record after another was passed. At last, by way of curiosity, a wire was drawn that measured one four-thousandth of an inch in diameter--twelve times finer than the hair on your head. The spider, so long counted a master workman, had been undone. The wire age was arriving--big wires to carry the world's heavy loads; fine wire to solve its molecular problems. The day of the hammer was done. CHAPTER II THE PIONEER Since Columbus the centuries have been gathering speed. At first it came slowly, for the need was not yet. Today a thought is born and tomorrow it is a giant, parting seas and moving mountains. The waste of yesterday is turned into the raw material of new manufacture, with its million wheels moving faster and faster. But back of it all, inevitably and eternally, is a busy human brain and unsatisfied energy.