What man had done man could do. If there was a place to test the efficacy of wire rope with its increased strength and diminishing size, it was the Portage Railway. So the Saxonburg wheatfield was turned into a ropewalk. Ceres made way for Vulcan. The neighbors, as soon as material could be shipped in from the Falls of the Beaver River, where wire drawing was done, found themselves under young Roebling's direction twisting wires, with rude appliances for torsion, into a fabric which had never been made or seen or probably heard of in America before, but which was destined, in a comparatively short time, to change the face of industry. [Sidenote: WIRE ROPE PROVES ITS PULLING POWER] It is easy to imagine the caustic comments of the Pennsylvania countryside, and the forebodings with which the pioneer installed his cables on what was then a conspicuous engineering labor. But it worked. Engineering audacity, plus scientific skill and native faculty for doing things, solved the problem of the Portage, but it did far more than that. The fame of it was soon broadcast and the orders for wire rope came flooding from all that fast opening country. Roebling had found his job. Destiny had him by the collar and he bade farming good-bye. [Illustration: HOISTING A BATTLESHIP TOWER WITH WIRE ROPE] It was in 1840 that the first Roebling rope was finished. Eight years later, the year when the revolution burst forth in the Teutonic empires, he moved his plant and its business to Trenton, and began forthwith to build the foremost wire rope factory in the world. Nothing can be more amusing or reveal more clearly what brains and energy have been able to accomplish in the arena of American opportunity than to contrast the picture of the first Roebling factory in Trenton, which suggests the rudest of farmsteads, with the sky-piercing chimneys and the mile or more of many-windowed brick buildings in and around the Jersey capital today, where the Roebling work is done. The three big factory groups which have grown from the shabby little buildings of 1848 are the fruit of intelligence and ceaseless endeavor, but they are reared primarily on a basis of manufacturing honor, and ruled by the general thesis that forever and ever quality comes before price. This means keeping faith with the structural iron worker, swinging pigmy-small five hundred feet above the din of the city streets; with the sailor, the miner, the rigger; with the hurrying multitude that packs the elevators in tall buildings, and with the aviator, to whom a breaking wire may spell death. That is the reason the Roebling Company has outgrown the limits of Trenton in the last decade and a half and with its overflow founded a city of its own; that is the reason why Roebling has almost got into the Thesaurus as a synonym for wire in every civilized language under the sun.