To measure the growth of wire, with its many forms and composites, during the last forty years would be to trace in detail not alone the progress of science, invention and mechanical industry, but the myriad conceits that have come ostensibly to facilitate the process of living. In the search for new comforts, for means of avoiding physical exertion, the world has been littered with novelties, and most of them depend on wire. Personal life as well as commerce and industry is interlaced with wire. With the opening of new countries, the increase of populations, the flocking of outland people to the cities and the consequent lack of farm labor, ingenuity has been more heavily taxed to find the quick and easy way of doing the world's work and keeping food in its mouths. Wire, so adaptable to the heaviest as well as the lightest tasks, has labored from year to year under an increasing demand.
It is not surprising therefore that a company which in such an impressive way had fixed itself in recognition as the first exponent of wire's usefulness should have grown in this period from modest commercial stature to a high place in its field and to the enjoyment of large production.
[Sidenote: THE GROWTH OF THE ROEBLING BUSINESS]
When the sons of John A. Roebling took up control of the business he had established, about one hundred men were employed and the product of their industry approximated $250,000 annually. Just before the beginning of the war more than eight thousand employees were engaged in the manufacture of Roebling products and the value of the output ran far into the millions. The factory which was so meagre and so humble in 1848 has spread its buildings not only over the surrounding acres, but across what were then neighboring farm lands until, constrained not alone by the pyramiding demand for its products but by the soaring values of the city that had grown up around it, and of which it had been in some measure the creator, it went pioneering again, sixteen years ago, down the Delaware, and established a new nucleus, which will suffice for a long period to come.
With the erection of the cables for the Williamsburg Bridge, the Roebling firm withdrew from the competitive field of engineering contracts and concentrated all its energies in the perfection of its product--wire.