A Century of Cable Cars (April/May 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 3)

A Century of Cable Cars

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Authors: William D. Middleton

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April/May 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 3

Beloved of San Franciscans for more than a century now, the sturdy cable cars cling tenaciously to the hills of their birth. They are fiercely protected as one of the crown jewels of Bay Area tourism—a columnist in the Chronicle once went so far as to say that, without them, San Francisco would only be a lumpy Los Angeles—but they are a good deal more than that.

A triumph of nineteenth-century American mechanical ingenuity, the cables were the first form of urban transportation that enjoyed any real success in displacing the animal-powered street railways that had dominated municipal transport for nearly fifty years.

Born in the 183Os, the horse-and mule-powered street railways grew into a great industry, grossing over a billion dollars a year, but they were far from ideal public transportation. The animals were seldom good for more than a few years in the punishing service, and they suffered from an endless variety of ailments. The huge stables required both a sizable initial investment and a high upkeep, and the business was never a very profitable one. Moreover, horsecars crept along at four or five miles an hour, and their speed severely limited the effective distance of street railway lines.

Cities tried a variety of mechanical alternatives without conspicuous success. Steam engines proved uneconomical in the small units needed for street railway service, and they were noisy and dirty in any case. Several attempts at “fireless” cars, using compressed air, pressurized ammonia, and even a boiler heated by the reaction of caustic soda with water, all ended in failure.

The concept of a moving, endless cable to propel vehicles through the city streets was at least as old as the horsecar industry itself. From 1812 onward, inventors had advanced proposals built around this idea. By 1858 E. S. Gardiner of Philadelphia had come up with a very detailed system for a street railway that included a constantly moving cable or rope and a gripping apparatus on each car to take hold of it. But although cable railways would be built along these lines, neither Gardiner nor any of the other early inventors were ever able to put their ideas to any practical test.

 

The first to actually try the idea was a brilliant Scot named Andrew Smith HaIlidie. Born in London in 1836, Hallidie was the son of Andrew Smith but later adopted the name of his godfather, Sir Andrew Hallidie, a noted physician. Andrew Smith manufactured wire rope, for which he had made several inventions, and young Hallidie gained some experience in wire-rope structures in his father’s business before emigrating to the United States in 1853 at the age of seventeen to seek his fortune in the California goldfields.

When he failed at mining, Hallidie turned to engineering and construction and soon established a considerable reputation. His first major success came in 1855, when, at only nineteen years of age, he