Andrew smith hallidie short biography

This spirit was well exemplified by the way A. Hallidie, of San Francisco, grappled with the transportation problem. The city of the Golden Gate is a very hilly city, and yet some of the finest building sites are on the steep slopes or summits of these hills.

Biography of the inventor of the cable car, by the author of "Cable Car Days in San Francisco." Also Hallidie's obituary from the Street Railway Journal, May 12, This article appeared in .

Even to-day, when millions of dollars have been spent in cutting and paving streets on these hills, it would be almost an impossibility to use many of the best sites if there were no cheap and easy means of public transportation. The ordinary horse-car could never have scaled these steep grades, and even had horses been found capable of ascending them, it is doubtful whether passengers could have been found brave enough to risk their lives in making the descent.

Something had to be invented to meet the necessity, for, as yet, the powers of electricity were not applied to the street-car as they are to-day. At this juncture Mr. Andrew Smith Hallidie turned his inventive energies to the problem, and those who knew him realized that it was as good as settled, for both he and his father were natural inventors, and both were interested in the solving [p.

Andrew Smith Hallidie, an American inventor and entrepreneur, was born Mar. 16, , in Scotland.

As early as his father had patented his invention of making ropes and cables from iron and steel wire, and in , when Andrew himself was but nineteen years old, he had shown his own power by designing and constructing an aqueduct, suspended on a wire, with a span of two hundred and twenty feet, across the middle fork of the American River.

In the mines there was a growing demand for wire rope, and Andrew determined to supply it. In June, , he extemporized hand machinery for making wire rope, and produced the first wire cable made on the Pacific Coast. The following year he established a manufactory for wire ropes in San Francisco. Then, for several years, he built wire suspension bridges, as well as made cables for use in the mines, — where it was found far more reliable than ordinary rope to haul up the cars loaded with ore and miners from the depths.

In he took out a patent for a rigid suspension bridge, and the same year invented and put into use another contrivance for conveying freight over a mountainous country by means of an overhead continuous wire rope. By its means timbers, fuel, tools, provisions and all kinds of supplies are transported to the mines, and in the returning cages or buckets ore is sent to the mill.

By means of this pulley, — which, [p. Another important feature is the gearing, which allows the heavy loads of ore descending to pull up the supplies, etc.