Fig. 6: The Roebling Company manufactured the GWB suspender ropes on its 1893 Roebling 80-Ton Rope Machine at its Trenton Works. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), which acquired the Roebling Company in 1952, altered the machine in 1968 to produce five-inch wire rope, the biggest at the time, for Big Muskie, a Bucyrus-Erie excavator at a strip mine in Ohio. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the 80-Ton Rope Machine as a National Mechanical Engineering


Landmark in 1989. C.W. Zink.


In 1915, Charles Roebling followed up by patenting


“an improved wire rope” with six 37-wire, “novel strands” composed of five different sizes of wire – a center of one size, a first layer of nine smaller wires, a second layer of nine wires a little smaller than the center wire, and an outer layer of 18 wires of two additional alternating sizes. Charles’ patent application left the center of the rope unspecified but claimed that “the arrangement of wires in the strand… avoid to a great extent air spaces or voids and thus secure an


increase in metallic area for a given diameter of strand, and a corresponding increase in tensile strength of the strand.” When the Roebling Company won the contract in 1927 for furnishing and installing the cables and suspender ropes on the Hudson River Bridge, Charles Sunderland was the Company’s Chief Engineer and closely supervised the entire project. A native of Yorkshire, England, Sunderland became Chief Engineer of the Roebling Bridge, Tramway and Wire Rope Departments in 1910.


WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE JULY-AUGUST 2012 27


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