Back in my working days, there was about a two year period that I spent a lot of my time in the San Francisco area. There was a lot I liked about the area and the city itself. One of the attractions that always fascinated me was the cable cars.
While continuing the process of de-cluttering and cleaning out things that have outlived their usefulness, I ran across a pamphlet that I had apparently picked up years ago. The pamphlet gave a brief history of the cable cars and it brought back some fond memories of my time in the “city by the bay.”
Back in 1869, Andrew S. Hallidie watched as four horses struggled to pull a streetcar up one of San Francisco’s steepest hills. About halfway to the top, one of the horses slipped on the wet cobblestones. The driver applied the brakes, but the chain snapped and the car slid backwards down the hill, dragging the poor horses with it. The horses didn’t survive and when Hallidie saw that, he decided to so something about it.
Andrew Hallidie’s father was an inventor that held a number of patents for “wire rope,” the forerunner of wire cable. Andrew had inherited his father’s inventiveness and his sense of adventure brought him from England to California, where he prospected for gold for a few relatively unsuccessful years. He tried blacksmithing, and then turned to building bridges — the suspension kind that used lots of his father’s wire rope.
Hallidie held a patent on the “Hillidie Ropeway,” a steam-powered cable line he’d invented while working in the gold territory. The ropeway, also called a tramway, transported cars full of ore across mountainous areas on a wire rope that had a tensile strength of 160,000 pounds per square inch. At the time of the streetcar accident that killed the horses, Hallidie lived in San Francisco and owned a company that manufactured….. wire rope!
His idea for a cable-operated streetcar started with laying a moving cable in a groove in the street. He attached a grip to the cable — when it grabbed the cable, the car would move forward. When it released, the car would stop. He spent the next couple of years trying to drum up financial backing and the project became known as “Halidie’s folly.” But he finally managed to raise enough money to build an experimental line.
On August 2, 1873, Hallidie and some of his engineers gathered for the first trial run — at 4 a.m. He chose the very early hour to minimize his embarrassment if it didn’t work. The driver, known as a grip man, climbed onto the car, but when he looked down and saw the bottom of the hill far below, he stepped down and said, “I have a wife and kids at home,” and walked away.
No one else volunteered, so Hallidie climbed into the car and took hold of the levers that operated the grip. The car glided smoothly down the hill and when it reached the bottom, he turned the car around and made it back up the hill — all without mishap.
Later that day, it seemed like the whole town turned out for the first public run. And even before waiting to see if it worked, 90 fearless San Franciscans climbed into the car that was built to hold 26 passengers. Many of them took the first official ride perched on the roof and hanging off the side of “Halidie’s folly.” For many, many years, San Franciscans rode the cable cars to and from work and shopping. Today it’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world. And — it has the distinction of being an official National Historic Landmark.
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