Andrew Hallidie tests the first cable car in San Francisco.
Hallidie is said to have conceived his idea in 1869 while watching a team of horses being whipped as they struggled to pull a car up wet cobblestones on Nob Hill. They slipped and were dragged to their deaths.
It so happened that Hallidie’s father held the British patent for wire-rope cable, and when the son came to the gold-rush fields, he put the cable to use hauling ore-laden cars from mines. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to envision horseless cable cars carrying passengers up San Francisco’s steep slopes. He formed the Clay Street Hill Railroad and got a contract to build a line up Nob Hill. It was an unqualified success, and cable cars have been operating in San Francisco ever since.
A number of cable car lines and companies sprang up in the wake of Hallidie’s success. Prior to the great earthquake and fire of 1906, fifty-three miles of cable car track stretched to virtually every corner of town. A vast underground pulley system moves a cable at a steady 9½ miles an hour, pulling the cable car along the tracks. The operator, or gripman, uses a lever to grip the cable moving beneath the street.
The system was nearly dismantled around 1950 by politicians who, some say, were in the pockets of vehicle, oil, and tire companies that wanted buses to replace cable. Friedel Klussmann founded the Citizens’ Committee to Save the Cable Cars and battled City Hall at every turn. The issue finally made it to the ballot, and San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to keep their cable cars.
The system’s been rebuilt—the cars refurbished but still propelled by underground cables. Those cables, however, are now pulled by electric motors instead of coal-fired steam engines.—TL