 transportation. I have a quick overview of Mechanics Institute, and then I'm going to read the bios of our two fantastic presenters this evening. Who is here at Mechanics Institute for the very first time? Woohoo! Welcome! So that means everyone else is a returning guest. Welcome back. The Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854, so we're a very old nonprofit. We are a historical landmark, cultural center, gorgeous multi-story library. If you haven't seen the library, please, please, please check it out this evening on your way down the steps or the elevator. It's truly beautiful. A world-renowned chess program and event center like what we're doing this evening. We offer anywhere from 5 to 15 events per week, anything from writer's groups and book groups, classes, chess tournaments, and chess engagement in the schools and here on site. We have author talks, film series, and special programs. It is my pleasure to welcome you all for our special event this evening as part of celebrating 150 years of cable cars in San Francisco. We have our two presenters and special guests, Mike Fifth and Don Holmgren. And we have their book for sale, Water Music in the Tracks, in the back. We also have a very, very new published book by Pete, Scott Harris, and Leah Smith called, Community is My Ride. And it's an absolute delight of drawings and pictures and stories of the uni transportation system here in the Bay Area. So I highly encourage y'all to check out both books and please take some copies home. They are wonderful, wonderful gifts and treasures. We also are joined this evening by another special guest, the SFMTA librarian, Kevin Schrahan, who is in the back there. Kelly is cataloging and archiving SFMTA's history. So we have tribal photographs, stickers, and some books and materials that you're welcome to check out and take home into the future. So lots of fun goodies to take home. I would love to introduce our presenters today. Mike Fifth is a native fourth generation San Franciscan and board member of the Friends of the Cable Car Museum. He is a graduate of both the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University History Department. For 30 years he has taught California and United States history as well as western civilization at local secondary school and colleges. As a director of the Friends of the Cable Car Museum, he has given lectures and written historical articles for the museum. His article, Kalanaeus Bolly, the story of the Clay Street Hill Railroad Cable Cars, appeared in the winter 2009 edition of the Argonaut. And Don Holmgren is a native San Franciscan and a product of the public school system at the California School of Mechanical Arts where he majored in mechanical drawing. This was followed by training and apprenticeship programs at Enterprise of Engine Company and American Hand Company. He continued on with a ten-year stint as a mechanical design draftsman at the California Packing Company. His career was interrupted by two years in the U.S. Army where he served as artillery surveyor. He eventually joined the Ortho Division of Chevron Chemical Company, retiring from there as a drafting coordinator for their Richmond facility. In addition to his activities with the Friends of the Cable Car Museum, Don has contributed to the writing of two books on San Francisco Street, Railway History, and offering an article for the Bay Area Railroad Association Journal. Please join me in a warm welcome of Mike Hampton. I guess, are we ready? I apologize in advance if Don and I screwed up the microphones because Melissa told us we have to hold them like this and we have a tendency to kind of turn and look without doing it. So, just y'all can remind us if we're not doing it. Okay, so what we're going to be taking a look at here is not only the Cable Cars this anniversary, but also a little bit of how these early work in the mines, this connection with the Mechanics Institute also, because without Andrew Holliday, you know, Cable Cars may have come because he wants them to be the first to think of some kind of a cable system. He goes all the way back to the 1830s and earlier, but he was the first that really kind of perfected one. And in building the place for you know, Cable Cars, he drew a lot on his work in the mines. So, we're going to take a look at a lot of eclectic stuff. We'll probably tell you stories, we may get on track. You know, if we do, just Alyssa pulls us back because, y'all, you start telling the stories in San Francisco and pretty soon you're five blocks away and around the corner. Okay, well, the earlier is the Clay Street, you know, Cable, we'll be returning to that. All right, let me see if I remember what it was that told me. Okay, so Andrew Smith Holliday, born Andrew Smith, his father was also Andrew Smith, his father held several patents for a wider rope. A wider rope was basically the name in the 19th century that they gave to Cable. So, mainly because the uses of it on ships were really early and it replaced hemp rope because it was stronger and more durable. I'll talk a little bit about how that's made up. But Andrew Holliday worked with his father, his godfather, Sir Andrew Holliday, I believe, a lot of common names here, was the position to King William IV, I think, and Queen Victoria. So, he took the Sir Andrew Holliday because I don't think he thought he was pretty good luck. It would sound better, but that's why he took the name Holliday and became Andrew Smith Holliday. His father were engaged in surveying, a wider rope. They held several patents. Donald would be giving a little bit more about patents as we go through. But he was a very industrious young man and he was involved in a lot of things and it kind of affected his health. So, to sort of take the waters in a way, he just followed and parted through the Gold Rush and came to California, landing here in 1852. Halliday did a lot of work in the mines. He did some blacksmithing. He did some surveying. They tried their luck at prospecting. Well, by 1852, you know, the plaster gold was beginning to run out and his father easily got discouraged and he went home. Andrew decided to stay and try it for himself. He did, I think, very short and out of prospecting. He said, you know, the dirt showed but a pale hit of gold and he thought, well, it was a better part of Allen to not really pursue that line of work. So he put his knowledge of surveying and mechanics to work in turning out, well, eventually turning out a wider rope, but blacksmithing, you know. And what he had developed was his cable and his tramway system because, starting about the 1850s or so, tramways really were popping up all over the Gold Country. And many, much of the system is similar to cable cars, but basically, and you can still see some of the towers are still around in certain places. It was a way of conveying the ore, cheaper, less labor, and of course, it doesn't matter what the train is, it doesn't matter what the weather's like, you can go over gorges or chasms or whatever. So it's a huge, huge subject. It's fascinating. I'm only going to touch on it briefly with Hality because Hality was only one of many, but he's kind of credited for the first tramway, the first real working tramway system in the Gold Islands. Okay, so as I mentioned, wire rope is used on ships. It replaced hand, also hand, you know, if you're using the hoist and stuff, it could break and did break. This was much safer, it was much more reliable, and of course, it lasted longer. And you can see the basic diagram of the wire rope because this is basically very close to what's used today. Cable is still turned out. There are many styles of cable and widths and everything, but we'll look a little at the cable used in the cable car system, but it really is a direct replica of this. And, okay. So you can see that it's basically, you know, several wires twisted together to one. I think the ratio is 19 and 6 and is now done. 19 wires, strands wired together to make six, you know, big wires. With kind of a sysil core, which is a kind of a, well, we often used to say, yeah, but then everybody in the audience would start snickering, so, you know, you cannot smoke cables. People have asked, but they've also asked, it's like a chocolate bar, but that's mostly the kids. So this is kind of the basic design. You can see here, this has got the wire cable center with cable cars because you want the wire to be plugged in turn. They use a sysil core, which is, as I said, kind of gives it some flexibility. But it comes from the work on ships with wire rope, and that's where his father and Andrew Halley also had some happens. And happens are very important in this history, as Don will show you. Okay. This is not a very good photo, unfortunately. I'm sorry, but this is an example of the aerial tram. I don't know if that's Halley there, but everything that I show you is going to have Halley in it. See, that's Andrew Halley. So that's Andrew Halley. But this is the kind of tower they would set up at intervals, and they have these, what they call pulleys, or sheaves, depending on the size, to convey the wire rope. And this is a... Sorry, I got a little bit of a camera here. This is a single cable for coming and going. You'll see some that are double for a little more stability. But basically, the problem is that even with the early tramways, you had to take the bucket off and unload it, you know, detach it from the cable, where Halley came up with kind of a unique system that would actually carry the buckets, and there was an automatic sort of, you know, duty that would dump the cables. And what did it say, time saved labor, and it quickly became the very popular bike. In the 1960s, even in the 1970s, you would still work on this. And it was, according to the people who used it, it was one of the most favorite tramways in the mind. So it was very dependable, and very well built, and it did save. It also could carry water, it could carry... Or would you carry? Carry passengers, because, as they say, terrain, gorges, hazems, whatever, doesn't make a difference, because you don't have to pay the roads to get there. And that was a huge outlay for some cable companies. There should be some of mining companies in the early days. So Halley, even before the cable car, made quite a bit of money on mining. These are just a couple of drawings from the bank robin of the tramway system, the endless rope, which I'll explain in a minute. And here's the single. This is a great picture. It's actually not known whether this one ever went into operation, because the single cable apparently was quite as dependable as the double one, which you've got in this picture here. You can see where the carriers... Here's the buckets, and the carriers, the rope, the wire rope. The space intervals would pull these on them, and they would operate by steam, and they would be conveyed more down to the pressures, or, you know, the prospectors died up pretty early, and then it was, you know, quartz-pressing, hydrold. There were a lot of different ways of mining that they all cost money. And so Halley's endless tramway became very important. A fascinating subject. There's a great book. A great book called... I think it's called Writing the Wire Rope. Is it done? Yeah, yeah. It tells you everything you want. Writing the high wire. Writing the high wire, yeah. Great titles they'd be able to use for them. This one is kind of... It ties right into cable crime, so that's why we wanted to spend a little time on it. Okay, I just want to show you a couple of things that I've been talking about. This is the frame here. You can see those tall frames to hold the... basically to hold the cable at so many intervals, just support it, okay? And we've also got buckets here. They were permanently attached, where originally they were kind of hung on the cable, and you had to take them off. These are permanently attached, and then the buckets are fixed to that. And by means of some mechanism, it empties automatically. So Halley was really quite an adventure. He really came up with some interesting ideas. This is important to cable cars, but it's also important to Halley, because this ripple here, what they call the bull wheel, was fast and on different ends, and that's what kept the cable from slipping, which is also a problem with cable cars, and it wasn't a problem with cable cars. So it alternately grips, and then when the tension is relieved, it opens up and lets the cable move freely, which is part of the cable car mechanism as well. So Halley pulled up a lot about these ideas, and when he began thinking of a system, this really was instrumental to it. He already had it kind of worked out in his mind. He also built suspension bridges, he used a wire rope, and he built several of them, you can see a few over here, up in the Klamath, the American River, Trinity, Stanislaus, a lot of these suspension bridges, using his wire rope, or people would buy the wire rope. John Riebling was another company back east of one of the first, really before Halley, maybe even to make wire rope. And these were used in the suspension bridges, but there were a lot of bridges, a lot of bridge building going on up in the mines. Oh, and across the western states, really with the gold rush, mining, and the comp stock load, and all of that. This one is an example, it's a picture, a little fuzzy, but this is the Alexander Bridge, he built on the Fraser River, it's a well-known one. There's a little controversy, because there was a big flood in, was that like 19, 20 down there? I think so, what about 19, 20 down there? And it washed the whole thing out. Now these suspension bridges were supposed to be tougher than that, but this one did get washed out, I'm not sure, I don't think they rebuilt this one, but it's an example of a bridge that Halady actually provided the wire for, and some of the specs, he had built them himself, companies rather hired to build these. So, again, Halady a man of many talents. Halady left the mines, and moved to San Francisco, where he had several companies, AS Halady and Company, you can see here, that was one of his early companies, about 1869 or so, 1860s, and he was making most of the wire rope, his wire rope became very well known, because it was strong, it was durable, apparently they say it lasted longer than others. When he first came here, they said he belted every horseshoe he could find to get enough metal to make these cables, because they took us a lot out in California. But he did very well, he had several employees, had several offices, and several of them across, actually the western states, you can see here, this one was on California Street, sorry, but he had a couple offices around, and AS he became more and more successful, and bigger, finally he ended up on North Point Street, taking up about a block in North Beach, with the California wire rope company. So he did very well, he bought the cable car, he was really assessed, in fact so much so that, you know, of course he was instrumental in the mechanics library, not only in supporting it, but getting funds for it, he advocated free education for men and women, for boys and girls, he was a founding region of UC, he was involved in a lot of things, including the early ASVC, which was going to lead us right into cable cars, but he didn't have several successful companies, okay, this was California Wireworks, that was the office down in Fremont, and then he had a huge complex, like I said, out in North Beach. You'll notice they mention, how these endless wire ropeway were transporting, that was his design, so-called endless wire, because it was spliced, so it ran in a continuous loop, with no deviation, even today, they use some cable cars, and it's really fascinating to watch them splice and get the chance, because it has to be totally, you know, the same diameter and everything, but that's what he used, that was so successful in the mines. Okay, so that's the background. Now Don and I are going to get a little bit into, you ready Don? We're going to get a little bit into what everybody- Go for it. Go for it. Okay, the Clay Street Hill Railroad Company, 1873, of course, we just had the anniversary then, in the 50th. Now, that sounds quite grand. It didn't start that way. Hallity had an idea for it, and later it becomes very dramatic, and I'll tell you that story in a minute, but he said he'd been thinking about it ever since, oh, 1868, 69, 70, he was kind of mulling, because the man sold wire rope, and I'm taking nothing away from Hallity, but this was a whole new market for his wire rope, a very good, but he couldn't get this thing going. Most people just kind of laughed at it. They called it Hallity's Folly. It'll never work. He couldn't find financing. He had to secure a street to build it up. He started thinking of California, because Knob Hill was very much underdeveloped, because nobody wanted to walk up the hills. He'd carry groceries up those hills. Forget it. So, and actually that, Kibkar made Knob Hill, Knob Hill, you know, which comes from the old the Bob's, so wealthy. They were back down in South Park at the time. So, Hallity thought, well, I'll do California, but that didn't work quite right, and the funny thing was, in early days of transit, people or companies would go out and they'd buy up a franchise from the city on a street. They had no intention of building any kind of transit, but they wanted to make sure that if you wanted to use it, you had to buy them out. So it was real cutthroat. And, you know, somebody would buy one way so that if you had, you know, if you had a two-way line or something, you couldn't get the other street, and they were always trying to do things. We're going to talk about that with patents. This was the Gilded Age. It was real cutthroat. And, you know, make money however you can. Transit was pretty primitive in the city. People did not ride horses, like you see in the movies. They walked. Especially in San Francisco. It wasn't much in the early city set around the square. This is the corner of Montgomery and, you know, I'm sorry, I forget, they play in the Korean thing. I'm pretty close to where we are. And, you see there in the bottom is an omnibus coach. And what those were, they came from France, actually, and omnibus, meaning in Latin, you know, everybody, everybody could ride as coach. Well, they're not like mini-stage coaches. You know, we all see in the westerns. And you enter through the back. There was a little step that let down. And you went up the back and you handed your man to the driver, or not. And when you want to get off, you pull a little rope past his leg and he stopped, or not. The drivers really enjoyed racing each other, so they were always taking it out like street lamps and corner poles and the horses were getting exhausted. And you can imagine, riding those over, and San Francisco streets might be bumpy now, but they weren't any better than that. So, riding those over city streets, and there were only about two lines, the red line and the yellow line. This is the yellow line. One ran to North Beach, one ran to the Mission. The city required you to plank roads and we'll look a little bit of that in a minute, but they were pretty rough because most franchises didn't want to spend money. Along comes about 1869, the horse party. The 1850s was the era of the honor of this. Oh, good enough, not great. Windy, cold. So, horse problems. You lay down the rail and you get a nice smooth ride. You can agonize more people, although a horse car really doesn't go too much faster than you can walk. But this was an advertisement in San Francisco. Why walk when you can ride? They were kind of forward thinking even then. But these were great and it was a real bonus for cities long as you didn't have to deal with the hill. Great on the flat, not so great on the hill, especially on slippery days. So, this brings us to the famous story of Jackson Street on a cold wet day in San Francisco when I was told it was winter. The horse car is going up Jackson Street, which is very, very wet, very, very steep. And the horses slip on the cobbles. My grandma used to tell me about this. She'd say, you can see those horses being dragged because the driver had a kind of a break, kind of a chain break, but those broke, and this one snapped apparently. And they went back down the hill, dragging the horses, and of course the horses had to be destroyed. Halody himself, in his memoirs, said he witnessed this. So, he said, at that point I determined that I was going to reduce the cruelty to animals and I was going to find some way to alleviate that, but also give citizens, you know, a real dependable way to ride on hills. Plus, wire rope, you know, the sole wire rope. Okay, so I showed you the ship rope. It's just for a look here, and we've got a couple little pieces up here if you want to take a look. This is the cable that Halody created, or the cable cars, which is basically just another form of the type they used on ships. This is, as I said, about the 16th Strand, the 19th Strands, six wires in a little systle middle. This is a picture of a few years ago being delivered to the, are you with the cable in the picture? Delivering it? No? I would have sworn that we should. But this is being delivered to the powerhouse, which is always kind of a very cool bug, but you can see the size of the cable they bring in. And, you know, the cable has a light, you know, at last it gets worn, it doesn't have as much strength, it stretches, so, you know, about, it varies, but about every, is it a whole year that it goes? California a little bit. California a little bit, yeah. It's really down the low, it's in the strategy, you know, when they, when it wears, they have to attach it to the new cable and pull the new one through the system. So, it really is, pretty much the prototype Halody used on the ships. This is just a drawing, I'll show you something different, because this is kind of a spec Halody drew for the Play Street Hill. And you can tell that what he did was he got rid of the horse, kept the trailer, and he'd sit to what they call a dummy. And the dummy has the grip. Now, that's the typical thing with Halody is that he had this endless roadway system in the lines, but the grip, which drives the car, that was the real innovation. Not sure you want to give Halody some credit for it, but of course other people came up with different grips, and much better grips. But that had really been a problem throughout cable transit history, back in the 1830s, and there's a great picture of Piedmont in a solid-aid railway company, had an overhead grip, real nice till this would be far off the track. So they had a lot of problems with the grips, and Halody had one, it's not the best grip I'll tell you right now, but it was an innovation. And y'all have a better picture, but you can see it right here, it's standing from the wheels here, down onto the cable. And these are the yolks, this is the roadway. Because one provision of operating a transit system was, you couldn't interfere with the traffic, and you couldn't put anything on the roadway that would stick out or become an obstacle. Okay. There's the outline of it. Do you want to explain that? Yeah, well, I'm sure that's the, there's a screw grip that Halody did, later they turned out to a leverage system, it was a lot better. But you turned that screw with that grab, I can't... This is the upper end of the slide we had on. Then we clamped those two, as well as we got on the cable. So it was a screw-type grip that Halody and the Plain Street held the procedure of ferries where you don't use those two, because they were so much tougher some. And that basically... Well... In the early days, I mean, I'm completely dazed, Halody had a lot of problems, he's very open, the cars tended to buck up a little bit sometimes, and Halody did it, or de-bred. They had a lot of problems with that screw grip, it's just kind of lowered, he grabbed it, and it went to the Eppelheimer. The Eppelheimer was his engineer. And as Don said, there was one other company that used it, but surprise, Halody was the president of the company, and he had the patent on this one. Patents were very important. I hear that quote, it would go to that later. So you can see, I'm kind of Victorian here, but lots of old cable cars at this point, you'll see the oil lamps up there on the Hummins-Claris 3, and this is pretty basic. This is actually a little nicer looking than they end up being, because Halody didn't have a lot of money. Everything was experimental. Here's a demo, these are very basic, we'll see that through. So just a little close up there of what Don was saying, the screw grip, which you can see it's folded to the floor in the car, and here's your two, it's a hollow two, one raises and lowers the grip, the other one tightens it. You've got to be pretty dexterous to work this thing. But again, people were always trying to come up with new ideas because they didn't want to pay patent fees. I'll show you in a minute, but Stanford, when he went over his cable car railroad, he didn't want to have to pay Halody fees, so he kind of tried to fool around, he didn't work, of course he didn't know, but he was really embarrassed, because Stanford doesn't pay anybody, but he had to pay Halody some patent fees. This one, it's just not very detailed, but I just want to show you the basic layout of his Clay Street hill, so you've got your winding machinery here, you've got some cable, you've got, you're gonna have boilers in here for, you know, steaming, you burn coal and run boilers, and then you have sheaves to direct the cables, okay? That was Halody's. This is Washington Mason today, these are the plans for 1982-1984, when they were started. This is only before with the winding, but you see the winding machinery here in the tension, so it is, of course, different in some ways, but in a lot of ways the ideas are very similar from early days on down. Improved or not, you know? Okay, so when you come into the powerhouse museum, this is what you see, these are the driving shifts, two of them are the driving shifts, the others are the hindlers. Halody came up with that, he had a figure eight drive to keep tension, because tension is important on even the first day. Better wrap on the shifts too. Yeah, so he keeps it tight and he keeps it running, because remember in the mines he had to have those grips on the end to keep the tension on the road, okay? So you see this day, today, of course, we've got the motors and the gear reducers in the early days that would have been driven on steam of everything in the 19th century. At the other end, we've got here the tension sheaves, and those are not here, and they are on rollers, they go back and forth to take up the slap or increase it, and then you have about 33,000 pounds and still dying, something like that. Something like that. And waiting in that pit down, just to keep the constant tension on the cable. Yeah, yeah. There's a better picture of it. Jumping. That's his 8,000. Yeah. It could be, Don and Rosé did this one. Halody started with about 3,000 pounds I think for his, of course he had a very short one. So that keeps the tension as you can see across and the figure eight, the tension, I mean Halody used all these what was a very experimental, you know, project. And just for, you know, views, this is the, these are the sheaves. In the Washington Mason powerhouse dragging the three lines, you know, in your house, okay, California Hyde, four lines, I should say, three lines of cable, they have four cables on them. So they're directed in there, and then directed, they call them sheaves, and then horizontal sheaves, and vertical sheaves, and then carrier pulleys are smaller, and that's what the cable car, or the cable kind of lies on. Okay, that picture is, it's going to be up here later if you want to take a look at it, but Halody chose Play Street finally because the people at Play Street promised them about four grand, the ones who were living there, he also bought property, and triple the value after the cable car became, you know, seven. But it also was a pretty dramatic, a set, it might be a little more showing in California Street, because it's very steep, and walking up there, the rise is about 300 feet, only a very short number of blocks. You located the powerhouse on the top, which means getting coal there with horses is a real bear, but it lessens the tension on the cable a little bit. And so it's a very steep, it'll be very dramatic. Well, the place you came up with about two grand, maybe two and a half grand, they didn't get the four grand. Halody had about 20 grand of his own money, brick and ray, and what's the third one done? Yeah, there were three friends who came to the campus to do the loan and money. He said later, not out of any confidence in what I was doing, but pure friendship, you know. Then he finally got a loan from the Clay Street Bank, that little working model of his car down there. They didn't really, Benjamin Brooks had a franchise he bought out, but the Clay Street Bank, they were really sure he was going to do it, but they thought, well, we'll take a chance, you know, on this. And actually, you're not to be a very successful investment. Okay, so, one thing about franchises, the city said, you can only charge a nickel, you can't interrupt the streets, you can't scare the horses. That was a big thing, and Sam said, don't scare the horses, you know, because they caused payback. And, you had to have it done within a certain period of time. I got surprised this day, but, so Halody wasn't quite done on August 1st. You know, we still had some changes in there, some things ironed out, the grout wasn't complete. So he held it just after midnight on August 2nd, so he thought, well, no one will know. You know, and I don't know if they knew or not, but it really didn't matter. So the successful work was very late, actually almost early in the morning on August 2nd. Apparently Halody had to tie the car to the neighboring lamp post because the brakes weren't quite ready, and he got an old locomotive engineer named Jimmy Hewitt, tough guy from the mines. He was going to take the car down the street in inaugural run. Hewitt got out, looked down into the fog and couldn't see the lower end, shook his head and said, no, thank you. And left. So Halody, the ever-intremented Halody jumped in, took the grip, took the car safely down the hill, reversed it on the turn table, took it back up. It actually did work. And they all shook hands. They got a glass of water, Halody's, that was all the frivoli. But according to legend, as they approached Mason Street, a Frenchman living on the route, stuck his head out the window and threw a bouquet of flowers at the car. Whether it's true or not, it's been immortalized, and that's another one of those things has been in me. And he used to say, the point is the story could have been true. But it's a nice story, so we like to tell it. So the first official run then took place later that day, Halody, put a few more things together, screwed a few more bolts, polished it up. And at 5 p.m., this car, and now this is actually repeatedly supposed to be about this Mr. Halody and his wife in the front car. This is the dummy, without the trailer obviously, at the foot of Play Street, waiting to take the inaugural run. According to legend, Ember Norton was there to give the lesson a little fair. Of course, Ember Norton turns up and everything, so. But I'm not saying he wasn't there. Halody claimed he was. The fire chief, the police chief, the usual assortment of politicians and celebrities and people. Well, they piled up, I think about 90 people on this thing, which is not made for 90 people, you know, and a bolt sheared in the grip. So for everybody, oh, see how these folly doesn't work. Well, he ran up, got the bolt, started going up the hill, then the rope started slipping. So he jumped off, went up the hill again, put some tar on the ship, and finally made it to the top. Well, there was some doubt when people were a little insurer, so Halody gave everybody a month of free rides. Think of that with Vincent, and it did. The thing became a real success. In a couple months, I think he had about, maybe, oh, was it? Try to think of the numbers. I think within about two years, he had about 150,000 people riding it monthly. You know, and he made tons of money because his outlay wasn't all that much. You know, he'd use red wood, and you'll see in some pictures, red sheep construction. So Halody really made a banished crew with this, and it worked, and people started riding it. And of course, these steep hills, and it did bring a lot of population up the hills later companies would, too. Halody also, as I said, bought several lots of about tripled in value. So Halody wasn't a businessman. But the thing actually worked pretty well. Two things iron out, got finished the run, but you know, it really would work. This gives you a good look at it once it was actually running officially. Once again, they're telling me this is Mr. Haleney. I don't know if it really looked like him to make fun. He's in every picture. But notice the planking. Much of the construction was done with red wood. The planking, the conduit, which you saw in the picture, you know, which the cable runs through. So it was really cheaply done because he didn't have a lot of money. And later on, they would have to redo a lot as once it was accepted and more current. But it really gives you kind of like a look at, you know, how primitive the conditions were because Haleney had to do this all on his own expense. You know, the city required this one. They didn't ship it for anything. But, you know, it's starting to get a little better developed here. You can see, of course, everybody's got their hat, their coat on. My grandmother would be very pleased because everybody had to wear one. Here's another view a little early and you can see how underdeveloped really the streets were then. And only a very few houses. So you have one coming up, Mr. Haleney. Again, it's supposed to be there and one going down. So it really did re-development. It spurred like a building of homes. It brought settlement up, Knott Hill, because people just didn't build on the hills in San Francisco for very good reasons. And the Clay City Hills started a trend with a lot of cable car companies that were following. They always operated the dummy trailer model. Because Haleney thought at the level crossings, he just thought it would be better suited to that come down and then you have the level crossing to stop. Later on, that will be changed. And this is the terminal down on Play Street. You can see the terminus. There was a couple of turntables here because to turn these things is a bit of work. And even had horses there once allowed to help pull it because they're not like today where one car run on. But you can see, you know, Play Street is getting pretty built up. Start going up the hills, businesses, people living there. And really, they used to have something called the real estate circular. And they were very big. There was a magazine of realtors. They were very big on cable cars. In fact, they advertised lots for sale on cable car lines because they thought, you know, better value and people are going to buy them because then you can ride. It did so well by 1879. Haleney did a short extension to Vaness Avenue. This is Vaness Avenue and Clay in about 1879. And you can see west of Vaness, there was nothing. Well, very little. And that's true for the very early years of cable car development. This is a chart Don made up for the 150th of Play Street Hill that Ben knows. Very shortly, course car operators, other transit people are looking up and saying, wait a minute. The guy's got something here. You know, we could run a line and we could make money and people will ride it. At first they thought only on hills, but actually the Southern Street, which was the next company here, they ran a lot of their car around level or fairly low grades, you know. So, by the way, that just means low. I'm sure you all know that, but I was taking the task one time because why do you think Southern Street is a low grade street? I wasn't really being, you know, criticizing. But we started building cable cars and we had eight, you know, private companies within a very short time. And it's a fascinating story, but this is the first shameless pledge for Donomy. You're going to have to ask his back to tell the story of the eight original companies. And this is a map of it in 1891 at the height. This is cable car all over what was basically the city then, you can see. You know, down here cable car is a development of the mission. People could now live in the mission and commute downtown for a nickel. It started the movement westward into the western edition. So, you know, relatively short period of time, about 20 years behind the cable cars. It really brought development to a lot of areas of the city. It was such a novelty that they sent it to the World's Fair in Chicago. Here we have Mr. Halladay's car, okay. This is car number eight, I believe. Say that again, regional cable car at the World's Fair. And in 1891, the company was sold to the Ferris Clubhouse. By now, a lot of companies were running it back 1880 and 1880. Almost the last cable car built. The O'Farrell-Joneson High, part of which is in the High Street part of the day. Okay, louder. Anyway, this is the newspaper from the era. It was sold and incorporated. Very soon it was replaced by the Ferris Clubhouse with a Sacramento play line that ran much further out west. It was a bigger car and the old tracks were ripped out and all the champagne broken over the old rim is the truth. But Halladay's cable car really got all this going. And we wouldn't have so much. Even today we wouldn't have our cars. I think really without Halladay's entrepreneurship, you know, he had an engineering Eppelsheimer who invented the grip used today. Much easier to use, okay. But Halladay really was an entrepreneur. Okay, Don, I'm going to let you take over. There's a little aside to Andrew Halladay's. He paid for the transportation of the Clay Street dummy and trailer to the exposition in Chicago in 1895 or so. The ironic thing about that is that we got the dummy back, but they never sent us the trailer. So somewhere in Chicago or some museum is our trailer and we should not have that back. With that happening up, we don't know. Well, I'm going to break up my talk into two sections. The first one I'm going to talk about, Andrew Halladay and his, well his patent trust and the other one I'm going to speak about these. The San Francisco cable car system, as it was from 1896, say to about 1928. When the cable car, can you hear me all right? Am I getting through? Okay. All right. Well, just in this period, the cable car was really a part of the fabric of San Francisco. It wasn't a tourist attraction like it is today. People actually rode the cable cars. They were part of the electric car system. The two worked hand in hand, so to speak. And they were really, I guess they were part of it, but made the city work. Well, I'm going to get into the patent trust right now. When Andrew Halladay realized that he had this concept of the cable car, he had a workable concept. He realized that a lot of smart people were going to cash in on this. And he will also have a lot of competition from a lot of clever people. So he tried to more or less monopolize all his patents concerning cable cars. He had, still an awful emplosheimer. He had Jacob Roode and a lot of people who developed better grips than he. He incorporated their designs into his patent trust. So the idea is, you build a cable car system or you will want to design everything. You have to buy a license, a patent license from his company. He had two of them. He had the Pacific Cable Company that operated in the western part of the United States. And he had the, I think it was the American Cable Car Company that operated and handled the patents in the eastern part of the United States. So he really tried to monopolize the development and licensing of cable car trusts throughout the country. What he did, he published this very nice brochure. And then he describes all the, basically the cable car systems that he designed for San Francisco. And he shows their virtues, they're well designed. And just they, just it indicates this is the way to go if you want to build a cable car system. Now, the character stick too, right in the preface he tells you that we have all these wonderful patents. But if you elect not to use one of his patents, I will see you in court. And he did. And he didn't have to go through far for him to, it didn't take too much for him to bring you, bring me legal action against you as I'm trying to say. Now, as what he did, if you built a cable car system according to his patents and signed his agreements, it was called a trust operation. And if you didn't do that, it was called a non-trust operation. And you didn't have to travel too far to see a non-trust and a trust operation in service. All you had to do was go to Oakland. There, the Oakland Cable Railway Company that was built by James Thayer, he did the right thing. He brought the license, he did what he had to do. He operated a very, well it was not a very exciting system, it went off saying San Pablo Avenue. It was kind of like Valencia Street. But it was, it was well built, well designed and it operated in a very satisfactory manner until about 1898 when it was electrified. Now the flip side of that was the consolidated D-Bond cable company, which operated a rather spectacular operation on Oakland Avenue from Blakemare up to Innisfy. Well what would become D-Bond after a while when it was called the consolidated D-Bond cable company. Now they did, they did everything in a non-trust manner. They developed a low cost way of laying cable track. And he was probably sued by Aladay, but Aladay lost the suit. And the Consolidated Cable Car Company used this Jacobs patented trust that was called to lay their track. On the grips, however, they used a variation of the Eppel-Scheinberg bottom grip. And Aladay sued him again. And then Aladay won that one. So it was a win-win-lose-one situation throughout his career with these various trusts. One thing's for sure, whether he win or lose, he will sue you. And he spent a lot of time in court. And, well, it didn't work well. He tried to trap everybody's suit, but there was a lot of very prominent people. There was a Charles Chubb of Oakland who developed a very nice patent for the grip and the carrier wheels and a lot. And this is the very complete patent. And this is what he had to fight against. I'm going to put it on the table there and you can take a look at it. And, well, you know, where did the trust work? Well, he had success with his trust in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Kansas City. But where he lost, and he's became really principal non-trust operations, were in New York, Omaha and Cincinnati. Well, to sum it up, the trust were very successful in protecting patents concerning the cable grip and hardware. But when it came to track and conduit, then the results are fairly mixed. Now, a big highlight was the trust to secure the... I'm probably missing here. Yeah, there you go. At least big success was ensuring the Omnibus Railroad and Cable Car franchise. They built a large facility here in Oakland, back in here in San Francisco. In fact, it's been said that this was a cable car line that was really built too late. By that time, the electric railway had come into the picture. And they could see that even though there was complaints about the electric railway, about the reliability and different things that didn't like the overhead system, the hand line was on the wall. So the actual Omnibus Railroad cable company was its last successful franchise. He tried a trick though that was very interesting in Dallas. There he actually was looking to finance the construction of this cable railway in return for purchasing and licensing for all the mechanical equipment. I think Eric came to pass, but he really tried to move his financing beyond the trust licensing to a more or less maintained his control over the cable car lines. Well, what happened? Well, the electric railway around in the early 1890s, they suddenly made a different cut into the construction of cable railways. They realized that the hand radio was on the wall and they weren't building cable railways. They didn't have to worry about how of these patterns. So it just quietly drifted off. And people like I say, they became more receptive, the overhead wire being strung into streets and it just quietly faded away. I have some photographs here. Oh, there's one. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. Yeah. So this is an interesting thing. After the fire and earthquake in San Francisco, the United Railroads wanted to just get rid of all their cable car lines with the exception of maybe three operations. But one of the cities that they wanted to incorporate into electric service was Pacific Avenue between Polk and Division Arrow Street. Well, a lot of prominent San Francisco's lived on Pacific Avenue. Spreckles for one and many others decided they did not want overhead wire. They wanted the cable car system restored. Well, the United Railroads in hell no. But these people had enough influence and they were wealthy enough and they had enough drive that they persuaded the city of San Francisco to force the United Railroads to restore the short stretch of cable car track on Pacific Avenue between Polk and Division Arrow Street. This meant bringing back the old W and Trader operation, which has long since been abandoned. And they would not have you with us at all. So they went out and they picked up five of the best W and Trader combinations they could find and they brought them back from Pacific Avenue. And that operation lasted until about 1929. And it was very likely patronized. As you can see, there's hardly anybody writing things. The Ws, you know, they came back from 1878 and they electrified them and they added stands just to keep the roof wobbly. And they just patched them up as best they could. But by 1929, they were really falling apart. They were electrified. The one solitary customer riding in the front of the W there. That's an interesting thing too. For the advent of electricity, of course, you have a nice big oil lamp where that headlight is now. That used to give out a lot of warmth. So people are cold in winter days in San Francisco. They love the hot love on those two front benches up there because that's nice and warm and you can have a nice evening ride on the cable car line. Well, I'll show you one more headlight. Wait a minute. There is another picture of the Pacific Avenue. You can drop me a trailer. You can see how tired they have become in 1929. And there's the obligatory conductor and equipment there frozen in the stands. That's taken at Pope and the Pope of the Pacific Avenue at the end of the line. OK. Now, we moved on to the, this was the principal cable car powerhouse in San Francisco, located on the Lenchon Market Street. This powerhouse powered the cable all the way down to the from the Market Street including powering the turntable which was at the foot of the ferry really. That was a huge complex with a couple of large steam engines in there. And it lasted until it was destroyed by the fire growth back in 1906. And later became the track yard and they did fabricated a track in there. It used to be able to, there used to be a hatch. In front of the flagstone, you could go in and you could see the galleries where these cables ran. Now there was no cable or machinery in there, but you could actually walk around in there. It was clean and dry and many people have done it. I have not been that brave personally. And this is a, this is the biggest cable car ever became. That's a combination of the germite and the dummy and the trader and they had a carbonation car out of it. This one was on the HV turntable. The paint scheme is a real pretty pencil-linger red cream which the United Railways used before the fire and earthquake. There you can see they closed the car in the front and dashed signs. It involved the accrued pencil-linger electric cars. It's a 34 foot long cable car. This is an open car on Octavia and H Street heading out to the California meatball car. Got it on stand-in and wall I think. That was a deep draw in the 1890s. And you can see that they really packed it in. It's a combination car inbound on the opposite track. And they operated on a one-car-for-heel route, but only those two cars could be in that block at once. Sorry, I wouldn't strain the cable too much. But that gives you an idea of how they packed it on a Sunday in the 1890s. Okay. And here we see a cable car on display of the trade of Lent's Street car house. Here she shows you the cable car in the background and the various components of the front. There's a truck with a grip and there is a little cart in front there that they used to lift the grip out of the car through a small door in the center. That's still built that way today with a rental motor truck in a little bit more easier manner, but the idea is the same. And that's saying this particular cable car is actually or has its origins as a horse car. The closed part of the cable car was once a Stephenson horse car that they was joined with an open section converted to a cable car. This was done quite a bit in San Francisco in the early days. Okay. Now here's the 28th of the Lent's car house repair shop. This car house did a lot of conversion work to bring on the cable car to the electric cars at the turn of the century. This shows it's conversion to the seat. That's right. This is the configuration of it. Two-turn table. And this is interesting. This shows you how the cable car lines interface with the electric car lines. They added a single third rail between Fillmore and Steiner Street to accommodate both the electric cars and the cable cars. You see a cable car on the tracks now about to swing down Steiner Street. And then the electric car continued out to on the Jackson-California line. That was a simple way of either facing cable cars with the electric cars. Now I will show you a very complicated way. Oh, well, those things. Okay. In 1915 they decided a different. You get the cable cars are modernized. They don't modernize the system. So they took them to sit at the Avenue of Dummy and they closed and made this very attractive little cable car out of it. You know, it's basically a basic standard electric car designed. Operated by one man. It's a very attractive looking little car. The only problem is nobody liked it. The operators hated it. The passengers hated it. So after a short time of service it was shoved to the back of the barn and forgotten about it. But it shows a lot of clever engineering how they actually tried to bring the cable car system into the you know, early 20th century, you might say. Oh, this is a, the five line information. USF. The reason I should, this is a particular interest. It shows the electric cars operating on cable car track, which is a really poor state. The picture doesn't do it justice, but the track is a really wearable condition. And it operated like this for years. And it's a wonder that there wasn't more problems with it than it was. The, it was quite noisy. And I know that the students of the faculty at USF did not care for the the noise at all. They bothered their lecturers, supposedly. Oh, this shows you a little bit of joint trackage. It's hard to see them coming off the Sacramento Street. You can see where the cable car track actually is part of the electric car track. Now there you go. See, that shows how it was fabricated. This was done to limit a very mad curve called a death curve. So they reworked this in a very clever manner. You can see how that third rail, this thing is really, really a very complicated piece of trackage. What they did is they built it, they assembled it in the yard, first of all, and made sure that it would function properly, tuned it up a little bit, marked the parts, and took it out in the streets and laid it. And after laying it, they made a few further adjustments and it syruped some land. And supposedly, as complicated as it was, they worked beautifully. And no problem. Well, this is the end of it here. What we see here is the end of the the mass cable car line system that ran from the 26th street all the way down to the ferry line. This just shows the short first between 18th Street and 26th Street. It's just a 30-minute less than a mile over the original system. That was what the original car was operating on. That's about August of 1939. And that is Castro Street. Know all the traffic, you know? And then look the busyness from there. You can see another car in the background. Y'all picked up two cars at a time on the system. And it was very likely to patronize. And finally in, I think, April of 1941, you're showing before Pearl Harbor, it was abandoned. But it was quite a tuner-built system. And this was abandoned. It was all very sad-looking. Yeah. That's right. The car in black and say goodbye to the little shuttle. Yeah. There were people there and there ever was on the line. Well, man. Okay. That's it. Something on the line. Yeah. This is just real quickly. This was his patent for the endless roadway system. Don was talking about the patents. And he said how he defended these tooth and nails. So this was the one that was very successful in the mines that he transferred to the cable cars. But I mentioned before, just to close up, he was a very talented man. He was a region. He was the Interregnum President of UC until Benjamin I. We were along in 1899. He was a big advocate for libraries, for schools. This is the Hality building at 130 Sutter Honorium. This is a plaque that is still, I believe, down at, unless someone's stolen it, down at Kearney and Clay. So Hality is well remembered in the town. I mentioned before the play street hill car. Well, that dummy trailer was sent to Chicago. Then they were sent to Baltimore. They bounced around for a while. And eventually, only the dummy came back. And we have it in the cable car museum. We don't know where the trailer is. We hope it's somewhere. But as the years pass, the likelihood is kind of dim. To celebrate, Jose had a dump in the museum. We had a bust of Mr. Hality created, which now sits in our foyer as you come in. And Jose went out and bought flowers for her on her birthday. And so everybody came by to see her. Up here, we have a little model. Just closing. There was a man named Harry Westcott. He lived on Clay Street. He remembered the Clay Street Hill Railroad. During World War II, we made toys for kids. You can see them in the San Francisco News article. One of those toys was brought in by, I think it was, this great granddaughter some years back. Crimes that she had in her garage. She didn't know what to do with it. But she said, I can't just throw it away. So we said, okay, we'll take it. We have it here. We're building a display case for it. And just because Mr. Westcott is a great human interest story, we're going to put that on display at the cable car museum. And there's Mr. Westcott. And that is the very dummy that we have up here with the track. So that, that is that. With this microphone for folks that may have questions about the kids with someone like to kick us off with a question. Thank you for all of the history. You mentioned that how you built the initial powerhouse on top of the Clay Street and that required an unconfined coal to those hard to get up. So did you use your own cable car to the hall of coal up there? No. People didn't ever use a cable car to haul anything except people. No, they had that horseshoe. They did haul. They hauled loose papers and produce that they were exposed to. Yeah. Yeah. No. They hauled the mail for about 10 years. Yeah. But no. People always say, oh, they must have used them. No. They only rode with passengers. They had these little tiny two-wheeled coal carts in San Francisco. And they would have to be endless trips to these various powerhouses to load this coal. And it seemed like a very labor-intensive way to handle it with these carts. But that's what they did at that point. They dumped the carts. They had a coal bumper in the street. So you can actually just empty out the cart, shove it in the bunker and then the bunker would be fired into the boiler. But it still was awkward. It seemed rather clumsy. Yeah. Around 1991, they did away with the anthracite coal, and they went to crude oil. With the stand oil refinery opening up in Richmond, all of a sudden it was a real source of fuel oil. So they converted, I think, three of the larger, no, most of the larger power plants had been converted to oil by 19-4. So the story goes, the originally started melting up horseshoes. I'm not really sure. There may be some truth to that. But very quickly, Temple School in California became the center of the mining industry. And so now, there were direct connections with the East Coast, obviously via the Panasonic Railroad and shipping. And so it was a real, Pennsylvania, a lot of steel coming from Pennsylvania. So they were shipping in a lot. He was involved in the trade. It was the first field? Yeah. Oh yeah. He was involved, I mean coal, for instance, from Australia and all over the place. Okay. So did he have a factory for for a webbing or Oh yeah. All these workers down at North Point, down at North Point, he had a whole block where they actually had offices all over the town. He had a whole block and he was supplying a lot of it to the West Coast. So you could spin the cable like you or something. Yeah. Actually, a step further, I think, the Marcus Street Railway Company, I think, developed a loom so they could spin their main powerhouses but they didn't show the market to you. I don't know too much about it, but it's written up in the Street Railway Journal that they had their own spin, the line saying, yeah. This joined me in a wonderful round of applause for my ride by Pete Scott-Barran and Leah Smith. Please check out all of the cool archival photos that Kelly Trahan bought from the SMMTA. And I hope that you had a wonderful enjoyable night and I will see you again here at Mechanics Institute. Please check out MILibrary.org for more information about our upcoming events. And before I forget, I askly want to give a big shout out to Jose and Doi at the Cable Car Museum who helped to be an incredible connection to Don and Mike for us here at Mechanics Institute and is really an absolute treasure in the city. So if you have not seen your way to the Cable Car Museum, please do check that out. And with that, thank you so much and have a wonderful night and we hope to see you again here at Mechanics Institute too. And feel free to check some of your last video out here.