 car by means of a manila rope. So manila is that fiber rope that we're all so used to. The rope itself is about 1,200 feet long, so it was a big rope way up on the hillside. As the rope typically only lasted 75 days, Hality thought, hmm, I know how to make rope that will last longer than that. So he proposed to the owners that he make a rope out of wire. The offer was accepted, and so Hality, who was clearly the MacGyver of his day, was able to just construct some machinery seemingly out of thin air. And he sent to San Francisco for the only kind of wire that one could buy back then, which was iron wire, the kind used for fencing. So in order to render it fit for wire rope making, he first had to build a charcoal pit, start a fire, and basically carbonize the wire itself so that it was flexible enough to make into rope. He would make three ropes and then splice them together, so ultimately it was 1,200 feet. And this first rope made in California would last 27 months, so approximately the lifespan of 10 manila ropes. So with this success, he realized that there was a market for his family's signature product. And so a few months later, made the trek down to San Francisco, bringing with him the machinery that he'd made and his business partner, Mr. Thomas Bradford. And together, they commenced making wire rope in North Beach in a small workshop on Taylor Street under the name of AS Hality and Company. Business was very slow at first. But Hality made a point of displaying his wire rope at the State Fair in 1859 and at the Mechanics Institute Fair of 1860. And of course, he would display his wire rope ever after that with us, at least. Things picked up, and by 1861, Hality was advertising in over 30 newspapers up and down the West and also in British Columbia. Meanwhile, people didn't really know what to do with his rope, so he started making suspension bridges. And he learned how to do this at his father's knee. His father had patented his own suspension bridge some 20 years earlier. So Hality's first known suspension bridge was a suspension flume, actually, for a mining company on the American River, which he finished in 1857. And this mini bridge was 140 feet long and about 24 feet above the American River. His next bridge would be over the Klamath, and the next one was over Deer Creek in Nevada City. And he would go on to build at least seven bridges within the next three years, most of them in the Sierra Foothills. Here's another bridge at Rattlesnake Bar. And you know, Hality's bridges all look the same. Not saying anything, but anything negative. But there they are. His fame reached as far as Victoria, British Columbia. And in February 1863, he would be commissioned by Sir Joseph Trutch to build an enormous suspension bridge over the Frasier River just outside of Fort Yale. The bridge was along the Caribou Wagon Road, which was a new road digging deep into the wilds of British Columbia. And despite some problems getting the materials from San Francisco to the bridge site, because there weren't very many roads, the bridge was completed within six months and was finished in September 1863. And this bridge was 268 feet long and some 90 feet over the river. I shouldn't say this was his last bridge, but the Alexandria Bridge made him think, I'm not sure I want to build bridges anymore because of long days outside, getting exposed to the weather and just the craziness of building a bridge. Shortly after, he would abandon that and move on to selling wire rope. Meanwhile, Hality's elder brother, Archibald, who had taken over their father's wire works in London, was busy innovating both rope and the machines to make them, make it. Building upon their father's designs, Archibald Smith would take out patents for a new kind of flat wire rope and a machine to make it, which he displayed at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts in 1858. At the same time in Nevada, a load of silver ore was found known as the Comstock. And the thing that was special about the Comstock was to get to the silver, one had to tunnel underground, which was different from how gold was typically mined. And the Comstock environment required elevators to move the ore and miners up and out of the mine. And elevators work best when they use flat wire rope because round rope kinks and snaps sometimes, disastrously, when it's rolled onto a spool. So, Halody took his brother's ideas and thoughts on flat wire and developed his own cable and debuted it in his catalog of 1863. And it quickly became the industry standard throughout the Comstock and the West. And as you can see in this map that outlines the Comstock and the number of claims, there was a huge market for wire rope. This map was drawn by a friend of the Mechanics Institute, the renowned African American lithographer, Grafton Tyler Brown. And here's an example of the flat wire rope in use. And as you can see, the wire, the cable's on the right and it's nearly as wide as that man's head. So throughout the 1860s, Halody would experiment with using his cables for transport and he began experimenting with suspended carriageways, again riffing off of breaking technology in the mining world, in the mining industry worldwide. Ultimately, his endless wire ropeway, which you can see in this picture, would revolutionize the transport of ore throughout the West and this ropeway would allow the transport of ore across all kinds of terrain, up and down mountains, over deep valleys, and it operates very similarly to a ski lift.