Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: Cable car patented
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (864) · January 17th, 2012 · Add a Comment
Today in History – January 17, 1871 - U.S. patent issued for an “endless wire rope way” cable car (No.110,971). The inventor of the cable car was Andrew S. Hallidie (center image above) and contracted by the Clay Street Hill Railroad Company in San Francisco. Hallidie’s system used a continuous looped wire rope that was placed in a tube below the surface of the ground. A motor kept the rope in continuous motion (first image below) and the rope was grasped and released by a griping device on the passenger car and controlled by the “driver”. Bells were used to warn other cars and pedestrians that a cable car was on its way. A code was developed so that the bell could be used to communicate between cable car drivers as well.
Legend has it that Hallidie’s inspiration for the cable car came in 1869 after witnessing horses being whipped while they struggled on the wet cobblestones to pull a horsecar up Jackson Street. When a horse slipped, it was sometimes dragged to its death.
Hallidie’s design was described in the Scientific American Supplement, September 17, 1881 with the title: The Wire Rope Street Railways of San Francisco, California. Hallidie describes how his cable car system operates and the various San Francisco companies (at that time) that had successfully adapted the cable car for their street railway company.
Andrew Smith Hallidie tested the first cable car at 4 o’clock in the morning, August 2nd, 1873, on Clay Street, in San Francisco. For more information, see the San Francisco Cable Car Museum and find out more about how cable cars work, their history and where they operate today. Or check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on cable cars and mass transportation systems.
Cable cars are a great example of the application of simple machines and mechanical advantage. For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s curricular resources and the Mechanical Engineering Education disciplinary community.
Tags: Civil Engineering · Engineering Management · Engineering Mechanics · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Mechanical Engineering
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