Mike and I met our friends Jeanna and Ben in San Francisco and we all had to catch a ride on the iconic San Francisco cable car. This cable car system is the world's last manually operated cable car system and an icon of the city of San Francisco.
Cable cars were invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie here in San Francisco in 1873. Hallidie's cable car system was based on early mining conveyance systems and dominated the city’s transit scene for more than 30 years. His idea for a steam engine-powered, cable driven rail system was conceived in 1869, after witnessing horses being whipped while they struggled on the wet cobblestones to pull a horsecar up Jackson Street.
Hallidie's father was an inventor who had a patent in Great Britain for "wire rope" cable. Hallidie immigrated to the U.S. in 1852 during the Gold Rush. He began using cable in a system he had developed to haul ore from mines and in building suspension bridges.
By 1947, the lower operational costs of buses prompted Mayor Roger Lapham to declare, "the city should get rid of all cable car lines as soon as possible."
In response, Friedel Klussmann founded the Citizens' Committee to Save the Cable Cars. The committee began a public campaign showing that the cable cars’ value to San Francisco was far greater than their operational cost. They succeeded in placing an amendment on the November ballot, Measure 10.
Newspapers picked up the story and public support grew quickly. Life magazine did a photo spread on gripmen. Celebrities rallied for the cable cars; business owners realized that tourists didn't come to San Francisco to ride the buses. Measure 10 passed in a landslide victory and the city of San Francisco had rallied to save the Powell Street cable car system.
Hallidie's cable car system would survive the great San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906, soldier on through two World Wars and outlast political attempts to remove the cars from city steets in the late 1940s and 1950s to become the worldwide symbol of San Francisco that it is today.
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