VAULT
The Overhead-Cableway Method of Logging
The inventor of systems for transferring cargo via suspended wires discusses how these methods could improve logging efficiency in this article first published in July 1925.
Written by Spencer Miller, chief engineer at Lidgerwood Manufacturing Co.
THE CABLEWAY IS OF MODERN ORIGIN, although an essential element, wire rope, was actually made before the Chistian era. When the city of Pompeii, which was destroyed in the year 79 B.C., was uncovered, about 15 feet of 3-strand bronze wire rope ½ inches in diameter was found. This rope is now in a museum at Naples, Italy.
The wire-rope tramway, more than two and a half centuries old and the forerunner of the cableway, was designed by Adam Wybe, a Dutch engineer, and erected in Dantzic, Germany, in 1644.
The cableway as a hoisting and conveying device was first shown in print in a French patent granted to Pluchet, January 4, 1851.
Several horizontal cableways similar to the modern type were constructed and operated in Grafton, Ill., in 1868-1869. Each of these comprise a main cable as a trackway, an endless rope to propel the load carriage, a hoisting rope, and fall-rope carriers to support the sag in the hoist rope when slack. In 1880 Alexander E. Brown, of Cleveland, Ohio, constructed several short- span cableways for discharging iron ore from vessels. One tower had an overhanging boom to reach over the ship. Both towers traveled on railroad tracks.
Wire rope systems like this were used to pull cut logs from rugged hillsides to roads and railheads. Photo: Library of Congress
The First Logging Cableway
In 1883, the first wire-rope logging device was developed by Horace Butters, a pine lumberman. He constructed an overhead logging cableway in Ludington, Mich. A special 7-inch by 10-inch double cylinder Lidgerwood hoist with boiler and with three friction drums (weight 13,000 lb.) to operate this cableway was purchased. Mr. Butters rigged his cableway to standing trees instead of towers, and actually hoisted and hauled logs from the woods and loaded them on railroad cars. In spite of the antiquity of wire rope, it may surprise one to learn that his earlier logging cableway employed manila rope for the operating line and guys, and for a short while even as a main cable. The zeal and determination of this enterprising lumberman put this overhead-cableway skidder in practical operation, and while hardly a commercial success in pine logging, nevertheless it attracted the attention of cypress lumbermen in the swamps of North Carolina and Louisiana.
The second phase in the development of the cableway method for logging occurred in the year 1892 in the South, where the problem of logging out of cypress swamps was in great need of solution. It was found necessary to redesign every element of the cableway skidder, such as engine, boiler, rigging traveling carriages, special pulley blocks, lacking a full knowledge of the logger’s problems. From that time and for a few years thereafter, the progress was one of evolution rather than creation.
“It has been said that the loggers of Washington and Oregon leave enough waste wood on the ground to supply ten paper mills with pulpwood.”
—Spencer Miller
The first machines were too light to handle cypress logs; breakages were frequent and delays costly. These machines were carefully studied by the author, who sought to improve them by taking account of failures and correcting subsequent machines. In spite of frequent breakdowns these early machines would in a few months earn for their owners as much as the machines had cost.
In all logging cableways an outhaul rope, operated by a friction drum, is necessary to haul the load carriage to the wood. The hoisting or skidding rope is operated by a second friction drum. The skidding rope leads through a pulley block on a head-spar tree, then through to another block on the carriage, and then to the log, to which it is attached. In the early logging cableways, after the log was hoisted to the carriage, the carriage and log were hauled in by the skidding rope, while simultaneously the outhaul rope was paid out through the drag of a brake on the outhaul friction drum. This was inefficient and was a source of much delay.
In 1900, the author, associated with J.H. Dickinson of New York, invented an improved overhead skidder with much greater power and greater speed and which remedied these difficulties. The drag of the outhaul brake was eliminated. This new design contained many other features that made for efficiency and labor saving, and has been commercially known for years as the “interlocking and slack-pulling cableway skidder.” This machine, originally built for 800-ft. spans, was so revolutionary in character that it is worthy of description: it was the forerunner of the modern overhead logging cableway in general use and made by several manufacturers.
Interlocking Drums. The interlocking feature was a simple combination of gearing with two friction drums and one friction clutch. When the skidding drum and outhaul drum were in friction engagement with appropriate gear, the outhaul drum would run in the opposite direction at the same speed at which the inhaul or skidding rope was wound in. When the log was delivered to the railroad, both drums were thrown out of friction and a third friction clutch on the crankshaft was thrown into engagement with a loose gear on the same shaft which, meshing with a rim gear on the outhaul drum, revolved it in the reverse direction at high speed. Thus it propelled the load carriage out into the timber at more than three times the speed of former machine. This new type displaced the original machine in many logging camps because it conserved power, increased speed, and eliminated the drag of any brake.
Fall-rope carriers to support the slackened skidding line were found impractical for logging cableways, and the branch-rope device, patented first by the author in 1893 and again in another form by J.H. Dickinson in 1895, was adopted in 1900.
It has been said that the loggers of Washington and Oregon leave enough waste wood on the ground to supply ten paper mills with pulpwood. To recover the waste wood and transport it to the paper mill at cost which will command the market is a real problem.
Th Crown Willamette Paper Co., near Astoria, Ore., has found the portable-spar cableway skidder an efficient apparatus to reach out from existing logging railroads, pick up this waste, and load it on railroad cars for shipment. One of these skidders, with a crew of 17 men, is salvaging about 500,000 ft per month, and is in a fair way of solving the problem of cost. The man of vision, with thought for the future, clearly sees that such a practice of relogging must reduce the fire hazard, must promote regrowth, and incidentally save other partly grown forests from being cut down to satisfy the demand for newsprint.
Spencer Miller was the chief engineer at Lidgerwood Manufacturing Co. in New York City. Miller developed an innovative means of transferring coal and equipment between U.S. Navy ships at sea and worked on the construction of the Panama Canal prior to writing this article.
© 2025 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.