Outspinning The Spider

It is the wire age.
Modern life, in all its intricate bearings, runs on wire. Wire everywhere; in
the heavens above, the earth beneath and the waters under the earth. In all
the legerdemain of science, which has put nature in bondage, wire is the
indispensable agent.
A curious, slow, finical little trade at which the smiths of forgotten races
toiled and pottered and ruined their eyesight for unnumbered thousands
of years has become, within less than a century, under the spur of modern
need and modern driving power, the pack-bearer of the world and the
mainspring of every activity from the cradle to the grave.
Wire still makes toys and gewgaws as it always did, but it is no longer the
plaything of vanity alone. Cancel wire and wire rope and their
concomitant, "flat wire," from the inventory of human assets tomorrow,
and the world would stop stock-still.