1873: Andrew Hallidie tests the first cable car in San Francisco.

Hallidie is said to have conceived his idea in 1869 while watching a team of horses being whipped as they struggled to pull a car up wet cobblestones on Nob Hill. They slipped and were dragged to their deaths.

It so happened that Hallidie’s father held the British patent for wire-rope cable, and when the son came to the Gold Rush fields he put it to use hauling ore-laden cars from mines. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to envision horseless cable cars carrying passengers up the steep slopes of San Francisco’s hills.

He formed the Clay Street Hill Railroad and was awarded a contract to build the city’s first cable car line up Nob Hill. Fourteen months later, on Aug. 2, 1873, the first cable car made its way up Clay Street. It was an unqualified success. Regular passenger service began a month later, and cable cars have been operating in San Francisco ever since.

A number of cable car lines and companies sprang up in the wake of Hallidie’s success. At its high-water mark, prior to the great earthquake and fire of 1906, 53 miles of cable car track stretched to virtually every corner of town.

A vast underground pulley system moves a cable at a steady 9 mph, pulling the cable cars along the tracks. The operator, or gripman, uses a lever to grip the cable moving beneath the street.

In the late 1940s and ’50s, there was a move to dismantle San Francisco’s cable car system, backed largely by politicians who some say were in the pockets of the oil and tire companies that had a vested interest in seeing buses replace cable. The system would have probably vanished if not for the efforts of one San Franciscan in particular, Friedel Klussmann, who founded the Citizens’ Committee to Save the Cable Cars and battled City Hall every step of the way.

When the issue finally made it to the ballot, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to keep their cable cars. Today, three lines — the Powell & Hyde, Powell & Mason, and California Street cable — continue to operate in the City by the Bay.

Source: San Francisco Municipal Railway

Photo: The Clay Street Hill Railroad, which started public service in 1873, was the first cable car company in San Francisco. (Courtesy Cable Car Museum)

This article first appeared on Wired.com Aug. 2, 2007.