USES OF WIRE. The MSC'S of various kinds of wire are practically innumerable, and involve numerous kinds of wire manufactured from va rious materials. The metals used are silver, platinum, copper, bronze, brass, iron, and steel, and from them are drawn wires varying in size from inch to inch, and possessing a ten sile strength of from 20 tons to 150 tons per square inch of sectional area. The manufacture of wire netting. gauze, and cloth is among the many ingenious and serviceable applications of wire. Many thousand tons of plain fencing wire, strands, and barbed wire are annually manufactured. Carding wire is a product of no less magnitude and importance. Beautiful types of wire are to he found in the eyepieces of telescopes in the form of hair or spider lines for assisting in the observation of moving stars, planets, or bodies and their relative hearings and for measuring angles or determining evolutions and gradients. A platinum wire as fine as 0.00003 inch in diameter has been obtained, of
which 1060 yards weighed 0.75 grain, or 1% grains per mile. This result was, however, ob tained by covering the wire with silver, which, after being drawn down with the platinum to as fine a degree as possible, was dissolved oil' by a solution of nitric acid. Platinum and other wires are also used in galvanic cauteries, ecra sures, nmgnetie machines, probes, and other sur gical instruments and appliances. Somewhat re cently stem] wire of high breaking strains has been employed for deep-sea soundings. (See SOUND, SouNnixo.) One of the most important uses of wire in engineering is for making wire rope. Such rope is made in much the same form as hemp rope. (See WIRE Rom.) Wire Hating is also made by machines which take the wire from bobbins and deliver the netting complete in rolls ready for shipping. Consult Smith, Wire: Its Manufacture and Uses (New York, 1891).