Home page

Chapter 2: From Telephones to Trucks | Raw to Ready: Mack Truck

This chapter of Raw to Ready: Mack Truck highlights how the early experiments on the telephone leads to a search for an alternative to the iron and steel cables being used at the time. Rust is a constant problem and highly conductive copper is the ideal alternative. The technology doesn't exist to manufacture copper strong enough for overhead lines, so Thomas Doolittle introduces a new process to compress and strengthen copper. Today over half the copper extracted from the earth becomes wire and makes up the Mack Truck's drive-by-wire technology.