Cable Car System

The last manually operated cable car system on Earth, saved from extinction by a grassroots ballot campaign, and the only moving object ever designated a National Historic Landmark.

Inventor Andrew Smith Hallidie, whose father held wire-rope patents, is said to have been moved to act after witnessing a horse-drawn streetcar's team slip on a wet, steep San Francisco street and be dragged to their deaths. Hallidie adapted his family's cable technology to move streetcars up the city's punishing hills without horses, and his first line opened on Clay Street on August 2, 1873.

The system expanded rapidly, and by the early 1900s eight competing companies operated 23 lines across more than 100 miles of track, each car gripping onto a continuously moving underground cable powered by a central powerhouse. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of this infrastructure, and the subsequent rise of the automobile made cable cars seem increasingly obsolete; by the mid-20th century the city considered replacing the remaining lines with buses entirely.

In 1947, San Francisco resident Friedel Klussmann organized a grassroots 'Save the Cable Cars' campaign that forced a ballot measure preserving the system, and voters overwhelmingly agreed. The surviving network was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964 — the only moving object ever to receive that designation — and today three lines, Powell-Mason, Powell-Hyde, and California Street, continue to carry both commuters and tourists up San Francisco's hills.