Have you heard the story that Andrew Halladie created the cable car because he witnessed a horse car accident on a steep hill that killed two of the three horses that were trying to pull the loaded car up a steep hill? Since he already manufactured wire ropes for use in mines, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to use wire rope in street transportation. Also, it was the first successful mechanized urban transit system (according to William Middleton in “Time of the Trolley”). The cable car spread from San Francisco to many other cities in the USA (Seattle, Pittsburgh, Chicago for example) and elsewhere. But after Frank Sprague perfected the electric streetcar in 1887, the cable car went into eventual decline.