Helpers and horses and extra drivers on any grade, however slight, would have to be used, and that meant an extra expense.

With street-car horses as the only means of traction, and with the long, expensive grades, he was not so sure that this venture would be a profitable one.
However, in the fall of 1880, or a little earlier (when he was still very much entangled with the preliminary sex affairs that led eventually to Rita Sohlberg), he became aware of a new system of traction relating to street-cars which, together with the arrival of the arc-light, the telephone, and other inventions, seemed destined to change the character of city life entirely.
Recently in San Francisco, where the presence of hills made the movement of crowded street-railway cars exceedingly difficult, a new type of traction had been introduced--that of the cable, which was nothing more than a traveling rope of wire running over guttered wheels in a conduit, and driven by immense engines, conveniently located in adjacent stations or "power-houses." The cars carried a readily manipulated "grip-lever," or steel hand, which reached down through a slot into a conduit and "gripped" the moving cable.

This invention solved the problem of hauling heavily laden street-cars up and down steep grades.

About the same time he also heard, in a roundabout way, that the Chicago City Railway, of which Schryhart and Merrill were the principal owners, was about to introduce this mode of traction on its lines--to cable State Street, and attach the cars of other lines running farther out into unprofitable districts as "trailers." At once the solution of the North and West Side problems flashed upon him--cables.
Outside of the bridge crush and the tunnels above mentioned, there was one other special condition which had been for some time past attracting Cowperwood's attention.

This was the waning energy of the North Chicago City Railway Company--the lack of foresight on the part of its directors which prevented them from perceiving the proper solution of their difficulties.