How the Invention of Rope Gave Us Modern Civilization

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2:03Tracy Alloway:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know what's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially like this year, just sort of like something on my mind? Could be anything. Well, probably on everyone's mind, actually. It's not just me. It's just like the extraordinary amount of rope it must have taken for whaling expeditions in the mid 19th century as depicted in a story such as Moby Dick and others. Like, just think about how much rope that requires. Is this whole episode an excuse for you to talk about Moby Dick?

2:37Tracy Alloway:It's not, but it is true. But it is. No, no, it's genuinely not. You know, one thing I learned, actually, in the course of researching this particular topic, which happens to be rope, the whale that apparently inspired Moby Dick was called Mocha Dick. Yeah. And also Dick was basically like saying Joe back then. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, right? You hear that. So really, the Moby Dick whale was Mocha Joe. Oh, that's right. You know, it's funny. I used to go to a coffee shop in Brattleboro, Vermont named Mocha Joe's. Ah, did it have a whaling theme? It didn't. But that's a missed opportunity. I like the way you did that.

3:12Tracy Alloway:Apparently, from what I understand, I also at one point went down this, like, where did this name come from? I think Dick is in Moby Dick even then carried the sort of contemporary connotation. Oh, really? Yeah, it was like sort of like tough. He was a jerk whale? No, like sort of like masculine. Oh, I see. You know, like even that it was sort of like that it even back then sort of was this sort of that was a masculine name for reasons that one would associate it. I'm not going to say anything else. Oh, that's fine. Anyway, but it's interesting to think, you think about the history of technologies, et cetera.

3:45Tracy Alloway:We did an episode on the history of nails and how crucial that was to the economy. And you think, like, here is this one technological breakthrough, some, like, unlock. And then it opens up all of these kinds of things. So whales were very important for, like, whale oil and candles, et cetera. But, like, what were the technologies that preceded whaling? And you literally could not do it. And, of course, that's just one example. But there are all kinds of technologies, things that you do that are economically productive. I remember in school we learned about like simple machines like the pulley and stuff like that.

4:16Tracy Alloway:But you can't have a pulley without rope. That's true. No, for real. We learned about the pulley when I was in elementary school. But no one bothered mentioning when I was in elementary school that the pulley would have been a useless technology without rope to pull through. That the rope itself is the technology behind the technology. This one's an interesting one because I think when you say the word rope, people think of something, you know, old fashioned. Like rope is Lindy, just a bundle of cords. Right. But actually, as we are about to discuss, there have been lots of technological breakthroughs in both the way rope is made and also the way rope is designed.

4:50Tracy Alloway:Totally. Well, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. Someone I've wanted to speak to since last summer, I think, when I came across his work. We're going to be speaking with Tim Queenie. He is the author of the recent book, Rope, How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. Quite a bold claim there, Tim. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, it's a bold claim, but that's the whole way you have to buy the book and read it and back it up. What is rope? No, seriously. What makes something rope? Well, that's a good question, and people have asked me how you define rope.

5:25But for this book, I defined rope in a very broad sense from everything down from cordage, which is thin, small rope or twine or what you want to call it that, up to heavy duty wire rope made of metal. So it's all rope as far as I'm concerned. And that's sort of how I went in. But basically, rope is twisted fibers that are then used to accomplish work. I definitely want to talk about space rope later on or space elevators, because that's something I was completely unaware of. But before we do, just on the book itself. So I'm aware that these single topic books have become something of a phenomenon.

6:03So you have people explaining the history of human development through the medium of salt or the container box or fish, cod or whatever. But what does rope actually say about civilization or human development that other single object stories maybe miss? Well, of course, rope, as we've already just talked about, is made up of fibers or little strands of fiber. And if you want to talk about it in sort of a thematic way, each one of those individual fibers can't do much on its own. But if you twist them all together, now you have a tool that's immensely useful. And it's sort of like the way a single person can't do all that much on their own.

6:46But people working together in groups can accomplish great things. And they often accomplish those great things down through history using rope.

6:54Tracy Alloway:So what is it about fiber? So you twist them together. I mean, this is going to sound dumb, but I really never thought about it before even like paid attention. But what is it about the property of a strand, the property of a fiber, or even the property of a long metal rod such that when you twist them together, it becomes very load-bearing. It's a combination of friction, especially with fibers. It's a combination of friction, twist, and something you could call the helix effect. The friction, of course, is just the individual fibers. As they're twisted together, they're rubbing up against each other and engaging those little nooks and crannies of the fiber or engaging with other nooks and crannies on other fibers.

7:35And so there's that friction that's stopping it and a certain amount of physical locking in that's going on that's stopping them from sliding past each other. But then you twist it. And by twisting them, you're re-engaging those fibers in a new way, even more deeply. And then finally, the last thing is what you might call the helix effect, which is if you were to take a rope and to wrap it around your arm like this.

8:01Tracy Alloway:Listeners, you should go over to the YouTube because Tim is actually wrapping a rope around his arm. It looks a little bit like a tefillin. But yeah, tell us what's going on here, especially for those who are just listening. So I'm just wrapping this rope around my arm and I'm not actually nailing this to my arm or gluing it to my arm or riveting it to my arm. But I'm just putting it on my arm. And then if you can't see maybe too well here. If I pull it on the same axis on which I've wrapped it around my arm, it stays. I've literally done nothing to make this rope stay other than the fact that it's wrapped around my arm.

8:36So what's actually happening here is you have this helix of rope that when you pull on it, on that same axis on which it was twisted, the helix collapses. and you might remember those party toys you got when you were a kid where you stick your fingers on both ends and pull on them the finger so-called finger trap and what happens is is those toys are made up of a whole series of of helixes and when you pull on them all the helixes collapse and they tighten up and that's what happens with rope with multiple strand rope this rope i have right here is actually made of jute and it's that's a natural fiber and this is actually a four-strand rope.

9:17I don't know if you can see the four strands.

9:19Tracy Alloway:Listeners got to watch this on YouTube. This is so much better as a video than just audio because you can see all the other jute. The four strands, those strands, and most rope all through history has been three-strand rope. And I'll talk about why that is in a second. But the strands, and when you pull on them, the strands all do that helix effect that one strand is wrapped around the other two, three strands and it's collapsing down on the other three and so on and so on with all four strands. They're all collapsing around each other. And that's what makes it incredibly strong is this helix effect.

9:52And that was actually told to me by a German engineer who works in the industry. And he's so well known that he's called the Pope of Rope. Are there rope celebrities?

10:04Tracy Alloway:Oh, we should have had him on instead. Yeah, he's the real celebrity. But he told me about this helix effect. And so it's really those three things, the friction, the twisting, and then the helix effect that causes three-strand rope to work so well. And three-strand, of course, is most commonly made because it's the least number of strands you can use to have this helix effect. So it's sort of the most economical way to get the helix effect at its maximum without having to add more strands, which of course can add cost. So three-strand is the way to go. So we're talking about the basic design of rope.

10:42Walk us through, I guess, the technological breakthroughs when it comes to designing rope. Was there a moment, you know, when the fourth chord was added or I don't know, they were twisted in a different way where someone was like, aha, I have invented the better rope that will now allow us to accomplish some great thing? Well, that's a really good question that I can't answer. And the reason why we can't answer that is because rope is such an ancient human tool that we just don't know when the first multi-strand rope was developed and made. The oldest rope that's ever been found is 50 ,000 years old.

11:21And that's a piece of cordage that was found on the bottom of a flint flake in a cave in southeastern France. And it was twisted by a Neanderthal person 50 ,000 years ago. And there There may indeed have been rope much older than that that was manufactured. But the problem with rope, natural fiber rope, is that it's made of plant material and it tends to rot away. There may be 70 ,000-year-old rope that was made, but we just, we don't know.

11:49Tracy Alloway:One thing that really struck me, and you said this in your book, but, you know, these days you invent a new technology, it feels like, in a year later, it's obsolete, right? And this pace seems to be accelerating. And one thing that I really appreciated from your book is that in the old days, a new technological innovation would come around like maybe like once every couple hundred thousand years or a million. I think you make the point that Homo erectus, who I guess were our uncles or something like that, basically had one invention, the hand axe. In a million and a half years, they basically figured out one thing.

12:24Tracy Alloway:Like technological revolutions were pretty slow back in the old days. Yeah, that's right. The hand axe, which from what I understand, the people I've talked to, archaeologists still aren't completely sure what those things were used for. But there are so many of those around and they were used for such a long time. And in my book, I talk about the hand axe and stone tools happening before rope, but it's quite possible that they were around contemporaneously with rope, but we have that issue of them rotting away. But once you've developed this multi-strand rope, it now has all these great uses that it can be put to.

13:00Probably the biggest use for early peoples was just the ability to organize your stuff. You can tie things together in bundles, which sounds maybe a little simplistic for us, but we do the same thing in lots of other ways. We just keep our stuff organized and they had to do the same thing. And so rope was just a great tool for that in addition to using it for domesticated animals and being able to keep them in place so they don't run off and lots of other things.

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15:48Crypto services by ZeroHash. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. If I could fast forward about 50 ,000 years or so, Joe started this conversation talking about the importance of rope when it comes to whaling. And if you think about a time period like the 1800s, sort of marked by the expansion of the British Empire, lots of ships sailing around, all covered in rope in one way or another.

16:18Tracy Alloway:Lots of ships sailing around. That's like a good description of much of all history. I guess that's true. All right. But you know the kind of ships I mean. How important was being able to manufacture rope at a sort of industrial scale in the 1800s? Because, I mean, we're talking about a lot of rope. I think you have a stat in your book about how much rope it took just to get a whale. And it was a lot. Yeah. The whaling ships would carry more than 10 ,000 feet of rope just for use on board the whale boats that went out to actually hunt the whales, not even discussing all the other uses that rope is put to on a sailing ship.

16:54And as you point out, a sailing ship, which was the premier technology for hundreds of years for crossing oceans is absolutely dependent upon rope, both for the standing rigging, which holds the masts up, and the running rigging, which controls the sails. Going all the way back to the Egyptians, they had the exact same issue. They had to have rope to keep their boats under control and for them to keep the masts from falling down. And if I could just go back for a second to the Egyptians, very interestingly, different way of building ships than the way a ship was built. For example, for a whaling ship in the 19th century, the way of building ships in the Western world is to put down a keel, then you have ribs that are 90 degrees to that keel, and then you have planks, which cover the ribs, and now you have your hull.

17:45But the Egyptians actually did it in a completely different way, and other cultures as well. It wasn't just the Egyptians. They actually stitched their boats together. They took the planks and they cut these V-shaped grooves in the planks and they actually threaded rope through these V-shaped grooves to either end of the collection of planks and then tightened them up and then they had a hull. And they would put ribs in after they'd stitched these boats together, but the ribs were there just in addition to the rope to hold the planks together. So rope is absolutely essential for a boat even to float in that era.

18:21So that's pretty amazing. And as I said, it wasn't just the Egyptians, but also a lot of Arab boat building was done in a similar fashion with stitched boats. But going back to the age of sail, they needed just tens of thousands of feet of rope to equip these vessels. And as you point out, when you have that much rope required, it ceases to be a cottage industry and the whole process becomes industrialized. And the people who really kicked this off were the British with the need to keep their large Royal Navy establishment going at all times and keep all these ships, hundreds of ships available to go to sea.

18:59So they had a series of dockyards where they manufactured rope along with other things. And some maritime historians say that it really was the Royal Navy that kicked off the Industrial Revolution because the whole process really needed to be industrialized to make all this rope.

19:15Tracy Alloway:So, Tracy, I jokingly said, oh, ships floating around. But no, this is really a key point here, which is that it is how rope became the backbone of civilization. It is hard to imagine civilization without a lot of boats. And it is literally impossible to imagine sailboats of various sizes without ropes of various things. You know, in steel, they talk about like the Bessemer process. Suddenly, like some sort of unlock. Steel existed before the Bessemer process, but then that unlocked a significant expansion. Was there some breakthrough that allowed for rope to go from one of these things that, oh, let's twist some plant fibers with our hands and maybe wrap them around something to something that could be truly produced at industrial scale?

19:58I don't think that there's any one event like that. It was kind of a continuous process, much like rope itself, that went from rope being made outdoors in these rope yards where they would twist the rope because you need a lot of space to do all this twisting, to an indoor activity because they no longer could take the time off for when it snowed and rained. They needed to make rope every day to meet the needs, as I said, of something like the Royal Navy. You needed to really produce rope on a massive scale and the needs of something like a large sailing ship where you need to have some very long ropes, specifically the longest rope being the anchor road or the rope that you tie your anchor to so you can anchor in deep water, that had to be 742 feet long.

20:45And so in order to make a 742 foot long, in the last part of the process of making rope, when you're putting the strands together, the rope actually gets shorter because you're twisting it. But you have to start out with 1 ,000 foot long strands that you're twisting together to make the final rope that ends up being 740 feet long. So you need a huge building to do this. And so these rope walks that were built into various dockyards around the world, it wasn't just the British who were doing this. They were built in the U.S. and all maritime nations were doing this, and even non-maritime nations because you need a rope for other things.

21:24But these rope walks really were the thing that industrialized the process and allowed you to make very long, very big ropes. Can you talk to us about the supply chain that created rope? So I guess rope in the 1800s was made out of jute or hemp or something like that. Where did that material come from and how did it get to the dockyards in a place like London? Yeah, that's a great question because it actually was a strategic material. There was something called naval stores. The British called them naval stores, which was pitch from pine to use for waterproofing. And then the actual pine trees themselves, the trunks to use for masts.