August 20, 2026 • 43 mins
Rope is one of the unsung heroes of the world of inventions. Think about it. Then let us tell you about it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're going to rope
you into interest in ropes in this episode the Stuff
You Should Know on Ropes.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, I had this idea, and this is one of
those where it was a very distinct situation that made
me think of it, which was on our trip to
Nantucket when Emily and I went there for the first
time not too long ago. We did a sailing trip
on a kind of an old school boat sailing boat,
and they let me. I volunteered to help out. So
(00:46):
I was hoisting sails and raising jibs and things. I
don't know if that's proper terminology. And I had that
rope in my hand and I kind of looked at
it and it was the old school, you know, rope rope,
not synthetic. It was clearly made from natural fibers and
it was braided and very thick and heavy, and I
was like, man, rope, It's like, what a what an
(01:09):
undersung invention?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Had you taken mushrooms?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
No, not at all, Well, maybe microdoes, but it was
definitely one of those moments where I was like, what
an undersung invention? Like, if you pulled one hundred people,
you would get lots of wheels or maybe gears or
fire or sliced bread or the toaster or whatever. But
I doubt if you would get more than like a
ten percent unless you work in like a sailing industry
(01:36):
or another industry that heavily relies on rope. I doubt
if you would get a ton of people that said, yeah, rope,
that's up there is one of the greatest inventions of
all time. But it has touched so much of humanity
and the forward progress of humanity.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, I mean, you'd make a great point. I hadn't
thought about it either. I probably would not have said rope.
But Julie helps us with this, I think. And I mean, like,
if you want to till some like really hard ground
to try to grow crops in it, try to do
that with an ox and a plow, but no rope. Sucker.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, if you want to shoot a wild boar from
thirty feet away, what are you gonna shoot it with?
You're gonna shoot it with a bow that has a
kind of rope. And you know we should point out
that what we're talking about is cordage. So any kind
of bundled fiber that's braided together, that's all sort of
a kind of rope. We wouldn't have had musical instruments,
(02:37):
we wouldn't have had undersea cabling to make the Internet possible.
And then what sailing came around that you know, you
think about, Yeah, big deal, it helps sailing, But sailing
is what helped discover the world.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, you got to think of it beyond the America's Cup.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So like you said, let's talk about rope. Let's get
into it, shall we do it? I learned a lot
in this and like you said, rope is a type
of cordage, not all cordages rope. Rope is essentially made
of different types of smaller ropes bundled together, like you said, braided.
You can also twist them. And you can make it
out of everything from synthetic fibers like jute or sisol.
(03:19):
Sisol comes from the agave plant. Did you know that
I did? Oh? I didn't. And you can make it
out of wire a little bit. You can make it
out of wire. There's all sorts of stuff you can
make it out of But the point is is that
all of them follow essentially the same method of making
a rope. That if you strip away all like the
(03:41):
bells and whistles that you have today, it's they're putting
this stuff together in the same way that people put
it together from the very outset of rope making.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, and you know, I think that's the other thing
that appealed to me was I was looking at this
rope and saw the like an individual strand was frayed perhaps,
and I saw how just like human hair like that was.
And I just love the idea that somebody was like,
you know, this thing weak, but put all this together
in it strong.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, it's very clever. I never thought about it either.
But the way that rope is made strong and stable
in all of that is because they're twisted in opposing
like the fibers are twisted in opposing directions, held to tension,
and that I think the impression I have is that
you're actually storing somehow some energy or force in the
(04:35):
rope when you start braiding it and twisting it under tension.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, it creates something that has high torsional stability, so
it can hold its shape even though rope is moving
around and being tied into knots, and it's constantly twisting
around and getting pulled on. And you know, it depends
on what kind of rope you have. But you know,
if you see these those giant ropes that they still
use to tie in like a cruise ship or something,
(05:01):
I mean, it's still the same stuff. It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
That's right. Let's talk specific jargon, baby, let's I love it.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'll let some jargon.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
All of this stuff is cordage. Like we said, a
cord is a rope that's three sixteenths of an inch
or less. That's right, use metric ts. It's still a chord.
You have to use inches for.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
That, that's right. A rope is a rope if it
is above three sixteenths of an inch. And then a
cable is when you have several ropes that are twisted together.
And these can be made from all kinds of things,
like we said, obviously the organic fibers you mentioned some.
We also have hemp, you may have said hemp and cotton.
We'll get into synthetics. When that came along, it was
(05:44):
a real game changer because that provided a little stretch
so nylon and polyester and polypropylene, stuff like that, and
then wire wires usually steel. And you know, we might
call something like that a cable, but it's still the
same concept that it's a kind of rope, as a
steel cable is or a steel rope is basically a cable.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, wire rope is rope. A cable is a bunch
of ropes. You can make it out of sisol if
you wanted to a cable, sure, and then a bunch
of cables twisted together is called the super duper rope.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Right, that's right. Good jargon.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So let's keep going. Let's talk jargon in as far
as construction goes. You said you can braid ropes, you
can also twist them. I never thought about this, and
I watched two videos. The one is it was a
how It's made video. God bless how it's made. Because
if you ever run into a written or verbal explanation
(06:42):
of something where you're like what, go find the how
it's made version and you'll see it with your own eyes.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
They've always done a great job. There's a lot, in fact,
there's a lot of good rope making videos online.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I watched like three or four others they're mesmerizing.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
They got far.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
There's another one we found called how Do They Braid Rope?
And it's from the National Film Board of Canada, the
Boards of Canada, and it doesn't even have narration. The
only soundtrack is the factory sounds like that really is mesmerizing.
And so you see the two different ways rope is made,
and the first how it's made one uses twist, which
(07:18):
is a conventional rope. And as I was saying, when
I started talking, I never realized that most ropes I've
ever seen in my life are twisted. I always just
assumed they were braided, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, And when you look at them up close, though,
you can definitely see the difference between a braid and
a twist. I love in twisted rope. This is when
you have twisted strands that are counter twisting around each other.
Usually it's three strands, and that's called a hawser laid twist.
But you can also have a four strander, which is
shroud laid. And that's if you've ever had a rope.
(07:52):
And then you've seen at the end of the rope
a little guy right in the center of it running
through the core. That's the fourth strand. It's like a
little core at the center of it all, and that
is the child blade.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yes, and we should say another piece of jargon. You
don't make rope or produce rope or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
You lay rope, that's right, just like you lay a cable.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Oh yeah, I never thought about that. I thought that
meant like actually putting it down. But yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
So what about the braid.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
The braid is something to see. Watching a braided rope
being created is amazing because there's all these little spools
during this amazing like ballroom dance with one another. It's
really cool.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
But they braiding is where you take a bunch of
strands and you braid, well, you braid them together into
an interlocking structure. Usually it has a core, and the
core can be twisted and have like a braided shell
around it. And when you're braiding stuff, you can use
way more strands than you can usually with a twisted rope.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, and they're generally a little longer and more appliable
than a twisted rope. But I like a good old
school rope.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I do too, A good natural fiber rope that you
can't even get your thumb and fingers to touch because
it's so thick. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Agreed. They've been using rope for probably hundreds of thousands
of years. Part of the problem with specifically dating rope
is that the early ropes were obviously organic in their
nature and their fibers, and so that stuff's not going
to stick around forever. We do have some, you know,
kind of cool evidence, like thirty four thousand years ago
(09:36):
in the Republic of Georgia where they saw flax fibers
embedded in clay, and so that was like, all right,
it's embedded in clay where it's sort of preserved, and
these were twisted and knotted up. So clearly people were
using rope back then. But there's other evidence of older
stuff too.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Right, Yeah, this is like implicit evidence. It's not direct,
like finding an actual piece of cordage. This is like
when they found a weaving tool years old in Germany.
It's made of ivory. Essentially, it was designed to keep
the strand separate when braiding or twisting the rope together,
which is still a technique that's used today.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
And then also they found beads, stone and shell beads
that start appearing in the prehistoric record three hundred thousand
years back. And I mean, try to wear a bead
around your neck without some sort of cordage. You can't
do it.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
No, those puka shells are just falling all over the floor.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, I mean maybe you could hold one under your chin,
between your chin and your neck, but who wants to
walk around like that?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Just use a cord, that's right. The idea for all
of this probably came from early on when they use
roots and vines for stuff like this. And you know,
I've got my camp up in the North Georgia Mountains.
There are some trees that have a like a like
a vine hanging down that like it might as well
(10:56):
be just nature's rope, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
For sure? What is I know exactly what you're talking about,
but I've never stopped and wondered what it was.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I guess it's a vine sure, Like it can't be
a root if it's coming down like from up top right.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, I didn't know if you knew what kind of
vine it was.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
No, I don't know what kind of vine it is,
But you know, you can sometimes you can like swing
on that stuff if it's sure if it's attached, but
be careful.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I mean, I guess that's what Tarzan used in the
old movies, right.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, he wasn't carrying around rope and slaying it over
tree branches.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
No. The other thing about rope is that it seems
to have been developed pretty much universally, Like like every group,
including ones that were never in contact with one another,
figured out how to make rope on their own. Yeah,
and then they just used whatever local types of fiber
was available. Like in North America, indigenous people used sinew
(11:53):
like tendons of say deer, I saw red deer sinew
rope making video. Yeah, yeah, hair, papyrus and reed in Egypt,
coconut fiber and bamboo in Southeast Asia. Like essentially you're like, okay,
can you make fibers out of this? Yes, well then
you can make a rope out of it too.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah. And you know, like we mentioned stuff like you know,
to string a bow obviously, but also making netting to
catch fish, shelter to weave together, you know, rope to
help like lift up a heavy frame of a hut
or something, hauling stuff, lashing things together. And this is
what I didn't really think of. But early bridges were
(12:36):
made of rope, And so if you want to get
from here to there and you can't do it, one
of the earliest things you could do is build a
rope bridge.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I would just not have gone across well, or I'd
have to go around. But there was a Herodotus wrote
in its histories about Xerxes, the first army in the
Second Persian War. I failed to look where this like
when this took place. But this was ancient Greece, obviously,
But they apparently bridged something like a kilometer wide straight
(13:10):
using rope and their ships to basically stretch the rope
and then put boards over these two or three rope
strands that were going all the way across the strait
to go invade grease.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, could you supprobl So rope is being used for
a ton of things for you know, many thousands of years.
Then all of a sudden, around thirty five hundred BC,
sailing became a thing. Yeah, and all of a sudden
it was on. Everyone was like, all right, rope is
the key to all of this happening. Can't raise a
sail without rope, can't tie up a can't more a
(13:46):
ship or can't anchor a ship without rope, So it's
key to what we're doing. And you know, people sailed
around for a little while, but then the fifteenth century
rolls around and the Age of Discovery starts unfolding, and
all of a sudden, if you were a nation that
was really good at sailing, you could and they did,
(14:07):
you could go around the world and start claiming places
as your own.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yes, and so rope became a really hot commodity during
the Age of Discovery or the Age of colonialism. I guess, yeah,
there was another industry that came along after, say, like
the navies of the world had started sailing, and that
was the whaling industry. For sure. The whaling industry needed
(14:33):
way more rope than a typical like you know, battleship
or cutter needed, because in addition to all the ropes
that like your typical sailing vessel needs, they also needed
lots and lots of rope, strong rope to connect to
the harpoon that they would harpoon a whale with and
then drag the whale around with them for the rest
of the time they were at sea. And there was
(14:56):
a I guess in Moby Dick. Still haven't read it yet.
Melville talks about how the rope was coiled so precisely
by like a professional rope layer in the bow of
the boat. This rope that was connected to the harpoon
because if there was any kind of like kink or
loop or something in it, it would just take your
(15:17):
arm clean off. Like if you got your arm caught
in this thing and a whale was rushing away with
a harpoon in it, it would your arm was just gone.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, and you know what I'm remembering now too. This
was another reason for rope because in Nantucket they had
the whaling museum there. Oh ye, So I went to
the whaling museum, which I thought was super interesting. And
I've never been more close than reading Moby Dick. Like
I'm right there. I'm just I'm working on a book
right now. The next horror book coming out soon from
(15:50):
Keith Rossen, the guy who had been reading lately, is
called chron By the way. It's great, but Moby Dick
is right there. And the thing that really pushed me
over the edge is I just saw that Rob Delaney, Uh,
you know the actor and comedian Rob Delaney. He's got
a podcast out now called Exploring the Greats that I
haven't listened to yet. But he and a professor named
(16:11):
Hester Bloom are doing Moby Dick one chapter at a time,
and I love Rob Delaney. I was like, you know what,
I think everything in life is telling me to finally
read Moby Dick and maybe listen to this podcast as
I go along and be a good way to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Okay, do it.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So I'm right, as soon as I finished Keith Rossen's book,
I'm gonna I think I'm going to dive into Moby Dick.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Fine, you can do it. Man.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Should we take a break, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
All right, We're gonna take a break and we're going
to talk about how rope is made right after this, So.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Chuck, like we were saying that ivory weaving tool forty
thousand years ago in Germany, it's essentially like it's still
definitely a part of how rope making was made traditionally
and then still today. But there is essentially if you
were making a rope, say pre twentieth century, yeah, you
(17:20):
were following essentially four steps. You have to prepare the fibers.
You spin those fibers in a yarn. You twist the
yarn and the strands, and then you twist the strands
and a rope, because, like I was saying before, a
rope is actually just increasingly large ropes twisted or braided together.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, and when we say yarn, that's a term that
you might think of as twine if you like bought
it in a store. We're not talking about like crafting yarn. No,
but it just maybe ounts yeah, for sure, but maybe
think twine and we'll go over these steps. We're not
going to get like super super in the weeds because
we've learned that, you know, trying to describe a like
(17:59):
a process, a factory process with just your mouth, is
that the easiest thing to do. So I would encourage
everyone to go look up a rope walk on YouTube,
and like we said, there are a bunch of different videos.
Just pick one of them. And if that doesn't fancy,
that isn't your fancy, isn't your fancy, cat fancy, I
(18:21):
love your markets just to shout out cat fancy. If
that one's not your liking, then there will no doubt
be another one. But we're talking about like up until
the seventeen hundreds, they used something called a rope walk,
which was a configuration of machines at opposite ends of
a long space. Sometimes it was an open field. Sometimes
(18:42):
it was a big, huge open like barn, but you
had a flaming tarpet nearby, which we'll see why in
a minute. Maybe you had a water wheel helping out.
But it was generally human powered, and it needed to
be long because they were making long ropes. And in
order to make a long rope, you just have to
walk this thing down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
(19:04):
feet until it's twisted up.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yep. I mean that's essentially that. And you have to
start with fiber. And again whatever local fiber you had works,
But do you need fiber to spin yarn? And yarn
is step two. Fibers you have to prepare. You do
all sorts of things to them, like you beat them,
you soak them, you call them names, and then once
(19:27):
they dry out, you run them through like giant combs.
You pull them through combs to basically individuate them. Right, Yeah,
then you start spinning those fibers into yarn. Now you're
in the rope making this for sure.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So you've got a spinning wheel At this point, you've
got a person with a bundle of fibers coiled around
their waist. It's hooked to a spindle, and then they
just very slowly walk backward, feeding those fibers in until
you get to the end of the rope walk. And
then you have your yarn. But in order to make
that yarn into the strand, you got to soak that in,
(20:02):
tar ring it through a roller. And then you've got
like a usable yarn or twine that you roll around
or wind around a big bobbin.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yes, and now that you have yarn, which is essentially
just think of it as a bunch of really really
thin ropes. Right. Now that you have your yarn, you've
got your first component of rope. Now you take the
yarn and you twist it or you braid it into strands. Right,
so you take a bunch of different lines of yarn,
you pull it through a tube which smooths the fibers,
(20:34):
compacts it, right, and then you also have it under tension.
You want it to be tense. And again you a
machine basically pulls it down the length of this rope walk,
which are really long. I don't know if you said
it or not. Some of them are like a thousand
feet long.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Right, Yeah, it depends on how long you need your rope. Sure, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
And then there's a forming machine that essentially separates the yarn,
and on the other side of the forming machine is
whatever machine they used to twist or braid it. And
then as you just keep walking backward that more and
more yarn gets turned into rope where it all comes
together at the center and it's twisted or braided. You
get to the other end. Now you have a strand.
(21:15):
You do that a bunch of times. Then you have
the components you need to make a rope.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
That's right, and you're going to twist those strands into rope.
Three or four of those strands are going to stretch
between a couple of twisting machines and they have Again
you got to really look this thing up because all
of this is possible, of course, because of two other
key inventions, the wheel and the gear. Yeah, because it's
you know, it looks like a sort of like a
little horse cart moving very slowly backward. So that's on wheels,
(21:44):
and then you have these gears moving in different directions.
That's making a thing that all these strands are tied
to goes in a circle, so it just starts twisting it.
And you got to have this other thing though, Man,
I forgot about the cone. Yeah, this cone that's got
these three notches, like you know, one at the top
(22:05):
and two on the sides. Like if you looked at
it from the front, it would be a triangle. But
it just runs through those I guess cutouts from the
cone to kind of keep everything from getting like twisted
in a bad way.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah. So on the on the back side of that cone,
which is called the laying top, it's keeping all those
strands separated. On the front side of it, that's where
the strands are being brought together and twisted into the rope.
Right again, you just walk backward, you pull those strands
through that processor that turn that twists them into rope,
(22:38):
and once you reach the end of the rope walk,
you've got a huge long length of rope that you
cut and you say presto. That's a tradition in rope making.
You have to shout presto when the rope is finished. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
It's really neat though, Like when you look at this
big like rack of bobbins with like maybe dozens of
I guess arns feeding through this little doughnut like tube
to make a strand and then that all being twisted
together with another. You know, these are machines, but it's
like the most basic machines you can have. It's a gear,
(23:13):
you know, twisting a thing in a circle. So it's
like it's just I love the really ingenious lo fi
stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, for sure, that's what that how it's made video
features is an old rope walk. Apparently one of the
oldest ones that's still around is in the Sweden city
of Karlskrona. It's from the eighteenth century. It's like a
thousand feet long three hundred meters and it's Sweden's longest building.
(23:40):
Oh well, which makes sense. I mean, there's probably not
a lot of buildings that are a thousand feet wide
in Sweden.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Probably just the no, never mind, bad joke, that's gonna say,
the Toble run factory. That's Switzerland, though, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Oh that was great, Chuck. I love that. There was
a problem with this early rope up until about the
end of the eighteenth century, and that was you were
pulling these strands through and they were all the same
length when they were twisted together. The problem is is
that meant that the stuff on the outside was under
(24:15):
higher tension than the stuff on the inside because they
were all the same length. Yeah, don't look too deeply
into it, just trust me. That's what happened, right, never
thought about it. So that meant that these ropes were
more likely to fray and crack and in turn break,
and that you needed a really thick, heavy rope to
make up for that. And then this captain for the
(24:37):
East India Company came along the same was Joseph Hudder.
Captain Joseph Hudder, and at the end of the eighteenth
century he created the forming plate, which is still very
much in use today. And it is so simple and
it makes so much sense that I would love to
just explain it real quick. Are you okay with that please?
The forming plate is a disc flat disk and there's
(24:58):
a bunch of consent circles drilled into it from made
out of individual holes. The fibers go through each of
those holes and then they all come together at a
center point where they're twisted or braided right well, because
the fibers going through the holes that make up the
outer circles have to technically travel further to that center
(25:21):
point because they're being bowed out. They have to go
far out. And then in that means that the fibers
used in the outside of the rope are longer than
the fibers on the inside of the rope, which means
that they're all under equal tension when the rope is finished.
And so basically, Joseph hutter made it quite possible for
(25:43):
much narrower, lighter ropes to do the job of heavier
ropes because they resisted fraying and breaking because of the
different lengths of fiber used in them.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Again, and genius Joseph uder It seems like one of
those guys. My brother's kind of one of these guys,
and I have a good friend named John Wolf who
is one of these guys. Just really smart people that
when presented with a almost like a mechanical problem like this, yeah,
their brains can just see it in a way and say, well,
why don't you just do this? And that I think
(26:15):
Josep Huttert might have been one of those guys where
he's like, well, you should just do this.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, I think you're exactly right, because it's that it's
that basic. Yeah, but it solves the problem so elegantly.
It's it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, but you got to have a certain kind of
brain to think that way. And I don't absolutely.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
I'd be like, I still don't understand why the outer
edges are fraying, you know, when they're all the same length.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
A quick example is I have a system at my
camp where it draws water out of the creek and
there's a propane hot water heater so we can have
like hot water and a sink. Awesome for washing dishes.
And it wasn't It was too long of a pool
at one point, and the motor, I guess, was getting
weaker and it wasn't pulling far enough. And I was like,
I don't know what to do, man, this thing well pull.
(26:57):
I wonder if they have a bigger one. And John
Wolf was there and he's like, yeah, I gotta just
get Like when I worked for Coke years ago and
we had really long lines, we would just put another
pump in the middle so it would just get to
that point and then that pump would pump it to
the other pump. He said, you should do that. I
was like, that is so simple. That's either something like
Ruby tells me or that you tell me because I
(27:19):
would never been able to figure that dumb thing out.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah, that kind of brain I just really admire.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Did you do it?
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh yeah, and it worked, works like a charm. You
should see the flow.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
That's awesome. That's funny. John Wolf always works how he
used to work for Coke into every conversation.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Oh man, you know Wolf.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So is it break time yet or are we still
going No, let's take a break. Okay, we're taking a break.
Everybody just watch.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Us, all right.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So we've covered up through the seventeen hundreds, told everyone
how rope is made. When it comes to the eighteen
hundreds and the Industrial Revolution starts happening, all of a sudden,
we have steam powered machines, and so rope is evolving
at the same time, and like how it's used in
applications and stuff like that. So you need like better rope,
(28:23):
bigger rope, longer rope, stronger rope, and all of a sudden,
with steam power, you could do that. And you know,
it's basically the same way you're just using like kind
of like everything with the Industrial Revolution, all of a sudden,
you could just do it on a much bigger scale
using machinery.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the Industrial Revolution changed the
demands that were put on rope and that at the
same time it changed the ways that rope could be
made to satisfy those demands.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Pretty cool point.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
And it all comes down to steam power. One of
the cool things about making rope with steam power with
an automated factory, even like this is early nineteenth century,
you need rope because they would use rope that ran
through the whole factory around like a central steam engine.
We've talked about this before and I don't remember what
it was in maybe diesel generator, I don't remember, but
(29:16):
that main engine spun it moved the rope, and the
rope ran around and moved these individual machines. It's one long,
continuous thing of rope. It's like the idiom says, you
need rope to make rope.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, it's good idiom.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I think so too. I don't know what it means,
but it sounds like it.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Well. They also were had innovations and textiles at the time,
so they were kind of co opting some of that
stuff to make better ropes. Like one example, I guess
is they were able to shrink a lot of stuff
to much smaller things. So the spinning jenny that used
to be this you know, mammoth machine, all of a
sudden you could fit in a room. And because it's
in a room and you didn't have this like two
(29:58):
thousand foot rope walk, you could like fully enclose that
and you could make rope year round, and it could
be heated, and you could hire women to work in
there because they already had experience working in textiles, so
now they could help make rope.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Right. So, yeah, the nineteenth century, the industrial Revolution essentially
well revolutionized how rope is made, even though it's still
using the same technique. It's just now the work is
being done more and more by machines. Right, Well, that's
industrial revolution at its core, But it didn't really kind
(30:33):
of change the types of rope that were being produced
as much. One thing that did come out of the
nineteenth century was wire rope. That was a brand new
thing that the Germans gave us in the eighteen thirties
because they needed it for their mining industry. And now
all of a sudden, you could build bigger and bigger
ships and make them out of metal because you didn't
(30:54):
need to use fiber rope any longer. You could use
metal rope which people call cable, but again it's still
just wire rope.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's right. And things stayed humming along pretty great until
the nineteen hundreds came along, and all of a sudden
in the twentieth century, we had synthetics upon us. So
nylon was the next like real big game changer when
it was introduced by the DuPont Chemical Company in nineteen
thirty nine as toothbrush bristles. When people are like, hey,
(31:25):
if you make these super long and they're not just
for toothbrushes, we can make this into rope, and I
think it'll be stronger, think it'll be stretchier. And within
a couple of years, you know, World War two definitely
helped when they had blocked like using raw materials for
rope making. So that's when nylon really had a chance
to shine.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, and then shortly after that, polypropylene and polyester followed too,
and so synthetics were basically everybody was like better living
through chemistry in the second half of the twentieth century,
and that certainly applied to rope making two and it's
still around today. I mean, like synthetics are. You can
find both natural fiber rope and synthetic rope as well.
(32:07):
But just because of the kind of operations that you
see in modern rope making facilities and factories, uh huh,
it just it'd be almost weird to see somebody make
a fiber rope in one of the modern factories, like
synthetic nylon and other kinds of material ropes just make sense.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, for sure. And the process is really similar because
you're you're still physically doing the same thing, but in
this case, you're starting out instead of you know, like
long fibers that you're running through a steel comb, you're
starting out with pellets that came from processed crude oil,
like little rice sized pellets of like you know, nylon,
(32:49):
let's say. And then you got to melt those down
in an extruder and push it through like smaller and
smaller nozzles until you get down to the diameter of
a hair, say, And then you have this long filament
and you know, you have to put it in a
cooling bath and so it holds a shape and stuff
like that. You stretch it out some on some rollers.
(33:10):
Apparently the stretching causes the polymer chains to align, which
is really going to strengthen it. But after that, aside
from having to treat it a little differently, it's kind
of the same process as an old rope walk and
then a factory as far as twisting the stuff together.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Exactly, except that these are done by machines that can
spin at like a thousand RPMs. As they're twisting these things.
It can make rope super fast. They do that with
yarn and then onto strands and then onto rope, and yeah,
it's essentially the same stuff again, back to that forty
thousand year old ivory weaving tool. And but once you
(33:47):
have the rope made, then it kind of jumps back
into modern the modern era because you have to do
things with nylon rope that you don't have to do
with fiber rope, which is like you have to heat
set it with steam that helps keep those polymers locked
in that same direction. They test them. I'm sure they
do this with modern fiber ropes too, but they they
(34:09):
stretch them, they jump on them, they beat them up,
they do all sorts of stuff, and they have sensors
that detect what's going on within the rope, and then
once the rope passes some sort of certification, it's maximum
operating capacities are stamped on the label and it's coiled
up and sold.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about a few specific kinds of
rope because it gets depending on what you need to do.
You might need a rope that's like stretch here or
I don't know, stiffer. Let's say, so, if you want
to talk about shot cord, that is bungee cord. Yeah,
(34:48):
and that is you know, if I've never bungee jumped,
but I did learn at one point that a bungee
cord was just a lot of rubber bands twisted into
a rope. And I don't know if that made me
feel better or worse about the whole process.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Well, yeah, so this is it's silicone to begin with,
silicone rubber and it's vulcanized and usually they're made of
sixteen different strands and then that's just the core. There's
a synthetic fiber shell that goes around the cord. Yeah,
and yeah, I think shock chords are pretty pretty reliable
(35:23):
for the most part. Yeah, they apparently stretched to about
one hundred and thirty percent of their original length, and
then Benden snatched back to their original length again without
being mall, without breaking sure or without losing their elasticity.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, I seriously what I mean? Uh, Well,
eventually they do over time, though, I guess because just
using regular bungee cords around the house, like old old
ones aren't as stretchy as they.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Used to be. Good point, And you probably want to
go bungee jump at a place that's reputable enough that
they're not over using their bungee cords. Agreed, Great point.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
You've also got spot cord, and that is not super
strong or anything, but it has a high resistance to snags.
And the cool thing about spot cord it's a cotton
rope that's braided and it's been produced by the Samson
Cordage Company for about one hundred and fifty years. And
if you go to like a big box hardware store
(36:21):
or something and you just get like a little fifty
foot small thin rope, it's probably a spot cord.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah. They feel real nice because they're cotton. Yeah, if
you've ever used a clothes line that's not wire, yeah,
there you go, it's probably a spot cord.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, if you've ever tied up your neighbor to a chair,
probably using spot cord, if you're not into the duct
tape thing.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
And came into the room saying, well, well, well look
how the tables have turned.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
That's right. I hope that comes across as a joke.
I know, I'm sure that's real world violence or although
you could just be tying them to a chair to
make them watch the Simpsons or something. Let's say that's
what I was talking about.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
And then another special rope, and these are very special ropes,
by the way, it's the lariat. And lariat is the
correct term for what a lot of people call lassos,
but I lift it up, chuck. Lasso is a verb,
and it's what you do with a lariat, which is.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Now, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You lasso a horse
or something.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yes, exactly. And you and I both have our own lariots.
Do you remember Kathy with the ka and Phoenix gave
them to us at the field.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
I thought it was Denver, but was it Phoenix?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Phoenix?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Okay, yeah, I still have mine. It's hanging up at
the camp.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah. I can't tell you how many steer I've wrestled
with mine.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
These are traditionally made with horsehair or raw hide. Today
they're usually braided with nylon or polyester maybe. But the
key to this thing is is that it's stiff. Like
I said, sometimes you might need a stiff rope. So
you know, if you've never used a or tried to
lasso something, you might be surprised to know that it's
a it's a you know, it's stiff.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's very stiff, super stiff, and it barely fits in
your suitcase from Phoenix back home to Atlantic.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
I know we managed it though.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. The way they work though, is a Honda knot
which slides up and down the rigid rope or stiff
rope very easily. So when you get it around to
steers horns, you pull it and the loop closes, but
it doesn't close mid air on your way right on
its way to the steers horns like it would if
you made it out of a spot cord.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
There's also we can't not talk about climbing ropes. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yeah, that's that's what keeps you alive if you're a
into repelling and rock climbing. Yep, they used to be
made out of plant fibers before nylon, just like any
other rope that we're talking about, of course. But you know,
if you've seen an action movie from the old days
and that rope is being you know, wearing against that
(38:58):
rock at the top of a cliff, yeah, it starts
going dying, dying, dying, and you're worried about your action hero,
then you need to go to a nylon rope because
one of the important things about a nylon rope is
not going to phrase as much like in the movie.
And also if you fall, it's going to be a
little stretchier. So in the old days, if you fell
like off of Everest in the old days, with a
(39:19):
fiber rope, like the entire force of falling is just
stops in an instant because there's zero stretch. And that's
no good.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
No, that produces rope trauma.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Aha, very nice.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
It can cut you just clean in half.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
That's what I've heard.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So with climbing ropes in particular, there's a special type
of rope construction that's he's called the Kern mantle construction
and it refers to the Kern the core like a kernel,
and that's made of a nylon rope, and then there's
a mantle the shell that has made of braided nylon
that protects the internal nylon rope, so the internal kern
(39:59):
rope is low bearing. The outer shell rope protects that
internal load bearing one. But because they're both so strong,
if one failed, the other would be able to keep
you dangling. And they're stretchy enough that rope trauma is
brought to almost nil. The possibility of it. When you
fall off of a cliff wearing a current mantle rope
(40:21):
that's right now.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
You came around in nineteen and fifty three. Yep, the odds,
and I guess that's kind of it on rope, right.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
That's it. One thing that struck me I could not
find an answer for it is that in the United
States alone, in twenty twenty five, three point five billion
dollars worth of rope was sold. Pretty impressive. They're projecting
it to increase to six billion in less than ten
years by twenty thirty three. I could not find why,
(40:52):
what do we need more rope for? I don't know.
Maybe gen Z's going to finally discover rope in twenty
thirty three, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I don't know. I'm trying to think of how like
a data center uses rope or something that's like something
really like growing fast right now, But I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, I guess maybe if you include fiber optic cable.
Oh maybe fiber optic rope, I should say in in
that that might account for it. Good con Well, that's
it for rope everybody, which means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
This goes back to the voice of God Dan Lafontaine,
the famous movie trailer guy in a World, We did
a what is say? Dan? M No, that was his brother.
He should have heard his voice. Hey, guys, Don Lafontaine,
I think we did a shorty on him.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Shorty yeah, voice of God.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
So hey, guys, been meaning to write for a while,
and when I heard the short stuff, I was like, Bam,
now I have to write. Because my father was a
sound editor in New York City and worked on movie trailers,
the sound mixes for them, and recording the voiceovers. He
met many actors over the years, and also Don, who
became a good friend of our family. When my younger
(42:03):
brother Travis was born in nineteen seventy one, Don became
his godfather. Even my mother loved Don and was always
said he was such a neat guy and fun and
they spent some time partying with him back in the day.
I have some old pictures of Don and my parents,
those little square wins with the rounded off corners where
everything looks like shades of brown and orange and yellow.
You know the ones. Guys, if I can lay my
(42:26):
hands on one, I'll attach it, which did not happen,
by the way, but I'd be tickled to death if
you selected my email to be read on the air
like you have no idea. Ll you can even edit
down and I won't mind. Smiley face yours, both of you's, truly.
That is from Tegwin Allen Stockdale or the nickname.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Tag What a name? That is a great name? Agreed, Well,
thanks a lot, Teglin Allen Stockdale. I don't think I
would ever say your name other than to use.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
All three agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Oh great. If you want to be like Tiglin Allen
Stockdale and email us with a great story about something
we talked about. We love that kind of thing. You
can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and
send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Stuff You should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're going to rope
you into interest in ropes in this episode the Stuff
You Should Know on Ropes.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, I had this idea, and this is one of
those where it was a very distinct situation that made
me think of it, which was on our trip to
Nantucket when Emily and I went there for the first
time not too long ago. We did a sailing trip
on a kind of an old school boat sailing boat,
and they let me. I volunteered to help out. So
(00:46):
I was hoisting sails and raising jibs and things. I
don't know if that's proper terminology. And I had that
rope in my hand and I kind of looked at
it and it was the old school, you know, rope rope,
not synthetic. It was clearly made from natural fibers and
it was braided and very thick and heavy, and I
was like, man, rope, It's like, what a what an
(01:09):
undersung invention?
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Had you taken mushrooms?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
No, not at all, Well, maybe microdoes, but it was
definitely one of those moments where I was like, what
an undersung invention? Like, if you pulled one hundred people,
you would get lots of wheels or maybe gears or
fire or sliced bread or the toaster or whatever. But
I doubt if you would get more than like a
ten percent unless you work in like a sailing industry
(01:36):
or another industry that heavily relies on rope. I doubt
if you would get a ton of people that said, yeah, rope,
that's up there is one of the greatest inventions of
all time. But it has touched so much of humanity
and the forward progress of humanity.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, I mean, you'd make a great point. I hadn't
thought about it either. I probably would not have said rope.
But Julie helps us with this, I think. And I mean, like,
if you want to till some like really hard ground
to try to grow crops in it, try to do
that with an ox and a plow, but no rope. Sucker.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, if you want to shoot a wild boar from
thirty feet away, what are you gonna shoot it with?
You're gonna shoot it with a bow that has a
kind of rope. And you know we should point out
that what we're talking about is cordage. So any kind
of bundled fiber that's braided together, that's all sort of
a kind of rope. We wouldn't have had musical instruments,
(02:37):
we wouldn't have had undersea cabling to make the Internet possible.
And then what sailing came around that you know, you
think about, Yeah, big deal, it helps sailing, But sailing
is what helped discover the world.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, you got to think of it beyond the America's Cup.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
So like you said, let's talk about rope. Let's get
into it, shall we do it? I learned a lot
in this and like you said, rope is a type
of cordage, not all cordages rope. Rope is essentially made
of different types of smaller ropes bundled together, like you said, braided.
You can also twist them. And you can make it
out of everything from synthetic fibers like jute or sisol.
(03:19):
Sisol comes from the agave plant. Did you know that
I did? Oh? I didn't. And you can make it
out of wire a little bit. You can make it
out of wire. There's all sorts of stuff you can
make it out of But the point is is that
all of them follow essentially the same method of making
a rope. That if you strip away all like the
(03:41):
bells and whistles that you have today, it's they're putting
this stuff together in the same way that people put
it together from the very outset of rope making.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, and you know, I think that's the other thing
that appealed to me was I was looking at this
rope and saw the like an individual strand was frayed perhaps,
and I saw how just like human hair like that was.
And I just love the idea that somebody was like,
you know, this thing weak, but put all this together
in it strong.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, it's very clever. I never thought about it either.
But the way that rope is made strong and stable
in all of that is because they're twisted in opposing
like the fibers are twisted in opposing directions, held to tension,
and that I think the impression I have is that
you're actually storing somehow some energy or force in the
(04:35):
rope when you start braiding it and twisting it under tension.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, it creates something that has high torsional stability, so
it can hold its shape even though rope is moving
around and being tied into knots, and it's constantly twisting
around and getting pulled on. And you know, it depends
on what kind of rope you have. But you know,
if you see these those giant ropes that they still
use to tie in like a cruise ship or something,
(05:01):
I mean, it's still the same stuff. It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
That's right. Let's talk specific jargon, baby, let's I love it.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'll let some jargon.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
All of this stuff is cordage. Like we said, a
cord is a rope that's three sixteenths of an inch
or less. That's right, use metric ts. It's still a chord.
You have to use inches for.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
That, that's right. A rope is a rope if it
is above three sixteenths of an inch. And then a
cable is when you have several ropes that are twisted together.
And these can be made from all kinds of things,
like we said, obviously the organic fibers you mentioned some.
We also have hemp, you may have said hemp and cotton.
We'll get into synthetics. When that came along, it was
(05:44):
a real game changer because that provided a little stretch
so nylon and polyester and polypropylene, stuff like that, and
then wire wires usually steel. And you know, we might
call something like that a cable, but it's still the
same concept that it's a kind of rope, as a
steel cable is or a steel rope is basically a cable.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, wire rope is rope. A cable is a bunch
of ropes. You can make it out of sisol if
you wanted to a cable, sure, and then a bunch
of cables twisted together is called the super duper rope.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Right, that's right. Good jargon.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
So let's keep going. Let's talk jargon in as far
as construction goes. You said you can braid ropes, you
can also twist them. I never thought about this, and
I watched two videos. The one is it was a
how It's made video. God bless how it's made. Because
if you ever run into a written or verbal explanation
(06:42):
of something where you're like what, go find the how
it's made version and you'll see it with your own eyes.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
They've always done a great job. There's a lot, in fact,
there's a lot of good rope making videos online.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I watched like three or four others they're mesmerizing.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
They got far.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
There's another one we found called how Do They Braid Rope?
And it's from the National Film Board of Canada, the
Boards of Canada, and it doesn't even have narration. The
only soundtrack is the factory sounds like that really is mesmerizing.
And so you see the two different ways rope is made,
and the first how it's made one uses twist, which
(07:18):
is a conventional rope. And as I was saying, when
I started talking, I never realized that most ropes I've
ever seen in my life are twisted. I always just
assumed they were braided, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, And when you look at them up close, though,
you can definitely see the difference between a braid and
a twist. I love in twisted rope. This is when
you have twisted strands that are counter twisting around each other.
Usually it's three strands, and that's called a hawser laid twist.
But you can also have a four strander, which is
shroud laid. And that's if you've ever had a rope.
(07:52):
And then you've seen at the end of the rope
a little guy right in the center of it running
through the core. That's the fourth strand. It's like a
little core at the center of it all, and that
is the child blade.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yes, and we should say another piece of jargon. You
don't make rope or produce rope or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
You lay rope, that's right, just like you lay a cable.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Oh yeah, I never thought about that. I thought that
meant like actually putting it down. But yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
So what about the braid.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
The braid is something to see. Watching a braided rope
being created is amazing because there's all these little spools
during this amazing like ballroom dance with one another. It's
really cool.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
But they braiding is where you take a bunch of
strands and you braid, well, you braid them together into
an interlocking structure. Usually it has a core, and the
core can be twisted and have like a braided shell
around it. And when you're braiding stuff, you can use
way more strands than you can usually with a twisted rope.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, and they're generally a little longer and more appliable
than a twisted rope. But I like a good old
school rope.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I do too, A good natural fiber rope that you
can't even get your thumb and fingers to touch because
it's so thick. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Agreed. They've been using rope for probably hundreds of thousands
of years. Part of the problem with specifically dating rope
is that the early ropes were obviously organic in their
nature and their fibers, and so that stuff's not going
to stick around forever. We do have some, you know,
kind of cool evidence, like thirty four thousand years ago
(09:36):
in the Republic of Georgia where they saw flax fibers
embedded in clay, and so that was like, all right,
it's embedded in clay where it's sort of preserved, and
these were twisted and knotted up. So clearly people were
using rope back then. But there's other evidence of older
stuff too.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Right, Yeah, this is like implicit evidence. It's not direct,
like finding an actual piece of cordage. This is like
when they found a weaving tool years old in Germany.
It's made of ivory. Essentially, it was designed to keep
the strand separate when braiding or twisting the rope together,
which is still a technique that's used today.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
And then also they found beads, stone and shell beads
that start appearing in the prehistoric record three hundred thousand
years back. And I mean, try to wear a bead
around your neck without some sort of cordage. You can't
do it.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
No, those puka shells are just falling all over the floor.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, I mean maybe you could hold one under your chin,
between your chin and your neck, but who wants to
walk around like that?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Just use a cord, that's right. The idea for all
of this probably came from early on when they use
roots and vines for stuff like this. And you know,
I've got my camp up in the North Georgia Mountains.
There are some trees that have a like a like
a vine hanging down that like it might as well
(10:56):
be just nature's rope, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
For sure? What is I know exactly what you're talking about,
but I've never stopped and wondered what it was.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I guess it's a vine sure, Like it can't be
a root if it's coming down like from up top right.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, I didn't know if you knew what kind of
vine it was.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
No, I don't know what kind of vine it is,
But you know, you can sometimes you can like swing
on that stuff if it's sure if it's attached, but
be careful.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I mean, I guess that's what Tarzan used in the
old movies, right.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, he wasn't carrying around rope and slaying it over
tree branches.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
No. The other thing about rope is that it seems
to have been developed pretty much universally, Like like every group,
including ones that were never in contact with one another,
figured out how to make rope on their own. Yeah,
and then they just used whatever local types of fiber
was available. Like in North America, indigenous people used sinew
(11:53):
like tendons of say deer, I saw red deer sinew
rope making video. Yeah, yeah, hair, papyrus and reed in Egypt,
coconut fiber and bamboo in Southeast Asia. Like essentially you're like, okay,
can you make fibers out of this? Yes, well then
you can make a rope out of it too.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah. And you know, like we mentioned stuff like you know,
to string a bow obviously, but also making netting to
catch fish, shelter to weave together, you know, rope to
help like lift up a heavy frame of a hut
or something, hauling stuff, lashing things together. And this is
what I didn't really think of. But early bridges were
(12:36):
made of rope, And so if you want to get
from here to there and you can't do it, one
of the earliest things you could do is build a
rope bridge.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
I would just not have gone across well, or I'd
have to go around. But there was a Herodotus wrote
in its histories about Xerxes, the first army in the
Second Persian War. I failed to look where this like
when this took place. But this was ancient Greece, obviously,
But they apparently bridged something like a kilometer wide straight
(13:10):
using rope and their ships to basically stretch the rope
and then put boards over these two or three rope
strands that were going all the way across the strait
to go invade grease.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, could you supprobl So rope is being used for
a ton of things for you know, many thousands of years.
Then all of a sudden, around thirty five hundred BC,
sailing became a thing. Yeah, and all of a sudden
it was on. Everyone was like, all right, rope is
the key to all of this happening. Can't raise a
sail without rope, can't tie up a can't more a
(13:46):
ship or can't anchor a ship without rope, So it's
key to what we're doing. And you know, people sailed
around for a little while, but then the fifteenth century
rolls around and the Age of Discovery starts unfolding, and
all of a sudden, if you were a nation that
was really good at sailing, you could and they did,
(14:07):
you could go around the world and start claiming places
as your own.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yes, and so rope became a really hot commodity during
the Age of Discovery or the Age of colonialism. I guess, yeah,
there was another industry that came along after, say, like
the navies of the world had started sailing, and that
was the whaling industry. For sure. The whaling industry needed
(14:33):
way more rope than a typical like you know, battleship
or cutter needed, because in addition to all the ropes
that like your typical sailing vessel needs, they also needed
lots and lots of rope, strong rope to connect to
the harpoon that they would harpoon a whale with and
then drag the whale around with them for the rest
of the time they were at sea. And there was
(14:56):
a I guess in Moby Dick. Still haven't read it yet.
Melville talks about how the rope was coiled so precisely
by like a professional rope layer in the bow of
the boat. This rope that was connected to the harpoon
because if there was any kind of like kink or
loop or something in it, it would just take your
(15:17):
arm clean off. Like if you got your arm caught
in this thing and a whale was rushing away with
a harpoon in it, it would your arm was just gone.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, and you know what I'm remembering now too. This
was another reason for rope because in Nantucket they had
the whaling museum there. Oh ye, So I went to
the whaling museum, which I thought was super interesting. And
I've never been more close than reading Moby Dick. Like
I'm right there. I'm just I'm working on a book
right now. The next horror book coming out soon from
(15:50):
Keith Rossen, the guy who had been reading lately, is
called chron By the way. It's great, but Moby Dick
is right there. And the thing that really pushed me
over the edge is I just saw that Rob Delaney, Uh,
you know the actor and comedian Rob Delaney. He's got
a podcast out now called Exploring the Greats that I
haven't listened to yet. But he and a professor named
(16:11):
Hester Bloom are doing Moby Dick one chapter at a time,
and I love Rob Delaney. I was like, you know what,
I think everything in life is telling me to finally
read Moby Dick and maybe listen to this podcast as
I go along and be a good way to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Okay, do it.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
So I'm right, as soon as I finished Keith Rossen's book,
I'm gonna I think I'm going to dive into Moby Dick.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Fine, you can do it. Man.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Should we take a break, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
All right, We're gonna take a break and we're going
to talk about how rope is made right after this, So.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Chuck, like we were saying that ivory weaving tool forty
thousand years ago in Germany, it's essentially like it's still
definitely a part of how rope making was made traditionally
and then still today. But there is essentially if you
were making a rope, say pre twentieth century, yeah, you
(17:20):
were following essentially four steps. You have to prepare the fibers.
You spin those fibers in a yarn. You twist the
yarn and the strands, and then you twist the strands
and a rope, because, like I was saying before, a
rope is actually just increasingly large ropes twisted or braided together.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, and when we say yarn, that's a term that
you might think of as twine if you like bought
it in a store. We're not talking about like crafting yarn. No,
but it just maybe ounts yeah, for sure, but maybe
think twine and we'll go over these steps. We're not
going to get like super super in the weeds because
we've learned that, you know, trying to describe a like
(17:59):
a process, a factory process with just your mouth, is
that the easiest thing to do. So I would encourage
everyone to go look up a rope walk on YouTube,
and like we said, there are a bunch of different videos.
Just pick one of them. And if that doesn't fancy,
that isn't your fancy, isn't your fancy, cat fancy, I
(18:21):
love your markets just to shout out cat fancy. If
that one's not your liking, then there will no doubt
be another one. But we're talking about like up until
the seventeen hundreds, they used something called a rope walk,
which was a configuration of machines at opposite ends of
a long space. Sometimes it was an open field. Sometimes
(18:42):
it was a big, huge open like barn, but you
had a flaming tarpet nearby, which we'll see why in
a minute. Maybe you had a water wheel helping out.
But it was generally human powered, and it needed to
be long because they were making long ropes. And in
order to make a long rope, you just have to
walk this thing down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
(19:04):
feet until it's twisted up.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yep. I mean that's essentially that. And you have to
start with fiber. And again whatever local fiber you had works,
But do you need fiber to spin yarn? And yarn
is step two. Fibers you have to prepare. You do
all sorts of things to them, like you beat them,
you soak them, you call them names, and then once
(19:27):
they dry out, you run them through like giant combs.
You pull them through combs to basically individuate them. Right, Yeah,
then you start spinning those fibers into yarn. Now you're
in the rope making this for sure.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
So you've got a spinning wheel At this point, you've
got a person with a bundle of fibers coiled around
their waist. It's hooked to a spindle, and then they
just very slowly walk backward, feeding those fibers in until
you get to the end of the rope walk. And
then you have your yarn. But in order to make
that yarn into the strand, you got to soak that in,
(20:02):
tar ring it through a roller. And then you've got
like a usable yarn or twine that you roll around
or wind around a big bobbin.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yes, and now that you have yarn, which is essentially
just think of it as a bunch of really really
thin ropes. Right. Now that you have your yarn, you've
got your first component of rope. Now you take the
yarn and you twist it or you braid it into strands. Right,
so you take a bunch of different lines of yarn,
you pull it through a tube which smooths the fibers,
(20:34):
compacts it, right, and then you also have it under tension.
You want it to be tense. And again you a
machine basically pulls it down the length of this rope walk,
which are really long. I don't know if you said
it or not. Some of them are like a thousand
feet long.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Right, Yeah, it depends on how long you need your rope. Sure, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
And then there's a forming machine that essentially separates the yarn,
and on the other side of the forming machine is
whatever machine they used to twist or braid it. And
then as you just keep walking backward that more and
more yarn gets turned into rope where it all comes
together at the center and it's twisted or braided. You
get to the other end. Now you have a strand.
(21:15):
You do that a bunch of times. Then you have
the components you need to make a rope.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
That's right, and you're going to twist those strands into rope.
Three or four of those strands are going to stretch
between a couple of twisting machines and they have Again
you got to really look this thing up because all
of this is possible, of course, because of two other
key inventions, the wheel and the gear. Yeah, because it's
you know, it looks like a sort of like a
little horse cart moving very slowly backward. So that's on wheels,
(21:44):
and then you have these gears moving in different directions.
That's making a thing that all these strands are tied
to goes in a circle, so it just starts twisting it.
And you got to have this other thing though, Man,
I forgot about the cone. Yeah, this cone that's got
these three notches, like you know, one at the top
(22:05):
and two on the sides. Like if you looked at
it from the front, it would be a triangle. But
it just runs through those I guess cutouts from the
cone to kind of keep everything from getting like twisted
in a bad way.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah. So on the on the back side of that cone,
which is called the laying top, it's keeping all those
strands separated. On the front side of it, that's where
the strands are being brought together and twisted into the rope.
Right again, you just walk backward, you pull those strands
through that processor that turn that twists them into rope,
(22:38):
and once you reach the end of the rope walk,
you've got a huge long length of rope that you
cut and you say presto. That's a tradition in rope making.
You have to shout presto when the rope is finished. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
It's really neat though, Like when you look at this
big like rack of bobbins with like maybe dozens of
I guess arns feeding through this little doughnut like tube
to make a strand and then that all being twisted
together with another. You know, these are machines, but it's
like the most basic machines you can have. It's a gear,
(23:13):
you know, twisting a thing in a circle. So it's
like it's just I love the really ingenious lo fi
stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, for sure, that's what that how it's made video
features is an old rope walk. Apparently one of the
oldest ones that's still around is in the Sweden city
of Karlskrona. It's from the eighteenth century. It's like a
thousand feet long three hundred meters and it's Sweden's longest building.
(23:40):
Oh well, which makes sense. I mean, there's probably not
a lot of buildings that are a thousand feet wide
in Sweden.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Probably just the no, never mind, bad joke, that's gonna say,
the Toble run factory. That's Switzerland, though, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Oh that was great, Chuck. I love that. There was
a problem with this early rope up until about the
end of the eighteenth century, and that was you were
pulling these strands through and they were all the same
length when they were twisted together. The problem is is
that meant that the stuff on the outside was under
(24:15):
higher tension than the stuff on the inside because they
were all the same length. Yeah, don't look too deeply
into it, just trust me. That's what happened, right, never
thought about it. So that meant that these ropes were
more likely to fray and crack and in turn break,
and that you needed a really thick, heavy rope to
make up for that. And then this captain for the
(24:37):
East India Company came along the same was Joseph Hudder.
Captain Joseph Hudder, and at the end of the eighteenth
century he created the forming plate, which is still very
much in use today. And it is so simple and
it makes so much sense that I would love to
just explain it real quick. Are you okay with that please?
The forming plate is a disc flat disk and there's
(24:58):
a bunch of consent circles drilled into it from made
out of individual holes. The fibers go through each of
those holes and then they all come together at a
center point where they're twisted or braided right well, because
the fibers going through the holes that make up the
outer circles have to technically travel further to that center
(25:21):
point because they're being bowed out. They have to go
far out. And then in that means that the fibers
used in the outside of the rope are longer than
the fibers on the inside of the rope, which means
that they're all under equal tension when the rope is finished.
And so basically, Joseph hutter made it quite possible for
(25:43):
much narrower, lighter ropes to do the job of heavier
ropes because they resisted fraying and breaking because of the
different lengths of fiber used in them.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Again, and genius Joseph uder It seems like one of
those guys. My brother's kind of one of these guys,
and I have a good friend named John Wolf who
is one of these guys. Just really smart people that
when presented with a almost like a mechanical problem like this, yeah,
their brains can just see it in a way and say, well,
why don't you just do this? And that I think
(26:15):
Josep Huttert might have been one of those guys where
he's like, well, you should just do this.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, I think you're exactly right, because it's that it's
that basic. Yeah, but it solves the problem so elegantly.
It's it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, but you got to have a certain kind of
brain to think that way. And I don't absolutely.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
I'd be like, I still don't understand why the outer
edges are fraying, you know, when they're all the same length.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
A quick example is I have a system at my
camp where it draws water out of the creek and
there's a propane hot water heater so we can have
like hot water and a sink. Awesome for washing dishes.
And it wasn't It was too long of a pool
at one point, and the motor, I guess, was getting
weaker and it wasn't pulling far enough. And I was like,
I don't know what to do, man, this thing well pull.
(26:57):
I wonder if they have a bigger one. And John
Wolf was there and he's like, yeah, I gotta just
get Like when I worked for Coke years ago and
we had really long lines, we would just put another
pump in the middle so it would just get to
that point and then that pump would pump it to
the other pump. He said, you should do that. I
was like, that is so simple. That's either something like
Ruby tells me or that you tell me because I
(27:19):
would never been able to figure that dumb thing out.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah, that kind of brain I just really admire.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Did you do it?
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh yeah, and it worked, works like a charm. You
should see the flow.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
That's awesome. That's funny. John Wolf always works how he
used to work for Coke into every conversation.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Oh man, you know Wolf.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So is it break time yet or are we still
going No, let's take a break. Okay, we're taking a break.
Everybody just watch.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Us, all right.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So we've covered up through the seventeen hundreds, told everyone
how rope is made. When it comes to the eighteen
hundreds and the Industrial Revolution starts happening, all of a sudden,
we have steam powered machines, and so rope is evolving
at the same time, and like how it's used in
applications and stuff like that. So you need like better rope,
(28:23):
bigger rope, longer rope, stronger rope, and all of a sudden,
with steam power, you could do that. And you know,
it's basically the same way you're just using like kind
of like everything with the Industrial Revolution, all of a sudden,
you could just do it on a much bigger scale
using machinery.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the Industrial Revolution changed the
demands that were put on rope and that at the
same time it changed the ways that rope could be
made to satisfy those demands.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Pretty cool point.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
And it all comes down to steam power. One of
the cool things about making rope with steam power with
an automated factory, even like this is early nineteenth century,
you need rope because they would use rope that ran
through the whole factory around like a central steam engine.
We've talked about this before and I don't remember what
it was in maybe diesel generator, I don't remember, but
(29:16):
that main engine spun it moved the rope, and the
rope ran around and moved these individual machines. It's one long,
continuous thing of rope. It's like the idiom says, you
need rope to make rope.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, it's good idiom.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I think so too. I don't know what it means,
but it sounds like it.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Well. They also were had innovations and textiles at the time,
so they were kind of co opting some of that
stuff to make better ropes. Like one example, I guess
is they were able to shrink a lot of stuff
to much smaller things. So the spinning jenny that used
to be this you know, mammoth machine, all of a
sudden you could fit in a room. And because it's
in a room and you didn't have this like two
(29:58):
thousand foot rope walk, you could like fully enclose that
and you could make rope year round, and it could
be heated, and you could hire women to work in
there because they already had experience working in textiles, so
now they could help make rope.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Right. So, yeah, the nineteenth century, the industrial Revolution essentially
well revolutionized how rope is made, even though it's still
using the same technique. It's just now the work is
being done more and more by machines. Right, Well, that's
industrial revolution at its core, But it didn't really kind
(30:33):
of change the types of rope that were being produced
as much. One thing that did come out of the
nineteenth century was wire rope. That was a brand new
thing that the Germans gave us in the eighteen thirties
because they needed it for their mining industry. And now
all of a sudden, you could build bigger and bigger
ships and make them out of metal because you didn't
(30:54):
need to use fiber rope any longer. You could use
metal rope which people call cable, but again it's still
just wire rope.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That's right. And things stayed humming along pretty great until
the nineteen hundreds came along, and all of a sudden
in the twentieth century, we had synthetics upon us. So
nylon was the next like real big game changer when
it was introduced by the DuPont Chemical Company in nineteen
thirty nine as toothbrush bristles. When people are like, hey,
(31:25):
if you make these super long and they're not just
for toothbrushes, we can make this into rope, and I
think it'll be stronger, think it'll be stretchier. And within
a couple of years, you know, World War two definitely
helped when they had blocked like using raw materials for
rope making. So that's when nylon really had a chance
to shine.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, and then shortly after that, polypropylene and polyester followed too,
and so synthetics were basically everybody was like better living
through chemistry in the second half of the twentieth century,
and that certainly applied to rope making two and it's
still around today. I mean, like synthetics are. You can
find both natural fiber rope and synthetic rope as well.
(32:07):
But just because of the kind of operations that you
see in modern rope making facilities and factories, uh huh,
it just it'd be almost weird to see somebody make
a fiber rope in one of the modern factories, like
synthetic nylon and other kinds of material ropes just make sense.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, for sure. And the process is really similar because
you're you're still physically doing the same thing, but in
this case, you're starting out instead of you know, like
long fibers that you're running through a steel comb, you're
starting out with pellets that came from processed crude oil,
like little rice sized pellets of like you know, nylon,
(32:49):
let's say. And then you got to melt those down
in an extruder and push it through like smaller and
smaller nozzles until you get down to the diameter of
a hair, say, And then you have this long filament
and you know, you have to put it in a
cooling bath and so it holds a shape and stuff
like that. You stretch it out some on some rollers.
(33:10):
Apparently the stretching causes the polymer chains to align, which
is really going to strengthen it. But after that, aside
from having to treat it a little differently, it's kind
of the same process as an old rope walk and
then a factory as far as twisting the stuff together.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Exactly, except that these are done by machines that can
spin at like a thousand RPMs. As they're twisting these things.
It can make rope super fast. They do that with
yarn and then onto strands and then onto rope, and yeah,
it's essentially the same stuff again, back to that forty
thousand year old ivory weaving tool. And but once you
(33:47):
have the rope made, then it kind of jumps back
into modern the modern era because you have to do
things with nylon rope that you don't have to do
with fiber rope, which is like you have to heat
set it with steam that helps keep those polymers locked
in that same direction. They test them. I'm sure they
do this with modern fiber ropes too, but they they
(34:09):
stretch them, they jump on them, they beat them up,
they do all sorts of stuff, and they have sensors
that detect what's going on within the rope, and then
once the rope passes some sort of certification, it's maximum
operating capacities are stamped on the label and it's coiled
up and sold.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about a few specific kinds of
rope because it gets depending on what you need to do.
You might need a rope that's like stretch here or
I don't know, stiffer. Let's say, so, if you want
to talk about shot cord, that is bungee cord. Yeah,
(34:48):
and that is you know, if I've never bungee jumped,
but I did learn at one point that a bungee
cord was just a lot of rubber bands twisted into
a rope. And I don't know if that made me
feel better or worse about the whole process.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Well, yeah, so this is it's silicone to begin with,
silicone rubber and it's vulcanized and usually they're made of
sixteen different strands and then that's just the core. There's
a synthetic fiber shell that goes around the cord. Yeah,
and yeah, I think shock chords are pretty pretty reliable
(35:23):
for the most part. Yeah, they apparently stretched to about
one hundred and thirty percent of their original length, and
then Benden snatched back to their original length again without
being mall, without breaking sure or without losing their elasticity.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, I seriously what I mean? Uh, Well,
eventually they do over time, though, I guess because just
using regular bungee cords around the house, like old old
ones aren't as stretchy as they.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Used to be. Good point, And you probably want to
go bungee jump at a place that's reputable enough that
they're not over using their bungee cords. Agreed, Great point.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
You've also got spot cord, and that is not super
strong or anything, but it has a high resistance to snags.
And the cool thing about spot cord it's a cotton
rope that's braided and it's been produced by the Samson
Cordage Company for about one hundred and fifty years. And
if you go to like a big box hardware store
(36:21):
or something and you just get like a little fifty
foot small thin rope, it's probably a spot cord.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah. They feel real nice because they're cotton. Yeah, if
you've ever used a clothes line that's not wire, yeah,
there you go, it's probably a spot cord.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, if you've ever tied up your neighbor to a chair,
probably using spot cord, if you're not into the duct
tape thing.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
And came into the room saying, well, well, well look
how the tables have turned.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
That's right. I hope that comes across as a joke.
I know, I'm sure that's real world violence or although
you could just be tying them to a chair to
make them watch the Simpsons or something. Let's say that's
what I was talking about.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
And then another special rope, and these are very special ropes,
by the way, it's the lariat. And lariat is the
correct term for what a lot of people call lassos,
but I lift it up, chuck. Lasso is a verb,
and it's what you do with a lariat, which is.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Now, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You lasso a horse
or something.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yes, exactly. And you and I both have our own lariots.
Do you remember Kathy with the ka and Phoenix gave
them to us at the field.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
I thought it was Denver, but was it Phoenix?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Phoenix?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Okay, yeah, I still have mine. It's hanging up at
the camp.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah. I can't tell you how many steer I've wrestled
with mine.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
These are traditionally made with horsehair or raw hide. Today
they're usually braided with nylon or polyester maybe. But the
key to this thing is is that it's stiff. Like
I said, sometimes you might need a stiff rope. So
you know, if you've never used a or tried to
lasso something, you might be surprised to know that it's
a it's a you know, it's stiff.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's very stiff, super stiff, and it barely fits in
your suitcase from Phoenix back home to Atlantic.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
I know we managed it though.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. The way they work though, is a Honda knot
which slides up and down the rigid rope or stiff
rope very easily. So when you get it around to
steers horns, you pull it and the loop closes, but
it doesn't close mid air on your way right on
its way to the steers horns like it would if
you made it out of a spot cord.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
There's also we can't not talk about climbing ropes. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yeah, that's that's what keeps you alive if you're a
into repelling and rock climbing. Yep, they used to be
made out of plant fibers before nylon, just like any
other rope that we're talking about, of course. But you know,
if you've seen an action movie from the old days
and that rope is being you know, wearing against that
(38:58):
rock at the top of a cliff, yeah, it starts
going dying, dying, dying, and you're worried about your action hero,
then you need to go to a nylon rope because
one of the important things about a nylon rope is
not going to phrase as much like in the movie.
And also if you fall, it's going to be a
little stretchier. So in the old days, if you fell
like off of Everest in the old days, with a
(39:19):
fiber rope, like the entire force of falling is just
stops in an instant because there's zero stretch. And that's
no good.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
No, that produces rope trauma.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Aha, very nice.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
It can cut you just clean in half.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
That's what I've heard.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
So with climbing ropes in particular, there's a special type
of rope construction that's he's called the Kern mantle construction
and it refers to the Kern the core like a kernel,
and that's made of a nylon rope, and then there's
a mantle the shell that has made of braided nylon
that protects the internal nylon rope, so the internal kern
(39:59):
rope is low bearing. The outer shell rope protects that
internal load bearing one. But because they're both so strong,
if one failed, the other would be able to keep
you dangling. And they're stretchy enough that rope trauma is
brought to almost nil. The possibility of it. When you
fall off of a cliff wearing a current mantle rope
(40:21):
that's right now.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
You came around in nineteen and fifty three. Yep, the odds,
and I guess that's kind of it on rope, right.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
That's it. One thing that struck me I could not
find an answer for it is that in the United
States alone, in twenty twenty five, three point five billion
dollars worth of rope was sold. Pretty impressive. They're projecting
it to increase to six billion in less than ten
years by twenty thirty three. I could not find why,
(40:52):
what do we need more rope for? I don't know.
Maybe gen Z's going to finally discover rope in twenty
thirty three, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I don't know. I'm trying to think of how like
a data center uses rope or something that's like something
really like growing fast right now, But I don't know.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, I guess maybe if you include fiber optic cable.
Oh maybe fiber optic rope, I should say in in
that that might account for it. Good con Well, that's
it for rope everybody, which means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
This goes back to the voice of God Dan Lafontaine,
the famous movie trailer guy in a World, We did
a what is say? Dan? M No, that was his brother.
He should have heard his voice. Hey, guys, Don Lafontaine,
I think we did a shorty on him.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Shorty yeah, voice of God.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
So hey, guys, been meaning to write for a while,
and when I heard the short stuff, I was like, Bam,
now I have to write. Because my father was a
sound editor in New York City and worked on movie trailers,
the sound mixes for them, and recording the voiceovers. He
met many actors over the years, and also Don, who
became a good friend of our family. When my younger
(42:03):
brother Travis was born in nineteen seventy one, Don became
his godfather. Even my mother loved Don and was always
said he was such a neat guy and fun and
they spent some time partying with him back in the day.
I have some old pictures of Don and my parents,
those little square wins with the rounded off corners where
everything looks like shades of brown and orange and yellow.
You know the ones. Guys, if I can lay my
(42:26):
hands on one, I'll attach it, which did not happen,
by the way, but I'd be tickled to death if
you selected my email to be read on the air
like you have no idea. Ll you can even edit
down and I won't mind. Smiley face yours, both of you's, truly.
That is from Tegwin Allen Stockdale or the nickname.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Tag What a name? That is a great name? Agreed, Well,
thanks a lot, Teglin Allen Stockdale. I don't think I
would ever say your name other than to use.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
All three agreed.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Oh great. If you want to be like Tiglin Allen
Stockdale and email us with a great story about something
we talked about. We love that kind of thing. You
can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and
send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Stuff You should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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