Rope is everywhere. Humans have been using this simple tool for thousands of years, and whether you’re sailing across the ocean or just tying your shoes, you can’t get far without some form of rope.
The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler spoke with Tim Queeney, who recently published a book called, “Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization,” breaking down it’s ubiquitousness and importance.
Carolyn Beeler: So, rope is such a simple technology that it seems hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. It actually feels a little funny to use the word technology with it, but it did have to be invented at some point. Who can claim credit for that?
Tim Queeney: Of course, unfortunately, we don’t know. We don’t know who actually developed the first rope. The oldest rope ever found is 50,000 years old from a cave in southeastern France, and was probably produced by Neanderthals. So, we’ll have to give the nod to the Neanderthals on that one.
So, what would it take for them to make this first rope? How would they do it? And what did they have to think about to be able to do so?
The scientists who found this and wrote papers about it have actually made the point that this represents abstract mathematical thinking by Neanderthals, which is pretty amazing. Because you have to get the fibers and you have twist the fibers of a plant, some grass that they probably used, and twist those fibers into strands, and then those three strands then have to be twisted in the opposite direction into the final rope. And This actually was three-strand rope that was discovered in this cave. So, it really shows that Neanderthals probably were far more advanced in their thinking than we probably give them credit for.
So, you spell out in your book all the very basic things we would not be able to do without rope, which I imagine most people just take for granted, and that our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to without it. Can you just run through some of those examples?
Probably the famous one that draws people attention is the pyramids and all the debate that’s going on about “how were the pyramid actually built?” All those theories require that you have rope, because you can have a thousand people ready to push a two-and-a-half ton block to make the Great Pyramid, but not all thousand of those people can actually get their hands on it to push it. But if you put a rope around it, they can all now drag that stone and make much easier work.
I was intrigued by the use of rope in record keeping by civilizations like the Incan Empire. You write that they had something called a khipu.
Right, the khipu, yeah. Those were really amazing devices. They had horizontal rope and then from the horizontal rope hung vertical ropes and on those vertical ropes were tied knots and the position of the knot and the type of knot indicates numbers. So, you can convey census data all over the empire and other data, maybe agricultural information, whatever. They were carried by runners up and down the incredible highway system that the Incans had.
So, in more recent centuries when Europeans began sailing across the oceans, commercial and naval ships had this insatiable appetite for rope. So, making rope was big business in port cities. How big was that industry? How important was it to these port cities?
It was amazing. During the age of sale, every port city had a ropewalk, just because there was such a huge demand for it. And for example, in 1794 in Boston, the single largest group of workers who were mechanics were ropemakers.
And they worked, as you said, at ropewalks. Can you describe what that was?
A ropewalk is basically a long building. The process for starting to make the rope, you start off making yarn just like you do for knitting, for example. And one person would walk backwards as the yarn was formed and feeding more fibers into it. And so, one of the reasons why it became called a ropewalk was because of this initial backwards walking to make the yarns. But the need to make a long building was required because you need to make lots of rope and lots of long rope, as well.
Most of the rope that we have been talking about so far would have been made of hemp or another plant fiber. How did the introduction of other materials like metal and plastic products change what rope could do?
Yes, the person who invented wire rope was a German engineer named William Albert in the 1830s.
Wire rope would be like a cable.
Typically called a cable, but it’s made of strands of metal just like rope made from plant material. It’s actually twisted together just like that because that was sort of the model they had for making rope, was the plant material, so then he twisted iron strands together to make wire rope because he was in the mining industry and they wanted something that would carry a huge amount of weight. So, it was really a perfect approach for using in industrial applications.
And of course, cable is important for so many modern applications like building skyscrapers, right?
Yes, exactly. And all the cable that we typically refer to as cable that you see building skyscrapers, that’s all wire rope.
You were a lifelong sailor. You learned to sail with your dad, I gather. So, you’ve been around rope for a long time. I’m wondering what made you look at a piece of rope and think, “I think there’s a whole book in here.”
It actually was related to my dad. After my dad passed away, my mom had all this rope and milk crates from our various boats that we had and she said, “take this back to Maine with you.” So, I did and I used it for various things. But one day I pulled out a piece of rope and I was going to use it for some purpose and it had a knot in it. And I was about to untie the knot when I suddenly realized, wow, my dad’s fingers tied that knot. It’s a physical example of him here in the world that’s still here. So, I just couldn’t untie it. I had to keep it and I put the piece of rope up on the wall and started thinking about rope.
Really interesting stuff, Tim. I definitely took rope for granted before I read this book, so you’re going to make me look at it in a little bit more of an appreciative light.
Yeah, people have said to me that they’ll be watching a show or something and rope will be in the picture and then they’ll go “rope!” after they’ve read the book.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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