Rope, yeah ROPE!

Stuff You Should Know - iHeartPodcasts

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Josh and Chuck dive into the fascinating history, construction, and importance of ropes—ofte

Key takeaways

• Rope is a fundamental yet underappreciated invention that has enabled major advancements in human civilization.
• The strength of rope comes from its construction—twisting fibers in opposing directions creates torsional stability.

Main topics

• History of rope making
• Types of rope construction (twisted vs. braided)

Notable quotes

"If you pulled 100 people, you would get lots of wheels or maybe gears or fire... but I doubt if you would get more than like a 10% that said, yeah, rope, that's up there as one of the greatest inventions."

Conclusion

Rope may seem simple, but its ingenuity and versatility have quietly powere

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If Speaker 7 (0:36) your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, Speaker 3 (0:58) I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen Speaker 7 (1:00) to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:06) On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (1:43) Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, Speaker 1 (1:53) 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 of Stuff You Should Know on Ropes. Speaker 2 (2:07) 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 kind of an old-school boat, sailing boat, and they let me, I volunteered to help out, so 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 undersung invention. Speaker 1 (2:53) Had you taken mushrooms? Speaker 2 (2:55) No, not at all. Well, maybe microdose. But it was definitely one of those moments where I was like, what an undersung invention. Like if you pulled 100 people, you would get lots of wheels or maybe gears or fire or sliced bread or the toaster or whatever. But like I doubt if you would get more than like a 10 % unless you work in like a sailing industry 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 as one of the greatest inventions of all time. But it has touched so much of humanity and the forward progress of humanity. Speaker 1 (3:33) Yeah. I mean, you 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 2 (3:55) Yeah. If you want to shoot a wild boar from 30 feet away, what are you going to shoot it with? You're going to shoot it with a bow that has a kind of rope. And we, 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. We wouldn't have had undersea cabling to make the Internet possible. And then once sailing came around that, you know, you think about, yeah, big deal. It helps sailing. But sailing is what helped discover the world. Speaker 1 (4:31) Yeah, you got to think of it beyond the America's Cup. Speaker 2 (4:35) Yeah, for sure. Speaker 1 (4:38) So, like you said, let's talk about rope. Let's get into it, shall we? Let's Speaker 2 (4:41) do it. Speaker 1 (4:42) I learned a lot in this. And like you said, rope is a type of cordage. Not all cordage is 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 sisal. Sisal comes from the agave plant. Did you know that? Speaker 2 (5:04) I did. Speaker 1 (5:05) 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 of like the 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 2 (5:32) 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 end, 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 and it's strong. Speaker 1 (5:51) Yeah, it's very clever. I never thought about it either, but the way that a rope is made strong and stable and all of that is because they're twisted in opposing, like the fibers are twisted in opposing directions, held to tension. Speaker 3 (6:07) And Speaker 1 (6:07) the impression I have is that you're actually storing somehow some energy. Or force in the rope when you start braiding it and twisting it under tension. Speaker 2 (6:21) 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. Yeah. I mean, it's still the same stuff. It's fascinating to me. Speaker 1 (6:45) That's right. Let's talk specific jargon, baby. Speaker 2 (6:50) I love it. I love some jargon. All Speaker 1 (6:52) of this stuff is cordage, like we said. A cord is a rope that's 3 16ths of an inch or less. That's right. Use metric. TS, it's still a cord. You have to use inches for that. Speaker 2 (7:05) That's right. A rope is a rope if it is above 3 16ths 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 a real game changer because that provided a little stretch. So nylon and polyester and polypropylene, stuff like that. And then wire. Wire is usually steel. And, you know, we might. call something like that a cable. But it's still the same concept. It's a kind of rope. A steel cable is, or a steel rope is basically a cable. Speaker 1 (7:49) Yeah. Wire rope is rope. A cable is a bunch of ropes. You can make it out of sisal if you wanted to, a cable. Sure. And then a bunch of cables twisted together is called a super duper rope. Speaker 2 (8:00) Right. That's right. Good jargon. Speaker 1 (8:03) So, Let's keep going. Let's talk jargon 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. One is it was a How It's Made video. God bless How It's Made. That was a good one. If you ever run into a written or verbal explanation 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 2 (8:29) They've always done a great job. There's a lot. In fact, there's a lot of good rope making videos online. I watched like three or four others. Speaker 1 (8:34) They're mesmerizing. They kind of are. 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 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 2 (9:11) Yeah. I mean, when you look at them up close, though, you can definitely see the difference between a braid and a twist. I love a 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 Hauser-laid twist. Speaker 1 (9:27) But Speaker 2 (9:28) you can also have a four-strander, which is shroud-laid, and that's if you've ever had a rope 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 shroud-laid. Speaker 1 (9:46) Yes. And we should say another piece of jargon. You don't make rope or produce rope or anything like that. You lay rope. Speaker 2 (9:53) That's right. Just like you lay a cable. Speaker 1 (9:56) Oh, yeah. I never thought about that. I thought that meant like actually putting it down. But yeah, no, totally. So what about the braid? 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 2 (10:15) Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:16) But braiding is where you take a bunch of strands and 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 2 (10:40) Yeah. And they're generally a little stronger and more pliable than a twisted rope. But I like a good old school rope. Speaker 1 (10:47) 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 2 (10:57) 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 34,000 years ago 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. So 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, right? Speaker 1 (11:33) Yeah, this is like implicit evidence. It's not direct, like finding an actual piece of cordage. This is like they found a weaving tool 40,000 years old in Germany. It's made of ivory. And essentially it was designed to keep the strands separate when braiding or twisting the rope together, which is still a technique that's used today. And then also they found beads, stone and shell beads, that start appearing in the prehistoric record. 300,000 years back. And I mean, try to wear a bead around your neck without some sort of cordage. You can't do it. Speaker 2 (12:09) No, those puka shells are just falling all over the floor. Speaker 1 (12:11) 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? Just use a cord. Speaker 2 (12:19) 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 be just nature's rope. Yeah, Speaker 1 (12:40) for sure. What is that? I know exactly what you're talking about, but I've never stopped and wondered what it was. I Speaker 2 (12:45) guess it's a vine. Sure. Like it can't be a root if it's coming down like from up top, right? Speaker 1 (12:52) Yeah. I didn't know if you knew what kind of vine it was. Speaker 2 (12:54) No, I don't know what kind of vine it is, but, you know. Sometimes you can swing on that stuff if it's attached, but be careful. Speaker 1 (13:02) I mean, I guess that's what Tarzan used in the old movies, right? Speaker 2 (13:06) Yeah, he wasn't carrying around rope and slinging it over tree branches. Speaker 1 (13:09) No.