¶ Intro / Opening
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm joll Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway, Terracy.
You know, it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially like this year, just sort of like something on my mind, a CoA on everyone's mind. Actually, it's not just me. It's just like the extraordinary amount of rope it must have taken for wailing expeditions in the mid nineteenth century has depicted in a story such as Moby Dick and others, like just think about how much rope that requires.
Is this whole episode an excuse for you to talk about Moby Dick.
It's not, but it is, But it is. No, No, it's genuinely you.
Know, one thing I learned actually in the course of researching this particular topic, which happens to be rope. The whale that apparently inspired Moby Dick was called Mocha Dick.
Yeah.
And also Dick was basically like saying Joe back then every Tom Dick and Harry, right, you hear that? So really the Moby Dick whale was Moka Joe.
Oh, that's right. You know, it's funny. I used to go to a coffee shop with Bradaboro vermont Na.
Moka Joe's didn't have a whaling theme. It didn't, but there's at least opportunity collicially you did that.
Apparently, from what I understand, I also at one point went down this like where did this name come from? I think Dick is in Moby Dick even then carry the sort of contemporary connotation.
Oh really, yeah, it was like sort of like tough.
He was a jerk whale.
No, like sort of like masculine. Oh like you know, like that. It was sort of like that.
It even back then sort of was this sort of that was a masculine name for reasons that one would associate it.
I'm not gonna say anything else.
That's fine anyway, but it's interesting to think you think about the history of technologies, et cetera.
We did an episode on.
The history of nails and how crucial that was to the economy, and you think, like, here's this one technological breakthrough some like unlock, and then it.
Opens up all of these kinds of things.
So whales were very important for like whale oil and candles, et cetera. But like, what were the technologies that preceded whaling and you literally could not do it? And of course that's just one example, but there are all kinds of technologies things that you do that are economically productive. I remember in school we learned about like simple machines like the pulley, oh yeah, and stuff like that.
But you can't have a pully without rope.
That's true for real, like the pully.
When I was in elementary school, But no one bothered mentioning when I was in elementary school that the pulley would have been useless technology without rope to.
Put the rope itself is the technology behind the technology. This one's an interesting one because I think when you say the word rope, people think of something, you know, old fashion, like rope is Lindy just a bundles of cords, right, But actually, as we were about to discuss, there have been lots of technological acts in both the way rope is made and also the way rope is designed totally.
Well, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact have the perfect guest, someone I've wanted to speak to since last summer. I think when I came across his work. We're going to be speaking with Tim Queeney. Here's the author of the recent book Rope, How a bundle of twisted fibers became the backbone civilization cuite A bold claims there, Tim.
Hi, guys, thanks to have for having me on. Yeah, that's it's a bold plan. But you know that's the way. You have to buy the book and read it back to back it up.
What is rope? No, seriously, what what makes other rope?
Well that's a good question, and people have asked me how you define rope, But for this book, I defined rope in a very broad sense, from everything down from cordage, which is a thin small rope or twine or which you want to call it that up to heavy duty wire rope nave metal. So it's all rope as far as I'm concerned, and that's sort of how I went in. But basically, rope is twisted fibers that are then used to accomplish work.
I definitely want to talk about space rope later on, or space elevators, because that's something I was completely unaware of, but before we do, just on the book itself. So I'm aware that these single topic books have become something of a phenomenon. So you have people talk explaining the history of human development through the medium of salt, the
container box or fish cod or whatever. But what does rope actually say about civilization or human development that other single object stories maybe miss well.
¶ The Mechanics of Rope Strength
Of course, rope, as we've already just talked about, is made up of fibers. There's little strands of fiber, and if you want to talk about it in sort of a thematic way, each one of those individual fibers can't do much on its own. But if you twist them all together, now you have a tool that's immensely useful.
And it's sort of like the way a single person can't do all that much on their own, but people working together in groups can accomplish great things, and they often accomplish those great things down through history using rope.
So what is it about fibers so you twist them together?
I mean, there's going to sound dumb, but I really never like thought about it before, even like paid attention. But what is it about the property of a strand, the property of a fiber, or even the property of a long metal rod such that when you twist them together, it becomes very load bearing.
It's a combination of friction, especially with fibers, it's a combination of friction, twist, and something you could call the helix effect. The friction, of course, is just the individual fibers as they're twisted together, they're rubbing up against each other and engaging those little nooks and crannies of the fiber or all engaging with other nooks and crannies on other fibers. And so there's that friction that's stopping it and a certain amount of physical locking in that's going
on that's stopping them from sliding past each other. But then you twist it, and by twisting him, you're re engaging those fibers in a new way, even more deeply. And then finally the last thing is what you might call the helix effect, which is if you were to take a rope and to wrap it around your arm.
So for listeners, you should go over to the YouTube because Tim is actually wrapping a rope around his arm.
It looks a little bit like a TI fill him.
But yeah, tell us what's going on here for the especially for those who are just listening.
So I'm just wrapping this rope around my arm, and I'm not actually sorry to maybe see, I'm not actually nailing this to my arm or gluing it to my arm or riveting it to my arm. But I'm just putting it on my arm. And then if you can't see maybe too well, hear if I pull it on the same axis on which I've wrapped it around my arm, it stays. I've literally done nothing to make this rope stay other than the fact that it's all wrapped around
my arm. So what's actually happening here is you have this helix of rope that when you pull on it on that same axis on which it was twisted, the helix collapses. And you might remember those party toys you got when you were a kid where you stick your fingers in both ends and pull on them the finger so called finger trap. And what happens is is, though those toys are made up of a whole series of helixes, and when you pull on them, all the helixes collapse
and they tighten up. And that's what happens with rope, with multiple strand rope. This rope I have right here is actually made of jute, and that's a natural fiber, and this is actually a four strand rope. If you can see the four strands.
The listener's got to watch this on YouTube.
This is so much better as a video than just on you because you can see all the other jute.
The four strands still strands, and most rope all through history has been three strand rope. And I'll talk about why that is in a second. But the strands and when you pull on them, the strands all do that helix effect that one strand wraps is wrapped around the other two three strands, and it's collapsing down on the other three and so on and so on. With all four strands, they're all collapsing around each other. And that's
what makes it incredibly strong, is this helix effect. And that was actually told to me by a German engineer who works in the industry, and he's so well known that he's called the Pope of rope.
A rope celebrities.
Oh we should have added him on it, said, yeah, yeah, he's the real celebrity.
But he told me about this helix effect. And so it's really those three things that the friction, the twisting, and then the helix effect that causes three strand rope to work so well. And three strand, of course is most commonly made because it's the least number of strands you can use to have this helix effect, so it's sort of the most economical way to get the helix effect. It's maximum without having to add more strands, which of course can add costs. So three strand is the way to go.
¶ Ancient Origins and Early Uses
So we're talking about the basic design of rope, walk us through I guess the technological breakthroughs when it comes to designing rope. Was there a moment, you know, when the fourth cord was added or I don't know, they were twisted in a different way where someone was like, aha, I have invented the better rope that will now allow us to accomplish some great thing.
Well, that's really good question that I can't answer. And the reason why we can't answer that is because rope is such an ancient human tool that we just don't know when the first multi strand rope was developed and made.
The oldest rope that's ever been found is fifty thousand years old, and that's a piece of cordage that was found on the bottom of a flint flake in a cave in southeastern France, and it was twisted by a Neanderthal person fifty thousand years ago, and there may indeed have been rope much older than that that was manufactured. But the problem with rope, a natural fiber rope is that it's made of plant material and it tends to
rot away. Maybe seventy thousand year old rope that was made, but we just we don't know.
One thing that really struck me, and you said this in your book, but you know, these days, you invent a new technology, it feels like in a year later, it's obsolete, right, And this pace seems to be accelerating. And one thing that I really appreciated it from your book is that in the old days, a new technological innovation would come around like maybe like once every couple
hundred thousand years or a million. I think you make the point that Homo erectus, I guess we're our uncles, there's something like that basically had one invention the hand acts in a million and a half years. They basically figured out one thing. Like technological revolutions were pretty slow back in the old days.
Yeah, that's right, that the hand acts, which from what I understand that people have talked to. There's still archaeologists still aren't completely sure what those things were used for, but there are so many of those around and that they were used for such a long time. And in my book I talk about the hand ACKs and stone tools happening before rope, but it's quite possible that they were around contemporaneously with rope. But we have that issue
of them running away. But once you've developed this multi strand rope, it now has all these great uses that it can be put to. Probably the biggest use for early people's was just the ability to organize your stuff. You can tie things together in bundles, which sounds maybe a little simplistic for us, but we do the same
thing and lots of other ways. We just keep our stuff organized, and they had to do the same thing, and so rope was just a great tool for that, in addition to using it for domesticated animals and being able to keep them in place they don't run off, and lots of other things.
¶ Rope's Maritime Backbone: Age of Sail
If I could fast forward about fifty thousand years or so, Joe started this conversation talking about the importance of rope when it comes to whaling, and if you think about a time period like the eighteen hundreds sort of marked by the expansion of the British Empire. Lots of ships sailing around, all covered in rope in one way or another.
Lots of ships sailing around. It's like a good description of much of all history.
Tess, that's sure, all right, but yeah, you know the kind of ships. I mean, how important was being able to manufacture rope at a sort of industrial scale in the eighteen hundreds, because I mean we're talking about a lot of rope. I think you have a stat in your book about how much rope it took just to get a whale, and it was a lot.
Yeah, the whaling ships would carry more than ten thousand feet of rope just for use on board the whaleboats that went out to actually hunt the whales, not even discussing all the other uses that rope is put to on a sailing ship. And as you point out, a sailing ship, which was the premier technology for hundreds of years for crossing oceans, is absolutely dependent upon rope, both for the standing rigging which holds the masts up and
the running rigging which controls the sails. Going all the way back to the Egyptians, they had the exact same issue. They had to have rope to keep their boats under control and for them to keep the masts from falling down. And if I could just go back for a second to the Egyptians very interestingly different way of building ships than the way a ship was built, for example, for
a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. The way of building ships in the Western world is to be put down a keel, then you have ribs that are ninety degrees to that keel, and then you have planks which cover the ribs, and now you have your hull. But the Egyptians actually did it in a completely different way, and other cultures as well. It wasn't just the Egyptians.
They actually stitched their boats together. They took the planks and they cut these V shaped grooves in the planks, and they actually threaded rope through these V shaped grooves to either end of the collection of planks and then tighten them up. And then they had a hull, and they would put ribs in after they'd stitch these boats together. But the ribs were there just in addition to the rope to hold the planks together. So rope is absolutely essential for a boat even even to float in that era.
So that's pretty amazing. And as I said, it wasn't just the Egyptians, but also a lot of Arab boat building was done in a similar fashion with stitched boats. But going back to the age of sail, they needed just tens of thousands of feet of rope to equip these vessels. And as you point out, when you have that much rope required, it ceases to be a cottage
industry and the whole process becomes industrialized. And the people who really kicked this off were the British with their need to keep their large Royal Navy establishment going at all times and keep all these ships, that hundreds of ships available to go to sea. So they had a series of dockyards where they manufactured rope along with other things.
And some maritime historians say that it really was the Royal Navy that kicked off the industrial revolution because the whole process really needed to be industrialized to make all this rope tracy.
¶ Industrializing Rope Production and Supply
I jokingly said, oh, ships floating around, but no, this is really a key point here, which is that it is how rope became the backbone of civilization. It is hard to imagine civilization without a lot of boats, and it is literally impossible to imagine sailboats of various sizes without ropes of various things. You know, and steel they
talk about like the Bessemer process. Suddenly like some sort of unlocked steel existed before the Bestimber process, but then that unlocked a significant expansion.
Was there some.
Breakthrough that allowed for rope to go from one of these things that lets twist some plant fibers with our hands, maybe wrap them around something, to something that could be truly produced at industrial scale.
I don't think that there's any one event like that. It was kind of a continuous process, much like rope itself, that went from rope being made outdoors in these rope yards where they would twist the rope because you need a lot of space to do all this twisting, to an indoor activity because they no longer could take the time off for when it snowed and rained. You needed
to make rope every day to meet the needs. As I said of something like the Royal Navy, you needed to really produce rope on a massive scale, and the needs of something like a large sailing ship where you need to have some very long ropes, specifically the longest rope being the anchor road, or the rope that you tie your anchor to so you can anchor in deep water. That had to be a seven hundred and forty two
feet long. And so in order to make a seven hundred and forty two foot long in the last part of the process of making rope, when you're putting the strands together, the rope actually gets shorter because you're twisting it. But we have to start out with thousand foot long strands that you're twisting together to make the final rope that ends up being the seven hundred and forty feet long. So you need a huge building to do this. And so these rope walks that were built into various dockyards
around the world. It wasn't just a British who were doing this. They were built in the US and all maritime nations were doing this, and even non maritime nations because you need a rope for other things. But these rope walks really were the thing that industrialized the process and allowed you to make very long, very big ropes.
Can you talk to us about the supply chain that created ropes? So, I guess wrote in the eighteen hundreds was made out of jute or hemp or something like that. Where did that material come from and how did it get to the dockyards in a place like London.
Yeah, that's a great question, because it actually was a
strategic material. There was something called naval stores the British called the Naval Stores, which was pitch from pine to use for waterproofing, and then the actual pine trees themselves the trunks to use for masts, and then finally the hemp that was used to make rope, because most of the rope made in during the Age of Sale was made from hemp fibers, because it actually makes spectacularly good rope because you can grow these hemp plants very very tall,
and the fibers that you can strip out of them are very long, and the longer the fiber, the stronger the rope is. These were strategic materials at the Royal Navy, for example, it was always looking towards its supply of these materials. When the US was a colony of Great Britain, the Parliament actually passed a law that required or asked or prompted American farmers to grow hemp plants so they could the hemp fiber could be sent back to Britain
for use in making rope. The other Really, the largest supplier of hemp was actually from the air of the Ukraine, and that's where Britain got most of its hemp from. And amazingly, one of the reasons why Napoleon, for example, invaded Russia in eighteen twelve was to There were a number of reasons, but one reason was to cut off the hemp supply HUMH to the British Royal Navy so then he could finally get around to it invading Britain, which he failed to do.
¶ Whaling Dangers and Essential Knots
It's interesting they made the colonists send the hemp fiber back to Britain, preserving the value at you know, the poor colonists just had to ship rock commodities while the rope yards in Britain got to actually do the premium higher end value add very common pattern in history to obviously, when in a whaling expedition, there's the sale right, and then there's a you know, in Mobe Dick they talk about, although apparently he doesn't use the term like they called it the Nantucket sleigh ride.
After you get the hook.
In the whale and then the whalers drag your boats, and then there's the you're like wetting. Someone has to pour water on the rope so that it's not burning their hands. Talk to us about how big of a breakthrough that was in terms of declaring this very important fuel.
Yeah, whalings started out with just attacking whales from the shore, but as those whales were used up, these whaling ships had to go farther and farther afield to find whales to harvest, and the rope was absolutely essential. Rope had to hold when after they sunk in that harpoon and the famous Nantucket's sleigh ride, when the whales going along
the surface and dragging the boat behind it. The one that's really dangerous though, is if the whale decides to sound or dive, because then the boat has to make sure that they have enough rope on board to let
out enough ropes that they're not dragged underwater. And sometimes whaleboats that were following a big whale, the other whaleboats would get near them and they would actually combine two lengths of rope that they each had in their rope tubs just to prevent the whale from sounding and actually dragging the boat under.
Since you mentioned combining tow rope links, what's your favorite knot?
Oh my god, I was going to ask that same question, but I was saving it for the head. Literally, have it written down here. That's so funny.
Sorry, I just thought, you know, you mentioned combining tow ropes.
We've been We've been doing this for so long.
We always think about this set.
We're morphing into the same person, I guess.
But let's you do what's your favorite notot?
Well? Actually, but it's interestingly enough. My editor wanted to put a nod on the cover initially, but we we realized.
Just showed me on her computer. She really did write down word for word. She was going to ask what's your favorite not? But I g zumped her. I asked it in the middle, even though she was saving it for the end.
So this is.
Probably the idea was came up to put a nod on the cover, but I said that this is actually not a not book because I can't. I can't actually take credit for being not expert. I'm not, but you, but I do have a number of knots that I like, and the one that's sort of the most fun to tie is the flying bowlin, the bowlin that forms in mid air. It's also called a tugboat bowl. And it's great. It's it's a very useful not to make it at
the last minute. If you need to make a bowlin or a loop at the end of a rope, you can actually make it very quickly and then you can throw it around a ballard or something if you're on a tugboat and maybe save the boat. I don't know, but yeah, that's a fun one to show off. I don't know if I can do it here in this close space. I do need a bit of space.
Let's see.
Let's see while you're doing it. While you're doing it, Tracy, do have a favorite not?
No, I do.
Like I'm proud that I can tie my shoes.
I can't tell my shoes. But you know what my favorite knot is the one shot a monkey's fist.
Do you know that?
Do you know what a monkey's fist is? Tim? Oh?
Sure, absolutely, that's for throwing it for a throwing line.
Yeah, you can like make this ball at the end of the rope and then you can like put it through a loop and it won't go through and.
It's very hard to what you use that for.
Well, if you're pulling on something and you wanted to put it through a loop, and you didn't want the rope to slide through a loop like you want to get to the end, so you could make sure it's there. Also, it's basically impossible to untie. In my experience, Tim is currently okay, let's this works.
I usually need even more space than this, but okay, let's let's see if we can get this to work.
Try one more time.
Well that's it, right, Yeah, even though I tied my microphone.
Cord too much.
¶ The Evolution to Wire Rope
So we talked a little bit about maybe there was through in terms of design and the way you're twisting cords. We don't really know because it was all organic material and its decayed, but we do know that rope kind of leapt from jute natural fibers to metals to steal and things like that. Talk to us about how important that was when it comes to I guess technological advancement in rope.
Yeah, there was a German engineer in the Hearts Mountains, in the mining region of the Hearts Mountains. This fellow named William Albert, and he noticed realized and knew that a lot of the rope that they were using to haul materials up through mines, up through the shafts of mines was corroding and breaking their natural fiber rope, and they would also use chains. The problem with the chain is that when one link corrodes and breaks, the entire
chain fails and the material falls. But he thought, what if I actually used iron, and I used lengths of iron, and I twisted it together just like as if it was hemp into multi stranded rope. And he did that and it works spectacularly. And one of the reasons why it works is because if you lose one strand, if once strand breaks, the entire rope doesn't fail. It has a very easy failure mode where it takes multiple strands to break for the wire rope to fail. So it
was very useful in that industrial setting. And there was another German engineer who emigrated to the US and his name was John Roebling, and he actually read there's actually a piece that William Albert wrote in a journal, an industrial journal that John Roebling read and became very interested in making his own wire rope, which he started doing. And his wire rope was superior in the eighteen forties and he started a business of making wire rope, and
then he got into designing suspension bridges. Of course, he and his son Washington Roebling were responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge, which may all made up with wire rope.
Yeah, that's wild. Like honestly, it wasn't until I read your book that it like dawned on me, like that's rope.
That's the same thing.
I mean, granted the material is different, but that fundamental idea of the strength through twisting that gave us the Brooklyn Bridge.
Yeah, that's right.
¶ Future of Rope: The Space Elevator
You end your book with like the future of rope, so to speak, and the idea like maybe rope could one day give us an elevator into space space rope.
Yeah, can you explain what that's all about?
Space elevator. Yeah, it's great. Whenever I give a talk, I always ask how many people here have ever heard of a space elevator, and never more than a quarter of them raise their hands. It's actually I'm surprised. I thought more people knew about it. But it's actually a physics idea that goes back to the nineteenth century. The idea being that any point on the equator of the
Earth is moving at nine hundred miles an hour. So if you were to attach a tether to the Earth and then you would extend that tether out into space with a weight on the end one hundred thousand kilometers out, then what would happen would be Of course, it'd be the same as if you took a piece of rope like this and I attached to a rock on the end of the rope and I twirled around in a circle.
What would happen to the rope. The rope would go really tight as it was preventing that rock from flying away. So the exact same effect happens here. As the Earth rotates, the weight that wigh out in space wants to fly off into the distance, and the tether's preventing it from doing that. And then the process, that tether becomes bar tight,
as it was made of steel. And once you have that, you can then put a crawler that uses friction wheels on that tether and it can crawl up that tether up to say twenty three thousand miles high, which is geosynchronous orbit, and you open the doors to your crawler and push the satellite out and at twenty three thousand miles high in geosynchronous orbit, so you can put things
into orbit without using rockets. You could also use this device to send that crawl all the way to the end of the tether at one hundred thousand kilometers out, and that end of that tether is whipping around at very high speed because it has to describe a much larger circle than the circle of the equator, so it's
moving very fast seventeen thousand miles an hour. You can bring something up to the top of that and as you if you want to send something to the Moon, as the tether swings around to the only hits the right angle, you release it and it goes flying toward the Moon without any need for rocketry. So it's an amazing device that up to now hasn't been built because of the one limiting factor, which is how do you build a tether that's strong enough to do the job?
Oh yeah, this was going to be my next question, which is you actually in the book seem quite bullish on the space elevator idea, and if you go and look up photos of it, it looks very very sci fi, right, it looks kind of out there, But realistically, do you think this is going to happen like sometime in our lifetimes.
Well, I did speak with two gentlemen who were very who are very bullish about this. A guy named Pete Swan who's a former NASA rocket scientist and he was at one point the head of the International Space Elevator Consortium. I don't know if you knew there was such a thing, but there is.
A consortium for everything, huh yes.
And so he and then a fellow name Adrian Nixon, who is associated with the University of Manchester in England, and they are both very bullish about this idea, that it can be done and that it will be done soon. In fact, Pete Swan just left his position with the International Space Elevator Consortium and he's starting up a company and he said, we're going to go out and build this sucker. And the reason why they it can do
this is that there's this material called graphene. It's very strange material and the way it's made is very strange. But it's basically carbon that uses gaseous depositation onto a copper substrate and when the conditions are right, it actually forms these hexagonal rings that are all interconnected and those interconnected hexagonal rings have the use the strongest bond known in nature. But that's only one ad and layer thick.
Then you do it again deposited again, and another layer forms, and then another and another, and you can go to twenty six thousand layers, as Adan Nixon told me about. And this tether is incredibly strong. I mean, it's unbelievably strong. You need something that's capable of ninety gigapascals of tensil strength to do this, and this graphene has been tested up to one hundred and twenty gigapascals of strength, so
it's very much capable of doing the job. The biggest drawback is that you have to it's a manufacturing drawback. You have to be able to make a tether one hundred thousand miles long with no breaks. So that's a little bit of a challenge.
You know, Tracy, Like when I think about the fact that Homo erectus went one point five million years, just like making the hand eggs when and then you hear this and it's like whether it happens in our lifetime, our kids' lifetime, their kids' lifetime, that's nothing like in the Grand scheme of history like which lifetime in the next couple hundred years it happens and is like truly in your own to me, I see it too, but for our species it's truly an irrelevant rounding error exactly.
And I do think, you know, if rope is so crucial to all of these breakthroughs and civilization being able to sail the seas, then naturally it probably is going to be an important technology for getting to other planets and so forth. Tim Quiney, thank you so much for coming on odd Law. Its fascinating conversation. I am now convinced by your books titled that rope is the back Phone and Civilization.
Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
¶ Concluding Thoughts: Rope's Endless Potential
Tracy, that last point at the end.
I have been thinking about this a lot, that like we're just getting started here, you know, We're like, we're the fifty thousand years of just making the most rudimentary rope out of twine, et cetera. Humans being able to produce rope at industrial scale it's like less than a minute in an Earth time, you know what I'm saying, Like, we're just getting started. And honestly, the idea that maybe in the next one thousand years, which is also nothing.
By the way, that we might get into space with rope, it seems very plausible to me.
Can I just say I got distracted because I searched for graphine? Oh yeah, someone's making graphene design earrings. They have the little like hexagonal stamp on them. It's kind of cool. Not actually made out of graphine.
Oh like they the design.
Yeah, the interlocking sigons that Tim was talking about. No, there is something about rope where we said this in the intro. But it's old, it's lyndy. But on the other hand, it's continuously being like perfected and applied to different uses. Right.
That core intuition, which I had not thought about before, But that core intuition you wrap it around something, you take one strand and then you pull a chord in the direction perpendicular or whatever with the direction of the thing and it doesn't move. Is really powerful. Right, It's
really simple, but it's also really powerful. And the idea that then, okay, the game is then to get even more advanced materials, to move past jute, you get to something synthetic, you go to steal, and then maybe to graphing. But that core simple fact that when you twist something around something, it becomes very durable. Is it pretty like powerful conceptual unlocked?
Well, also it avoids the single point failure problem that you see in something like the Change. Yeah, but here's a question. If rope is the backbone of civilization and chords are the backbone of rope, then are chords the backbone of civilization? Like? How far don't I take this?
This is this is the thing which is, and we just have to be humble. It's like civilization has many ant and uncles, you know what I'm saying, many many, many fathers and mothers.
Coming up soon.
No, but this is you're You're totally right, because like I could argue it's like, oh, whales are the you know, whale oil, but or but you couldn't get there without the whatever. It is like all of these things have various uh antecedents and then unlocks. Right, And so it's always sort of helpful to understand. I like the history of technology there. It makes me makes me appreciate everything a little bit more.
Yeah, and I guess how iterative a lot of it tends to be.
There was in the book he talks about how what was the movie with Tom Hanks and he's like on an island and he has.
To cast away.
Yeah, and I guess he had to. He had to make some rope. I forgot. There's been a long time since I saw that eye. I feel like if I.
Were on an island, that wouldn't occur to me like I would like, I wouldn't.
You'd have a lot of time to think about it, Joe.
I bet I would never get there.
I do not.
Oh, I should have twisted the fiber to make the book. I'd be like, how do you do? I bet like that wouldn't. Now have you read the book? Of course it's different. But had I not read the book, I think I would have been pretty screwed.
I guess Robinson Crusoe has to be like your next big reader.
I should read it.
I should read Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Outhoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Watsenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Check out a rope. How a bundle of twisted fibers became the backbone of Civilization by our guest Tim Queeney. Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Carman armand dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and Kell Brooks at Keil Brooks.
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