Pod Insights Odd Lots How the Invention of Rope Gave Us Modern Civilization About this episode Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was it developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of the recent book Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow to build an elevator into outer space. Read more:Japan Cablemaker Rout Exposes Cracks in AI Infrastructure RallyWhy Huawei’s New Chipmaking Plan Has Investors Buzzing Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:07 Joe Weisenthal? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
2:12 Tracy Alloway? And I'm Tracy Alloway.
2:13 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, you know what's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially like this year, just sort of like something on my mind?
2:20 Tracy Alloway? Could be anything.
2:20 Joe Weisenthal? Well, probably on everyone's mind, actually. It's not just me. It's just like the extraordinary amount of rope it must have taken for whaling expeditions in the mid 19th century, as depicted in a story such as Moby Dick and others. Like, just think about how much rope that required.
2:36 Tracy Alloway? Is this whole episode an excuse for you to talk about Moby Dick?
2:40 Joe Weisenthal? It's not, but it is true.
2:42 Tracy Alloway? But it is.
2:42 Joe Weisenthal? No, no, it's genuinely not.
2:44 Tracy Alloway? You know one thing I learned, actually?
2:46 Joe Weisenthal? Go on.
2:46 Tracy Alloway? In the course of researching this particular topic, which happens to be rope, the whale that apparently inspired Moby Dick was called Mokadick.
2:55 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
2:56 Tracy Alloway? And also Dick was basically like saying Joe back then.
3:00 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
3:00 Tracy Alloway? Every Tom, Dick and Harry, right? You hear that. So really, the Moby Dick whale was Mokadick.
3:05 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, that's right. You know, it's funny. I used to go to a coffee shop in Bradleboro, Vermont, named Mokadick's.
3:10 Tracy Alloway? Ah, did it have a whaling theme?
3:11 Joe Weisenthal? It didn't, but that's a...
3:12 Tracy Alloway? Missed opportunity.
3:13 Joe Weisenthal? I like the way 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 carried this sort of contemporary connotation.
3:25 Tracy Alloway? Oh, really?
3:26 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, it was like, sort of like tough.
3:27 Tracy Alloway? He was a jerk whale?
3:28 Joe Weisenthal? No, like, sort of like masculine.
3:31 Tracy Alloway? Oh, I see.
3:32 Joe Weisenthal? You know, like, even that it was sort of like, that it even back then, sort of, was this sort of, that was a masculine name for reasons that one would associate it.
3:41 Tracy Alloway? I'm not going to say anything else.
3:43 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, 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 is this one technological breakthrough, some like unlock, and then it opens up all of these kinds of things. So whales were very important for, like, whale oil and candles, et cetera. But like, what were the technologies that preceded whaling? And you literally could not do it. And of course, that's just one example. But there are all kinds of technologies, things that you do that are economically productive. I remember in school, we learned about like, simple machines, like the pulley.
4:18 Tracy Alloway? Oh, yeah.
4:18 Joe Weisenthal? And stuff like that. But you can't have a pulley without rope.
4:21 Tracy Alloway? That's true.
4:22 Joe Weisenthal? No, for real. Like, we learned about the pulley when I was in elementary school. But no one bothered mentioning when I was in elementary school that the pulley would have been useless technology without rope to pull through.
4:31 Tracy Alloway? That the rope itself is the technology behind the technology. This one's an interesting one because I think when you say the word rope, people think of something, you know, old fashioned. Like, rope is lindy, just a bundle of cords, right? But actually, as we are about to discuss, there have been lots of technological breakthroughs in both the way rope is made and also the way rope is designed.
4:53 Joe Weisenthal? Totally. Well, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest, someone I've wanted to speak to since last summer, I think, when I came across his work. We're going to be speaking with Tim Queenie. He is the author of the recent book Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. Quite a bold claim there, Tim.
5:13 Speaker 03 Hi, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, that's, it's a bold claim, but, you know, that's the hots. Well, you have to buy the book and read it to back it up.
5:21 Joe Weisenthal? What is rope? No, seriously, what, like, what makes something rope?
5:24 Speaker 03 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 thin, small rope, or twine, or whichever you want to call it that, up to heavy-duty wire rope made of metal. So it's all rope, as far as I'm concerned, and that's sort of how I went in. But basically, rope is twisted fibers that are then used to accomplish work.
5:52 Tracy Alloway? 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 explaining the history of human development through the medium of salt or the container box or...
6:16 Tracy Alloway? Fish, cod, or whatever. But what does rope actually say about civilization or human development that other single object stories maybe miss?
6:28 Speaker 03 Well, of course, rope, as we've already just talked about, is made up of fibers, or 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.
6:57 Joe Weisenthal? So what is it about fiber? So you twist them together? I mean, I, this is 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, like, metal rod, such that when you twist them together, it becomes very load bearing?
7:16 Speaker 03 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, all the little nooks and crannies of the fiber, or 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 them, you're re-engaging those fibers in a new way, even more deeply. And then finally, the last thing is what you might call the helix effect, which is if you were to take a rope
8:01 Speaker 03 and to wrap it around your arm.
8:03 Joe Weisenthal? 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 tefillin. But yeah, tell us what's going on here, especially for those who are just listening.
8:14 Speaker 03 So I'm just wrapping this rope around my arm. And I'm not, I'm not actually, it's hard to maybe, I'm not actually nailing this to my arm, or gluing it to my arm, or riveting it to my arm. But I'm just putting it On my arm. And then if you can't see maybe too well here.
8:29 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, yeah.
8:29 Speaker 03 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 on both ends and pull on them. The finger, so-called finger trap. And what happens is, is those toys are made up of a whole series of 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.
9:13 Speaker 03 This rope I have right here is actually made of jute. And it's, that's a natural fiber. And this is actually a four-strand rope. I don't know if you can see the four strands.
9:22 Joe Weisenthal? Listeners gotta watch this on YouTube. This is so much better as a video than just audio, because you can see all the other jute, alright?
9:28 Speaker 03 The four strands, those strands, and most rope all through history has been three-strand rope. And I'll talk about why that is in a second. But the strands, and when you pull on them, the strands all do that helix effect. That one strand 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.
10:06 Tracy Alloway? Are there rope celebrities?
10:07 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, we should have had him on instead.
10:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, he's, 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, and three-strand, of course, is most commonly made. Because it's the least number of strands you can use to have this helix effect. So it's sort of the most economical way to get the helix effect at its maximum. Without having to add more strands, which of course can add cost. So, so three-strand is the way to go.
10:42 Tracy Alloway? 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?
11:07 Speaker 03 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 50,000 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 50,000 years ago. And there may indeed have been rope much older than that that was manufactured. But the problem with rope, natural fiber rope, is that it's made of plant material and it tends to rot away. There may be 70,000 year old rope that was made, but we just, we don't know.
11:52 Joe Weisenthal? One thing that really struck me, and you said this in your book, but you know, these days you invent a new technology, it feels like in a year later it's obsolete, right? And this pace seems to be accelerating. And one thing that I really appreciated from your book is that in the old days, a new technological innovation would come around like maybe like once every couple hundred thousand years or a million. I think you make the point that Homo erectus, who I guess were our uncles or something like that, basically had one invention, the hand axe. In a million and a half years, they basically figured out one thing. Like technological revolutions were pretty slow back in the old days.
12:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right. The, the hand axe, which from what I understand, the people I've talked to, they're 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 axe and stone tools happening before rope, but it's quite possible that they were around Temporaneously with rope, but we have that issue of them rotting away. But once you've developed this multi-strand rope, it now has all these great uses that it can be put to. Probably the biggest use for early peoples was just the ability to organize your stuff. You can tie things together in bundles, which sounds maybe a little simplistic for us, but we do the same thing in lots of other ways.
13:16 Speaker 03 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.
13:45 Tracy Alloway? There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.
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14:41 Tracy Alloway? If I could fast forward about 50,000 years or so, Joe started this conversation talking about the importance of rope when it comes to whaling. And if you think about a time period like the 1800s, sort of marked by the expansion of the British Empire, lots of ships sailing around, all covered in rope in one way. Or another.
15:03 Joe Weisenthal? Lots of ships sailing around. That's like a good description of much of all history.
15:07 Tracy Alloway? I guess that's true. All right. But you know, you know, the kind of ships, I mean, how important was being able to manufacture rope at a sort of industrial scale in the 1800s? Because I mean, we're talking about a lot of rope. I think you have a stat in your book about how much rope it took just to, you know, get a whale and it was a lot.
15:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, the whaling ships would carry more than 10,000 feet of rope just for use on board the whale boats that went out to actually hunt the whales. Not even discussing all the other uses that rope is put to on a sailing ship. 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,
16:11 Speaker 03 different way of building ships than the way a ship was built. For example, for a whaling ship in the 19th century, the way of building ships in the Western world is to you put down a keel, then you have ribs that are 90 degrees to that keel, and then you have planks which cover the ribs and now you have your hull. 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 tightened them up and then they had a hull.
16:52 Speaker 03 And they would put ribs in after they stitched these boats together, but the ribs were there just in addition to the rope to hold the planks together. So rope is absolutely essential for a boat even to 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
17:32 Speaker 03 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.
18:00 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, I jokingly said, oh, ships floating around. But no, this is really a key point here, which is that it is how rope became the backbone of civilization. It is hard to imagine civilization without a lot of boats. And it is literally impossible to imagine sailboats of various sizes without ropes of various things. You know, in steel, they talk about like the Bessemer process, suddenly like some sort of unlock. Steel existed before the Bessemer process, but then that unlocked a significant expansion. Was there some breakthrough that allowed for rope to go from one of these things that, oh, let's twist some plant fibers with our hands, maybe wrap them around something, to something that could be truly produced at industrial scale?
18:43 Speaker 03 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 ropeyards where they would twist the rope, because you need a lot of space to do all this twisting, to an indoor activity, because they no longer could take the time off for when it snowed and rained. They needed to make rope every day to meet the needs, as I said, of something like the Royal Navy. You needed to really produce rope on a massive scale. And the needs of something like a large sailing 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.
19:26 Speaker 03 That had to be 742 feet long. And so in order to make a 742 foot long, in the last part of the process of making rope, when you're putting the strands together, the rope actually gets shorter because you're twisting it. But you have to start out with 1,000 foot long strands that you're twisting together to make the final rope that ends up being the 740 feet long. So you need a huge building to do this. And so these rope walks that were built into various dockyards around the world, it wasn't just the British who were doing this. They were built in the US and all maritime nations were doing this. And even non-maritime nations because you need a rope for other things.
20:09 Speaker 03 But these rope walks really were the thing that industrialized the process and allowed you to make very long, very big ropes.
20:16 Tracy Alloway? Can you talk to us about the supply chain that created rope? So I guess rope in the 1800s was made out of jute or hemp or something like that. Where did that material come from? And how did it get to the dockyards in a place like London?
20:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a great question because it actually was a strategic material. There was something called naval stores. The British called them naval stores, which was pitch from pine to use for waterproofing. And then the actual pine trees themselves, the trunks to use for masts. And then finally, the hemp that was used to make rope. Because most of the rope made during the age of sail 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.
21:17 Speaker 03 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 area 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 1812 was to, there were a number of reasons, but one reason was to cut off the hemp supply
22:02 Speaker 03 to the British Royal Navy. So then he could finally get around to invading Britain, which he failed to do.
22:08 Joe Weisenthal? It's interesting, they made the colonists send the hemp fiber back to Britain, preserving the value add, you know, the poor colonists just had to ship raw commodities while the ropeyards in Britain got to actually do the premium, higher end value add, very common pattern in history. Obviously, when in a whaling expedition, there's the sail, right? And then there's the, you know, in Moby 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 whales 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.
22:51 Joe Weisenthal? Talk to us about like how big of a breakthrough that was in terms of acquiring this very important fuel.
22:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, whaling 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, the rope had to hold when, after they sunk in that harpoon. And the famous Nantucket Sleigh Ride, when the whales going along the surface and dragging the boat behind it, the one that's really Very dangerous, though, is if the whale decides to sound or dive.
23:27 Joe Weisenthal? Right.
23:28 Speaker 03 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 whale boats that were following a big whale, the other whale boats 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.
23:50 Joe Weisenthal? Since you mentioned combining two rope lengths, what's your favorite knot?
23:55 Tracy Alloway? That, oh, oh, my God.
23:56 Joe Weisenthal? Were you gonna ask that?
23:57 Tracy Alloway? I was gonna ask that same question, but I was saving it for the end.
24:00 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, sorry, sorry.
24:00 Tracy Alloway? I literally have it written down here. That's so funny.
24:03 Joe Weisenthal? Sorry, I just thought, you know, you mentioned combining two ropes.
24:05 Tracy Alloway? Dude, we've been, we've been doing this for so long.
24:08 Joe Weisenthal? We always think about the same.
24:09 Tracy Alloway? That we're morphing into the same person, I guess.
24:11 Joe Weisenthal? But let's just do it. What's your favorite knot?
24:13 Speaker 03 Well, actually, but it's interestingly enough, my editor wanted to put a knot on the cover initially, but we, we realized.
24:19 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy just showed me on her computer, she really did write down word for word. She was gonna ask, what's your favorite knot? But I, I zomped her. I, I asked it in the middle, even though she was saving it for the end. So this, this is for both of us.
24:32 Speaker 03 The idea was, came up to put a knot on the cover, but I, I said that this is actually not a knot book. Because I, I can't, I can't actually take credit for being a knot expert.
24:44 Joe Weisenthal? All right. But you must have one. Let's go.
24:47 Speaker 03 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 bolling, the bolling that forms in midair.
24:56 Joe Weisenthal? Flying bolling.
24:57 Speaker 03 It's also called a tugboat bolling. It's great. It's, it's a very useful knot to make at, at the last minute. If you need to make a bolling or a loop at the end of a rope, you can actually make it very quickly. And then you can throw it around a, a bollard 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 closed space. It's, I'm a, I do need a bit of space to do it.
25:21 Tracy Alloway? Wait, no, make the knot.
25:21 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, let's see, let's see. While you're doing it, while you're doing it, Tracy, do you have a favorite knot?
25:26 Tracy Alloway? No.
25:26 Joe Weisenthal? I do.
25:27 Tracy Alloway? Like, I'm proud that I can tie my shoes. That's about it.
25:30 Joe Weisenthal? I can't tie my shoes. But you know what my favorite knot is? Someone should, a monkey's. Fist, do you know that one?
25:34 Tracy Alloway? No.
25:35 Joe Weisenthal? Do you know what a monkey's fist is, Tim?
25:36 Speaker 03 Oh, sure, absolutely. That's for throwing line.
25:39 Joe Weisenthal? 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 like go through. And it's very hard to.
25:49 Tracy Alloway? What would you use that for?
25:50 Joe Weisenthal? Well, if you're pulling on something and you wanted to like 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.
26:05 Speaker 03 Okay, let's see. This works. I usually need even more space than this, but.
26:09 Joe Weisenthal? Okay, let's see.
26:10 Tracy Alloway? Oh.
26:10 Speaker 03 Let's see if we can get this to work. Oh, no.
26:14 Joe Weisenthal? Try one more time. Oh.
26:16 Speaker 03 Well, that's it right there.
26:17 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, there you go.
26:19 Speaker 03 Even though I tied my microphone cord. It's through my microphone.
26:23 Tracy Alloway? Too much for him.
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27:10 Tracy Alloway? So we talked a little bit about maybe there was breakthrough in terms of design and the way you're twisting cords. We don't really know because it was all organic material and it's decayed. But we do know that rope kind of leapt from jute, natural fibers to metals, to steel and things like that. Talk to us about how important that was when it comes to, I guess, technological advancement in rope.
27:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, there was a German engineer in the Harts Mountains, in the mining region of the Harts 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, the 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 worked spectacularly. And one of the
28:20 Speaker 03 reasons why it works is because if you lose one strand, if one 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 1840s.
29:02 Speaker 03 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, all made up with wire rope.
29:16 Joe Weisenthal? 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.
29:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right.
29:34 Joe Weisenthal? 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.
29:43 Tracy Alloway? Space rope.
29:44 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, can you explain what that's all about?
29:46 Speaker 03 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 19th century, the idea being that any point on the equator of the earth is moving at 900 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, 100,000 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 a rock on the end of the rope, and I twirled around in a circle, what would happen to the rope?
30:29 Speaker 03 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 way out in space wants to fly off into the distance, and the tether's preventing it from doing that. And in 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, 23,000 miles high, which is geosynchronous orbit. And you open the doors to your crawler and push the satellite out, and at 23,000 miles
31:13 Speaker 03 high, it's now in geosynchronous orbit. So you can put things into orbit without using rockets. You could also use this device to send that crawler all the way to the end of the tether, at 100,000 kilometers out, and that end of that tether is whipping around at very high speed, because it has to describe a much larger circle
31:34 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, yeah, yeah.
31:34 Speaker 03 than the circle of the equator. So it's moving very fast, 17,000 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?
32:04 Tracy Alloway? Oh yeah, this is 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 sci fi, right? It looks kind of out there. But realistically, do you think this is going to happen like sometime in our lifetimes?
32:23 Speaker 03 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.
32:41 Tracy Alloway? A consortium for everything, huh?
32:43 Speaker 03 Yes. And so he and then a fellow named 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 a very strange material. The way it's made is very strange, but it's basically carbon that uses gaseous deposition onto a copper substrate. And when the conditions are right, it actually forms these hexagonal rings. They're
33:27 Speaker 03 all interconnected. And those interconnected hexagonal rings have the use the strongest bond known in nature. But that's only one atom layer thick. Then you do it deposited again, and another layer forms, and then another and another. And you can go to 26,000 layers, as Adrian Nixon told me about. And this tether is incredibly strong. I mean, it's unbelievably strong. You need something that's capable of 90 gigapascals of tensile strength to do this. And this graphene has been tested up to 120 gigapascals of strength. So it's very much capable of doing the job. The biggest drawback is that you have to have, it's a manufacturing drawback.
34:11 Speaker 03 You have to be able to make a tether 100,000 miles long with no brakes. So that's a little bit of a challenge.
34:18 Joe Weisenthal? You know, Tracy, like when I think about the fact that Homo erectus went 1.5 million years just like making the hand axe. When, and then you hear this and it's like, well, there happens in our lifetime, our kid's lifetime, their kid's lifetime, that's nothing. Like in the grand scheme of history, like which lifetime in the next couple of hundred years it happens in is like truly an irrelevant.
34:43 Tracy Alloway? Matters to me. I want to see the space elevators.
34:45 Joe Weisenthal? But in for our species, it's truly an irrelevant rounding error exactly. And I do think, you know, rope is so crucial to all of these breakthroughs in 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 Queene, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Fascinating conversation. I am now convinced by your book's title that rope is the backbone of civilization.
35:15 Speaker 03 Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
35:29 Joe Weisenthal? 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 50,000 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 1,000 years, which is also nothing, by the way, that we might get into space with rope, it seems very plausible to me.
36:00 Tracy Alloway? Can I just say, I got distracted because I searched for graphene. And 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 graphene.
36:12 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, like the earrings, the design of the graphene.
36:15 Tracy Alloway? The interlocking hexagons that Tim was talking about. No, there is something about rope where, we said this in the intro, but it's old, it's lindy. But on the other hand, it's continuously being perfected and applied to different uses, right?
36:32 Joe Weisenthal? 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 cord 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. You move past jute, you get to something synthetic, you go to steel, then maybe to graphene. But that core simple fact that when you twist something around something, it becomes very durable. It's a pretty like powerful conceptual unlock.
37:11 Tracy Alloway? Well, also it avoids the single point of failure problem that you see in something like a chain. Yeah.
37:16 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
37:17 Tracy Alloway? But here's a question. If rope is the backbone of civilization and cords are the backbone of rope, then are cords the backbone of civilization? Like, how far can you take this?
37:27 Joe Weisenthal? This is, this is the thing which is, and we just have to be humble. It's like civilization has many ancestors, you know what I'm saying? Many, many, many fathers and mothers.
37:37 Tracy Alloway? The string episode coming up soon.
37:39 Joe Weisenthal? No, but this, you're totally right because like I could argue it's like, oh, whales have 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 antecedents and then unlocks, right? And so it's always sort of helpful to understand. I like these history of technology thing. It makes me, makes me appreciate everything a little bit more.
38:00 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, and I guess how iterative a lot of it tends to be.
38:03 Joe Weisenthal? 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.
38:09 Tracy Alloway? Oh, Cast Away.
38:10 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. And I guess he had to, he had to make some rope. I forgot. It's been a long time since I saw that movie. I feel like if I were on an island, that wouldn't occur to me. Like, I would like, I wouldn't.
38:20 Tracy Alloway? But you'd have a lot of time to think about it, Joe.
38:22 Joe Weisenthal? I bet I would never get there. I could do not, oh, I should have twisted the fiber to make the boat. I'd be like, how do you do, I bet, like, that wouldn't have. Now, I haven't read the book, of course, it's different. But had I not read the book, I think I would have been pretty screwed.
38:34 Tracy Alloway? I guess Robinson Crusoe has to be like your next big read or something.
38:38 Joe Weisenthal? I should read that. I should read that.
38:39 Tracy Alloway? Yeah. All right. Shall we leave it there?
38:40 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
38:41 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
38:46 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Wasenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Check out Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization by our guest, Tim Queene. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmand, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
39:14 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about rope, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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