Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm joll Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway, Terracy.
Speaker 2: You know, it's something I've been thinking a lot about lately,
Speaker 2: especially like this year, just sort of like something on
Speaker 2: my mind, a CoA on everyone's mind. Actually, it's not
Speaker 2: just me. It's just like the extraordinary amount of rope
Speaker 2: it must have taken for wailing expeditions in the mid
Speaker 2: nineteenth century has depicted in a story such as Moby
Speaker 2: Dick and others, like just think about how much rope
Speaker 2: that requires.
Speaker 3: Is this whole episode an excuse for you to talk
Speaker 3: about Moby Dick.
Speaker 4: It's not, but it is, But it is. No, No,
Speaker 4: it's genuinely you.
Speaker 3: Know, one thing I learned actually in the course of
Speaker 3: researching this particular topic, which happens to be rope. The
Speaker 3: whale that apparently inspired Moby Dick was called Mocha Dick.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also Dick was basically like saying Joe back then
Speaker 3: every Tom Dick and Harry, right, you hear that? So
Speaker 3: really the Moby Dick whale was Moka Joe.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's right. You know, it's funny. I used to
Speaker 4: go to a coffee shop with Bradaboro vermont Na.
Speaker 3: Moka Joe's didn't have a whaling theme. It didn't, but
Speaker 3: there's at least opportunity collicially you did that.
Speaker 2: Apparently, from what I understand, I also at one point
Speaker 2: went down this like where did this name come from?
Speaker 2: I think Dick is in Moby Dick even then carry
Speaker 2: the sort of contemporary connotation.
Speaker 4: Oh really, yeah, it was like sort of like tough.
Speaker 3: He was a jerk whale.
Speaker 4: No, like sort of like masculine. Oh like you know,
Speaker 4: like that. It was sort of like that.
Speaker 2: It even back then sort of was this sort of
Speaker 2: that was a masculine name for reasons that one would
Speaker 2: associate it.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna say anything else.
Speaker 2: That's fine anyway, but it's interesting to think you think
Speaker 2: about the history of technologies, et cetera.
Speaker 4: We did an episode on.
Speaker 2: The history of nails and how crucial that was to
Speaker 2: the economy, and you think, like, here's this one technological
Speaker 2: breakthrough some like unlock, and then it.
Speaker 4: Opens up all of these kinds of things.
Speaker 2: So whales were very important for like whale oil and candles,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But like, what were the technologies that preceded
Speaker 2: whaling and you literally could not do it? And of
Speaker 2: course that's just one example, but there are all kinds
Speaker 2: of technologies things that you do that are economically productive.
Speaker 2: I remember in school we learned about like simple machines
Speaker 2: like the pulley, oh yeah, and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: But you can't have a pully without rope.
Speaker 3: That's true for real, like the pully.
Speaker 2: When I was in elementary school, But no one bothered
Speaker 2: mentioning when I was in elementary school that the pulley
Speaker 2: would have been useless technology without rope to.
Speaker 3: Put the rope itself is the technology behind the technology.
Speaker 3: This one's an interesting one because I think when you
Speaker 3: say the word rope, people think of something, you know,
Speaker 3: old fashion, like rope is Lindy just a bundles of cords, right,
Speaker 3: But actually, as we were about to discuss, there have
Speaker 3: been lots of technological acts in both the way rope
Speaker 3: is made and also the way rope is designed totally.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact
Speaker 2: have the perfect guest, someone I've wanted to speak to
Speaker 2: since last summer. I think when I came across his work.
Speaker 2: We're going to be speaking with Tim Queeney. Here's the
Speaker 2: author of the recent book Rope, How a bundle of
Speaker 2: twisted fibers became the backbone civilization cuite A bold claims there, Tim.
Speaker 5: Hi, guys, thanks to have for having me on. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's it's a bold plan. But you know that's the way.
Speaker 5: You have to buy the book and read it back
Speaker 5: to back it up.
Speaker 4: What is rope? No, seriously, what what makes other rope?
Speaker 5: Well that's a good question, and people have asked me
Speaker 5: how you define rope, But for this book, I defined
Speaker 5: rope in a very broad sense, from everything down from cordage,
Speaker 5: which is a thin small rope or twine or which
Speaker 5: you want to call it that up to heavy duty
Speaker 5: wire rope nave metal. So it's all rope as far
Speaker 5: as I'm concerned, and that's sort of how I went in.
Speaker 5: But basically, rope is twisted fibers that are then used
Speaker 5: to accomplish work.
Speaker 3: I definitely want to talk about space rope later on,
Speaker 3: or space elevators, because that's something I was completely unaware of,
Speaker 3: but before we do, just on the book itself. So
Speaker 3: I'm aware that these single topic books have become something
Speaker 3: of a phenomenon. So you have people talk explaining the
Speaker 3: history of human development through the medium of salt, the
Speaker 3: container box or fish cod or whatever. But what does
Speaker 3: rope actually say about civilization or human development that other
Speaker 3: single object stories maybe miss well.
Speaker 5: Of course, rope, as we've already just talked about, is
Speaker 5: made up of fibers. There's little strands of fiber, and
Speaker 5: if you want to talk about it in sort of
Speaker 5: a thematic way, each one of those individual fibers can't
Speaker 5: do much on its own. But if you twist them
Speaker 5: all together, now you have a tool that's immensely useful.
Speaker 5: And it's sort of like the way a single person
Speaker 5: can't do all that much on their own, but people
Speaker 5: working together in groups can accomplish great things, and they
Speaker 5: often accomplish those great things down through history using rope.
Speaker 4: So what is it about fibers so you twist them together?
Speaker 2: I mean, there's going to sound dumb, but I really
Speaker 2: never like thought about it before, even like paid attention.
Speaker 2: But what is it about the property of a strand,
Speaker 2: the property of a fiber, or even the property of
Speaker 2: a long metal rod such that when you twist them together,
Speaker 2: it becomes very load bearing.
Speaker 5: It's a combination of friction, especially with fibers, it's a
Speaker 5: combination of friction, twist, and something you could call the
Speaker 5: helix effect. The friction, of course, is just the individual
Speaker 5: fibers as they're twisted together, they're rubbing up against each
Speaker 5: other and engaging those little nooks and crannies of the
Speaker 5: fiber or all engaging with other nooks and crannies on
Speaker 5: other fibers. And so there's that friction that's stopping it
Speaker 5: and a certain amount of physical locking in that's going
Speaker 5: on that's stopping them from sliding past each other. But
Speaker 5: then you twist it, and by twisting him, you're re
Speaker 5: engaging those fibers in a new way, even more deeply.
Speaker 5: And then finally the last thing is what you might
Speaker 5: call the helix effect, which is if you were to
Speaker 5: take a rope and to wrap it around your arm.
Speaker 2: So for listeners, you should go over to the YouTube
Speaker 2: because Tim is actually wrapping a rope around his arm.
Speaker 4: It looks a little bit like a TI fill him.
Speaker 2: But yeah, tell us what's going on here for the
Speaker 2: especially for those who are just listening.
Speaker 5: So I'm just wrapping this rope around my arm, and
Speaker 5: I'm not actually sorry to maybe see, I'm not actually
Speaker 5: nailing this to my arm or gluing it to my
Speaker 5: arm or riveting it to my arm. But I'm just
Speaker 5: putting it on my arm. And then if you can't
Speaker 5: see maybe too well, hear if I pull it on
Speaker 5: the same axis on which I've wrapped it around my arm,
Speaker 5: it stays. I've literally done nothing to make this rope
Speaker 5: stay other than the fact that it's all wrapped around
Speaker 5: my arm. So what's actually happening here is you have
Speaker 5: this helix of rope that when you pull on it
Speaker 5: on that same axis on which it was twisted, the
Speaker 5: helix collapses. And you might remember those party toys you
Speaker 5: got when you were a kid where you stick your
Speaker 5: fingers in both ends and pull on them the finger
Speaker 5: so called finger trap. And what happens is is, though
Speaker 5: those toys are made up of a whole series of helixes,
Speaker 5: and when you pull on them, all the helixes collapse
Speaker 5: and they tighten up. And that's what happens with rope,
Speaker 5: with multiple strand rope. This rope I have right here
Speaker 5: is actually made of jute, and that's a natural fiber,
Speaker 5: and this is actually a four strand rope. If you
Speaker 5: can see the four strands.
Speaker 4: The listener's got to watch this on YouTube.
Speaker 2: This is so much better as a video than just
Speaker 2: on you because you can see all the other jute.
Speaker 5: The four strands still strands, and most rope all through
Speaker 5: history has been three strand rope. And I'll talk about
Speaker 5: why that is in a second. But the strands and
Speaker 5: when you pull on them, the strands all do that
Speaker 5: helix effect that one strand wraps is wrapped around the
Speaker 5: other two three strands, and it's collapsing down on the
Speaker 5: other three and so on and so on. With all
Speaker 5: four strands, they're all collapsing around each other. And that's
Speaker 5: what makes it incredibly strong, is this helix effect. And
Speaker 5: that was actually told to me by a German engineer
Speaker 5: who works in the industry, and he's so well known
Speaker 5: that he's called the Pope of rope.
Speaker 3: A rope celebrities.
Speaker 2: Oh we should have added him on it, said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's the real celebrity.
Speaker 5: But he told me about this helix effect. And so
Speaker 5: it's really those three things that the friction, the twisting,
Speaker 5: and then the helix effect that causes three strand rope
Speaker 5: to work so well. And three strand, of course is
Speaker 5: most commonly made because it's the least number of strands
Speaker 5: you can use to have this helix effect, so it's
Speaker 5: sort of the most economical way to get the helix effect.
Speaker 5: It's maximum without having to add more strands, which of
Speaker 5: course can add costs. So three strand is the way
Speaker 5: to go.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about the basic design of rope, walk
Speaker 3: us through I guess the technological breakthroughs when it comes
Speaker 3: to designing rope. Was there a moment, you know, when
Speaker 3: the fourth cord was added or I don't know, they
Speaker 3: were twisted in a different way where someone was like, aha,
Speaker 3: I have invented the better rope that will now allow
Speaker 3: us to accomplish some great thing.
Speaker 5: Well, that's really good question that I can't answer. And
Speaker 5: the reason why we can't answer that is because rope
Speaker 5: is such an ancient human tool that we just don't
Speaker 5: know when the first multi strand rope was developed and made.
Speaker 5: The oldest rope that's ever been found is fifty thousand
Speaker 5: years old, and that's a piece of cordage that was
Speaker 5: found on the bottom of a flint flake in a
Speaker 5: cave in southeastern France, and it was twisted by a
Speaker 5: Neanderthal person fifty thousand years ago, and there may indeed
Speaker 5: have been rope much older than that that was manufactured.
Speaker 5: But the problem with rope, a natural fiber rope is
Speaker 5: that it's made of plant material and it tends to
Speaker 5: rot away. Maybe seventy thousand year old rope that was made,
Speaker 5: but we just we don't know.
Speaker 2: One thing that really struck me, and you said this
Speaker 2: in your book, but you know, these days, you invent
Speaker 2: a new technology, it feels like in a year later,
Speaker 2: it's obsolete, right, And this pace seems to be accelerating.
Speaker 2: And one thing that I really appreciated it from your
Speaker 2: book is that in the old days, a new technological
Speaker 2: innovation would come around like maybe like once every couple
Speaker 2: hundred thousand years or a million. I think you make
Speaker 2: the point that Homo erectus, I guess we're our uncles,
Speaker 2: there's something like that basically had one invention the hand
Speaker 2: acts in a million and a half years. They basically
Speaker 2: figured out one thing. Like technological revolutions were pretty slow
Speaker 2: back in the old days.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right, that the hand acts, which from what
Speaker 5: I understand that people have talked to. There's still archaeologists
Speaker 5: still aren't completely sure what those things were used for,
Speaker 5: but there are so many of those around and that
Speaker 5: they were used for such a long time. And in
Speaker 5: my book I talk about the hand ACKs and stone
Speaker 5: tools happening before rope, but it's quite possible that they
Speaker 5: were around contemporaneously with rope. But we have that issue
Speaker 5: of them running away. But once you've developed this multi
Speaker 5: strand rope, it now has all these great uses that
Speaker 5: it can be put to. Probably the biggest use for
Speaker 5: early people's was just the ability to organize your stuff.
Speaker 5: You can tie things together in bundles, which sounds maybe
Speaker 5: a little simplistic for us, but we do the same
Speaker 5: thing and lots of other ways. We just keep our
Speaker 5: stuff organized, and they had to do the same thing,
Speaker 5: and so rope was just a great tool for that,
Speaker 5: in addition to using it for domesticated animals and being
Speaker 5: able to keep them in place they don't run off,
Speaker 5: and lots of other things.
Speaker 3: If I could fast forward about fifty thousand years or so,
Speaker 3: Joe started this conversation talking about the importance of rope
Speaker 3: when it comes to whaling, and if you think about
Speaker 3: a time period like the eighteen hundreds sort of marked
Speaker 3: by the expansion of the British Empire. Lots of ships
Speaker 3: sailing around, all covered in rope in one way or another.
Speaker 4: Lots of ships sailing around. It's like a good description
Speaker 4: of much of all history.
Speaker 3: Tess, that's sure, all right, but yeah, you know the
Speaker 3: kind of ships. I mean, how important was being able
Speaker 3: to manufacture rope at a sort of industrial scale in
Speaker 3: the eighteen hundreds, because I mean we're talking about a
Speaker 3: lot of rope. I think you have a stat in
Speaker 3: your book about how much rope it took just to
Speaker 3: get a whale, and it was a lot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the whaling ships would carry more than ten thousand
Speaker 5: feet of rope just for use on board the whaleboats
Speaker 5: that went out to actually hunt the whales, not even
Speaker 5: discussing all the other uses that rope is put to
Speaker 5: on a sailing ship. And as you point out, a
Speaker 5: sailing ship, which was the premier technology for hundreds of
Speaker 5: years for crossing oceans, is absolutely dependent upon rope, both
Speaker 5: for the standing rigging which holds the masts up and
Speaker 5: the running rigging which controls the sails. Going all the
Speaker 5: way back to the Egyptians, they had the exact same issue.
Speaker 5: They had to have rope to keep their boats under
Speaker 5: control and for them to keep the masts from falling down.
Speaker 5: And if I could just go back for a second
Speaker 5: to the Egyptians very interestingly different way of building ships
Speaker 5: than the way a ship was built, for example, for
Speaker 5: a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. The way of
Speaker 5: building ships in the Western world is to be put
Speaker 5: down a keel, then you have ribs that are ninety
Speaker 5: degrees to that keel, and then you have planks which
Speaker 5: cover the ribs, and now you have your hull. But
Speaker 5: the Egyptians actually did it in a completely different way,
Speaker 5: and other cultures as well. It wasn't just the Egyptians.
Speaker 5: They actually stitched their boats together. They took the planks
Speaker 5: and they cut these V shaped grooves in the planks,
Speaker 5: and they actually threaded rope through these V shaped grooves
Speaker 5: to either end of the collection of planks and then
Speaker 5: tighten them up. And then they had a hull, and
Speaker 5: they would put ribs in after they'd stitch these boats together.
Speaker 5: But the ribs were there just in addition to the
Speaker 5: rope to hold the planks together. So rope is absolutely
Speaker 5: essential for a boat even even to float in that era.
Speaker 5: So that's pretty amazing. And as I said, it wasn't
Speaker 5: just the Egyptians, but also a lot of Arab boat
Speaker 5: building was done in a similar fashion with stitched boats.
Speaker 5: But going back to the age of sail, they needed
Speaker 5: just tens of thousands of feet of rope to equip
Speaker 5: these vessels. And as you point out, when you have
Speaker 5: that much rope required, it ceases to be a cottage
Speaker 5: industry and the whole process becomes industrialized. And the people
Speaker 5: who really kicked this off were the British with their
Speaker 5: need to keep their large Royal Navy establishment going at
Speaker 5: all times and keep all these ships, that hundreds of
Speaker 5: ships available to go to sea. So they had a
Speaker 5: series of dockyards where they manufactured rope along with other things.
Speaker 5: And some maritime historians say that it really was the
Speaker 5: Royal Navy that kicked off the industrial revolution because the
Speaker 5: whole process really needed to be industrialized to make all
Speaker 5: this rope tracy.
Speaker 2: I jokingly said, oh, ships floating around, but no, this
Speaker 2: is really a key point here, which is that it
Speaker 2: is how rope became the backbone of civilization. It is
Speaker 2: hard to imagine civilization without a lot of boats, and
Speaker 2: it is literally impossible to imagine sailboats of various sizes
Speaker 2: without ropes of various things. You know, and steel they
Speaker 2: talk about like the Bessemer process. Suddenly like some sort
Speaker 2: of unlocked steel existed before the Bestimber process, but then
Speaker 2: that unlocked a significant expansion.
Speaker 4: Was there some.
Speaker 2: Breakthrough that allowed for rope to go from one of
Speaker 2: these things that lets twist some plant fibers with our hands,
Speaker 2: maybe wrap them around something, to something that could be
Speaker 2: truly produced at industrial scale.
Speaker 5: I don't think that there's any one event like that.
Speaker 5: It was kind of a continuous process, much like rope itself,
Speaker 5: that went from rope being made outdoors in these rope
Speaker 5: yards where they would twist the rope because you need
Speaker 5: a lot of space to do all this twisting, to
Speaker 5: an indoor activity because they no longer could take the
Speaker 5: time off for when it snowed and rained. You needed
Speaker 5: to make rope every day to meet the needs. As
Speaker 5: I said of something like the Royal Navy, you needed
Speaker 5: to really produce rope on a massive scale, and the
Speaker 5: needs of something like a large sailing ship where you
Speaker 5: need to have some very long ropes, specifically the longest
Speaker 5: rope being the anchor road, or the rope that you
Speaker 5: tie your anchor to so you can anchor in deep water.
Speaker 5: That had to be a seven hundred and forty two
Speaker 5: feet long. And so in order to make a seven
Speaker 5: hundred and forty two foot long in the last part
Speaker 5: of the process of making rope, when you're putting the
Speaker 5: strands together, the rope actually gets shorter because you're twisting it.
Speaker 5: But we have to start out with thousand foot long
Speaker 5: strands that you're twisting together to make the final rope
Speaker 5: that ends up being the seven hundred and forty feet long.
Speaker 5: So you need a huge building to do this. And
Speaker 5: so these rope walks that were built into various dockyards
Speaker 5: around the world. It wasn't just a British who were
Speaker 5: doing this. They were built in the US and all
Speaker 5: maritime nations were doing this, and even non maritime nations
Speaker 5: because you need a rope for other things. But these
Speaker 5: rope walks really were the thing that industrialized the process
Speaker 5: and allowed you to make very long, very big ropes.
Speaker 3: Can you talk to us about the supply chain that
Speaker 3: created ropes? So, I guess wrote in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 3: was made out of jute or hemp or something like that.
Speaker 3: Where did that material come from and how did it
Speaker 3: get to the dockyards in a place like London.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a great question, because it actually was a
Speaker 5: strategic material. There was something called naval stores the British
Speaker 5: called the Naval Stores, which was pitch from pine to
Speaker 5: use for waterproofing, and then the actual pine trees themselves
Speaker 5: the trunks to use for masts, and then finally the
Speaker 5: hemp that was used to make rope, because most of
Speaker 5: the rope made in during the Age of Sale was
Speaker 5: made from hemp fibers, because it actually makes spectacularly good
Speaker 5: rope because you can grow these hemp plants very very tall,
Speaker 5: and the fibers that you can strip out of them
Speaker 5: are very long, and the longer the fiber, the stronger
Speaker 5: the rope is. These were strategic materials at the Royal Navy,
Speaker 5: for example, it was always looking towards its supply of
Speaker 5: these materials. When the US was a colony of Great Britain,
Speaker 5: the Parliament actually passed a law that required or asked
Speaker 5: or prompted American farmers to grow hemp plants so they
Speaker 5: could the hemp fiber could be sent back to Britain
Speaker 5: for use in making rope. The other Really, the largest
Speaker 5: supplier of hemp was actually from the air of the Ukraine,
Speaker 5: and that's where Britain got most of its hemp from.
Speaker 5: And amazingly, one of the reasons why Napoleon, for example,
Speaker 5: invaded Russia in eighteen twelve was to There were a
Speaker 5: number of reasons, but one reason was to cut off
Speaker 5: the hemp supply HUMH to the British Royal Navy so
Speaker 5: then he could finally get around to it invading Britain,
Speaker 5: which he failed to do.
Speaker 2: It's interesting they made the colonists send the hemp fiber
Speaker 2: back to Britain, preserving the value at you know, the
Speaker 2: poor colonists just had to ship rock commodities while the
Speaker 2: rope yards in Britain got to actually do the premium
Speaker 2: higher end value add very common pattern in history to obviously,
Speaker 2: when in a whaling expedition, there's the sale right, and
Speaker 2: then there's a you know, in Mobe Dick they talk about,
Speaker 2: although apparently he doesn't use the term like they called
Speaker 2: it the Nantucket sleigh ride.
Speaker 4: After you get the hook.
Speaker 2: In the whale and then the whalers drag your boats,
Speaker 2: and then there's the you're like wetting. Someone has to
Speaker 2: pour water on the rope so that it's not burning
Speaker 2: their hands. Talk to us about how big of a
Speaker 2: breakthrough that was in terms of declaring this very important fuel.
Speaker 5: Yeah, whalings started out with just attacking whales from the shore,
Speaker 5: but as those whales were used up, these whaling ships
Speaker 5: had to go farther and farther afield to find whales
Speaker 5: to harvest, and the rope was absolutely essential. Rope had
Speaker 5: to hold when after they sunk in that harpoon and
Speaker 5: the famous Nantucket's sleigh ride, when the whales going along
Speaker 5: the surface and dragging the boat behind it. The one
Speaker 5: that's really dangerous though, is if the whale decides to
Speaker 5: sound or dive, because then the boat has to make
Speaker 5: sure that they have enough rope on board to let
Speaker 5: out enough ropes that they're not dragged underwater. And sometimes
Speaker 5: whaleboats that were following a big whale, the other whaleboats
Speaker 5: would get near them and they would actually combine two
Speaker 5: lengths of rope that they each had in their rope
Speaker 5: tubs just to prevent the whale from sounding and actually
Speaker 5: dragging the boat under.
Speaker 2: Since you mentioned combining tow rope links, what's your favorite knot?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I was going to ask that same question,
Speaker 3: but I was saving it for the head. Literally, have
Speaker 3: it written down here. That's so funny.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I just thought, you know, you mentioned combining tow ropes.
Speaker 3: We've been We've been doing this for so long.
Speaker 4: We always think about this set.
Speaker 3: We're morphing into the same person, I guess.
Speaker 4: But let's you do what's your favorite notot?
Speaker 5: Well? Actually, but it's interestingly enough. My editor wanted to
Speaker 5: put a nod on the cover initially, but we we realized.
Speaker 2: Just showed me on her computer. She really did write
Speaker 2: down word for word. She was going to ask what's
Speaker 2: your favorite not? But I g zumped her. I asked
Speaker 2: it in the middle, even though she was saving it
Speaker 2: for the end.
Speaker 4: So this is.
Speaker 5: Probably the idea was came up to put a nod
Speaker 5: on the cover, but I said that this is actually
Speaker 5: not a not book because I can't. I can't actually
Speaker 5: take credit for being not expert. I'm not, but you,
Speaker 5: but I do have a number of knots that I like,
Speaker 5: and the one that's sort of the most fun to
Speaker 5: tie is the flying bowlin, the bowlin that forms in
Speaker 5: mid air. It's also called a tugboat bowl. And it's great.
Speaker 5: It's it's a very useful not to make it at
Speaker 5: the last minute. If you need to make a bowlin
Speaker 5: or a loop at the end of a rope, you
Speaker 5: can actually make it very quickly and then you can
Speaker 5: throw it around a ballard or something if you're on
Speaker 5: a tugboat and maybe save the boat. I don't know,
Speaker 5: but yeah, that's a fun one to show off. I
Speaker 5: don't know if I can do it here in this
Speaker 5: close space. I do need a bit of space.
Speaker 4: Let's see.
Speaker 2: Let's see while you're doing it. While you're doing it, Tracy,
Speaker 2: do have a favorite not?
Speaker 4: No, I do.
Speaker 3: Like I'm proud that I can tie my shoes.
Speaker 2: I can't tell my shoes. But you know what my
Speaker 2: favorite knot is the one shot a monkey's fist.
Speaker 1: Do you know that?
Speaker 4: Do you know what a monkey's fist is? Tim? Oh?
Speaker 5: Sure, absolutely, that's for throwing it for a throwing line.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can like make this ball at the end
Speaker 2: of the rope and then you can like put it
Speaker 2: through a loop and it won't go through and.
Speaker 4: It's very hard to what you use that for.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're pulling on something and you wanted to
Speaker 2: put it through a loop, and you didn't want the
Speaker 2: rope to slide through a loop like you want to
Speaker 2: get to the end, so you could make sure it's there. Also,
Speaker 2: it's basically impossible to untie. In my experience, Tim is
Speaker 2: currently okay, let's this works.
Speaker 5: I usually need even more space than this, but okay,
Speaker 5: let's let's see if we can get this to work.
Speaker 4: Try one more time.
Speaker 5: Well that's it, right, Yeah, even though I tied my microphone.
Speaker 4: Cord too much.
Speaker 3: So we talked a little bit about maybe there was
Speaker 3: through in terms of design and the way you're twisting cords.
Speaker 3: We don't really know because it was all organic material
Speaker 3: and its decayed, but we do know that rope kind
Speaker 3: of leapt from jute natural fibers to metals to steal
Speaker 3: and things like that. Talk to us about how important
Speaker 3: that was when it comes to I guess technological advancement
Speaker 3: in rope.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there was a German engineer in the Hearts Mountains,
Speaker 5: in the mining region of the Hearts Mountains. This fellow
Speaker 5: named William Albert, and he noticed realized and knew that
Speaker 5: a lot of the rope that they were using to
Speaker 5: haul materials up through mines, up through the shafts of
Speaker 5: mines was corroding and breaking their natural fiber rope, and
Speaker 5: they would also use chains. The problem with the chain
Speaker 5: is that when one link corrodes and breaks, the entire
Speaker 5: chain fails and the material falls. But he thought, what
Speaker 5: if I actually used iron, and I used lengths of iron,
Speaker 5: and I twisted it together just like as if it
Speaker 5: was hemp into multi stranded rope. And he did that
Speaker 5: and it works spectacularly. And one of the reasons why
Speaker 5: it works is because if you lose one strand, if
Speaker 5: once strand breaks, the entire rope doesn't fail. It has
Speaker 5: a very easy failure mode where it takes multiple strands
Speaker 5: to break for the wire rope to fail. So it
Speaker 5: was very useful in that industrial setting. And there was
Speaker 5: another German engineer who emigrated to the US and his
Speaker 5: name was John Roebling, and he actually read there's actually
Speaker 5: a piece that William Albert wrote in a journal, an
Speaker 5: industrial journal that John Roebling read and became very interested
Speaker 5: in making his own wire rope, which he started doing.
Speaker 5: And his wire rope was superior in the eighteen forties
Speaker 5: and he started a business of making wire rope, and
Speaker 5: then he got into designing suspension bridges. Of course, he
Speaker 5: and his son Washington Roebling were responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge,
Speaker 5: which may all made up with wire rope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's wild. Like honestly, it wasn't until I read
Speaker 2: your book that it like dawned on me, like that's rope.
Speaker 4: That's the same thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, granted the material is different, but that fundamental
Speaker 2: idea of the strength through twisting that gave us the
Speaker 2: Brooklyn Bridge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: You end your book with like the future of rope,
Speaker 2: so to speak, and the idea like maybe rope could
Speaker 2: one day give us an elevator into space space rope.
Speaker 4: Yeah, can you explain what that's all about?
Speaker 5: Space elevator. Yeah, it's great. Whenever I give a talk,
Speaker 5: I always ask how many people here have ever heard
Speaker 5: of a space elevator, and never more than a quarter
Speaker 5: of them raise their hands. It's actually I'm surprised. I
Speaker 5: thought more people knew about it. But it's actually a
Speaker 5: physics idea that goes back to the nineteenth century. The
Speaker 5: idea being that any point on the equator of the
Speaker 5: Earth is moving at nine hundred miles an hour. So
Speaker 5: if you were to attach a tether to the Earth
Speaker 5: and then you would extend that tether out into space
Speaker 5: with a weight on the end one hundred thousand kilometers out,
Speaker 5: then what would happen would be Of course, it'd be
Speaker 5: the same as if you took a piece of rope
Speaker 5: like this and I attached to a rock on the
Speaker 5: end of the rope and I twirled around in a circle.
Speaker 5: What would happen to the rope. The rope would go
Speaker 5: really tight as it was preventing that rock from flying away.
Speaker 5: So the exact same effect happens here. As the Earth rotates,
Speaker 5: the weight that wigh out in space wants to fly
Speaker 5: off into the distance, and the tether's preventing it from
Speaker 5: doing that. And then the process, that tether becomes bar tight,
Speaker 5: as it was made of steel. And once you have that,
Speaker 5: you can then put a crawler that uses friction wheels
Speaker 5: on that tether and it can crawl up that tether
Speaker 5: up to say twenty three thousand miles high, which is
Speaker 5: geosynchronous orbit, and you open the doors to your crawler
Speaker 5: and push the satellite out and at twenty three thousand
Speaker 5: miles high in geosynchronous orbit, so you can put things
Speaker 5: into orbit without using rockets. You could also use this
Speaker 5: device to send that crawl all the way to the
Speaker 5: end of the tether at one hundred thousand kilometers out,
Speaker 5: and that end of that tether is whipping around at
Speaker 5: very high speed because it has to describe a much
Speaker 5: larger circle than the circle of the equator, so it's
Speaker 5: moving very fast seventeen thousand miles an hour. You can
Speaker 5: bring something up to the top of that and as
Speaker 5: you if you want to send something to the Moon,
Speaker 5: as the tether swings around to the only hits the
Speaker 5: right angle, you release it and it goes flying toward
Speaker 5: the Moon without any need for rocketry. So it's an
Speaker 5: amazing device that up to now hasn't been built because
Speaker 5: of the one limiting factor, which is how do you
Speaker 5: build a tether that's strong enough to do the job?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, this was going to be my next question,
Speaker 3: which is you actually in the book seem quite bullish
Speaker 3: on the space elevator idea, and if you go and
Speaker 3: look up photos of it, it looks very very sci fi, right,
Speaker 3: it looks kind of out there, But realistically, do you
Speaker 3: think this is going to happen like sometime in our lifetimes.
Speaker 5: Well, I did speak with two gentlemen who were very
Speaker 5: who are very bullish about this. A guy named Pete
Speaker 5: Swan who's a former NASA rocket scientist and he was
Speaker 5: at one point the head of the International Space Elevator Consortium.
Speaker 5: I don't know if you knew there was such a thing,
Speaker 5: but there is.
Speaker 3: A consortium for everything, huh yes.
Speaker 5: And so he and then a fellow name Adrian Nixon,
Speaker 5: who is associated with the University of Manchester in England,
Speaker 5: and they are both very bullish about this idea, that
Speaker 5: it can be done and that it will be done soon.
Speaker 5: In fact, Pete Swan just left his position with the
Speaker 5: International Space Elevator Consortium and he's starting up a company
Speaker 5: and he said, we're going to go out and build
Speaker 5: this sucker. And the reason why they it can do
Speaker 5: this is that there's this material called graphene. It's very
Speaker 5: strange material and the way it's made is very strange.
Speaker 5: But it's basically carbon that uses gaseous depositation onto a
Speaker 5: copper substrate and when the conditions are right, it actually
Speaker 5: forms these hexagonal rings that are all interconnected and those
Speaker 5: interconnected hexagonal rings have the use the strongest bond known
Speaker 5: in nature. But that's only one ad and layer thick.
Speaker 5: Then you do it again deposited again, and another layer forms,
Speaker 5: and then another and another, and you can go to
Speaker 5: twenty six thousand layers, as Adan Nixon told me about.
Speaker 5: And this tether is incredibly strong. I mean, it's unbelievably strong.
Speaker 5: You need something that's capable of ninety gigapascals of tensil
Speaker 5: strength to do this, and this graphene has been tested
Speaker 5: up to one hundred and twenty gigapascals of strength, so
Speaker 5: it's very much capable of doing the job. The biggest
Speaker 5: drawback is that you have to it's a manufacturing drawback.
Speaker 5: You have to be able to make a tether one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand miles long with no breaks. So that's a
Speaker 5: little bit of a challenge.
Speaker 2: You know, Tracy, Like when I think about the fact
Speaker 2: that Homo erectus went one point five million years, just
Speaker 2: like making the hand eggs when and then you hear
Speaker 2: this and it's like whether it happens in our lifetime,
Speaker 2: our kids' lifetime, their kids' lifetime, that's nothing like in
Speaker 2: the Grand scheme of history like which lifetime in the
Speaker 2: next couple hundred years it happens and is like truly
Speaker 2: in your own to me, I see it too, but
Speaker 2: for our species it's truly an irrelevant rounding error exactly.
Speaker 2: And I do think, you know, if rope is so
Speaker 2: crucial to all of these breakthroughs and civilization being able
Speaker 2: to sail the seas, then naturally it probably is going
Speaker 2: to be an important technology for getting to other planets
Speaker 2: and so forth. Tim Quiney, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming on odd Law. Its fascinating conversation. I am now
Speaker 2: convinced by your books titled that rope is the back
Speaker 2: Phone and Civilization.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
Speaker 4: Tracy, that last point at the end.
Speaker 2: I have been thinking about this a lot, that like
Speaker 2: we're just getting started here, you know, We're like, we're
Speaker 2: the fifty thousand years of just making the most rudimentary
Speaker 2: rope out of twine, et cetera. Humans being able to
Speaker 2: produce rope at industrial scale it's like less than a
Speaker 2: minute in an Earth time, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 2: we're just getting started. And honestly, the idea that maybe
Speaker 2: in the next one thousand years, which is also nothing.
Speaker 2: By the way, that we might get into space with rope,
Speaker 2: it seems very plausible to me.
Speaker 3: Can I just say I got distracted because I searched
Speaker 3: for graphine? Oh yeah, someone's making graphene design earrings. They
Speaker 3: have the little like hexagonal stamp on them. It's kind
Speaker 3: of cool. Not actually made out of graphine.
Speaker 4: Oh like they the design.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the interlocking sigons that Tim was talking about. No,
Speaker 3: there is something about rope where we said this in
Speaker 3: the intro. But it's old, it's lyndy. But on the
Speaker 3: other hand, it's continuously being like perfected and applied to
Speaker 3: different uses. Right.
Speaker 2: That core intuition, which I had not thought about before,
Speaker 2: But that core intuition you wrap it around something, you
Speaker 2: take one strand and then you pull a chord in
Speaker 2: the direction perpendicular or whatever with the direction of the
Speaker 2: thing and it doesn't move. Is really powerful. Right, It's
Speaker 2: really simple, but it's also really powerful. And the idea
Speaker 2: that then, okay, the game is then to get even
Speaker 2: more advanced materials, to move past jute, you get to
Speaker 2: something synthetic, you go to steal, and then maybe to graphing.
Speaker 2: But that core simple fact that when you twist something
Speaker 2: around something, it becomes very durable. Is it pretty like
Speaker 2: powerful conceptual unlocked?
Speaker 3: Well, also it avoids the single point failure problem that
Speaker 3: you see in something like the Change. Yeah, but here's
Speaker 3: a question. If rope is the backbone of civilization and
Speaker 3: chords are the backbone of rope, then are chords the
Speaker 3: backbone of civilization? Like? How far don't I take this?
Speaker 2: This is this is the thing which is, and we
Speaker 2: just have to be humble. It's like civilization has many
Speaker 2: ant and uncles, you know what I'm saying, many many,
Speaker 2: many fathers and mothers.
Speaker 3: Coming up soon.
Speaker 2: No, but this is you're You're totally right, because like
Speaker 2: I could argue it's like, oh, whales are the you know,
Speaker 2: whale oil, but or but you couldn't get there without
Speaker 2: the whatever. It is like all of these things have
Speaker 2: various uh antecedents and then unlocks. Right, And so it's
Speaker 2: always sort of helpful to understand. I like the history
Speaker 2: of technology there. It makes me makes me appreciate everything
Speaker 2: a little bit more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess how iterative a lot of it
Speaker 3: tends to be.
Speaker 2: There was in the book he talks about how what
Speaker 2: was the movie with Tom Hanks and he's like on
Speaker 2: an island and he has.
Speaker 3: To cast away.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I guess he had to. He had to
Speaker 4: make some rope. I forgot. There's been a long time
Speaker 4: since I saw that eye. I feel like if I.
Speaker 2: Were on an island, that wouldn't occur to me like
Speaker 2: I would like, I wouldn't.
Speaker 3: You'd have a lot of time to think about it, Joe.
Speaker 4: I bet I would never get there.
Speaker 1: I do not.
Speaker 2: Oh, I should have twisted the fiber to make the book.
Speaker 2: I'd be like, how do you do? I bet like
Speaker 2: that wouldn't. Now have you read the book? Of course
Speaker 2: it's different. But had I not read the book, I
Speaker 2: think I would have been pretty screwed.
Speaker 3: I guess Robinson Crusoe has to be like your next
Speaker 3: big reader.
Speaker 4: I should read it.
Speaker 3: I should read Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 4: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Outhoughts podcast. I'm
Speaker 3: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe Watsenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Check out a rope. How a bundle of twisted fibers
Speaker 2: became the backbone of Civilization by our guest Tim Queeney.
Speaker 2: Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Carman armand dash Ol
Speaker 2: Bennett at Dashbot and Kell Brooks at Keil Brooks.
Speaker 4: And for more odd Lass.
Speaker 2: Content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots or
Speaker 2: of a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and
Speaker 2: you could chat about all of these topics twenty four
Speaker 2: seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash on and if.
Speaker 3: You enjoy all thoughts, if you like it when we
Speaker 3: talk about rope, then please leave us a positive review
Speaker 3: on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are
Speaker 3: a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our
Speaker 3: episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is
Speaker 3: find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the
Speaker 3: instructions there. Thanks for listening