Rope, yeah ROPE!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

**Josh Clark** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And we're going to rope you into interest in ropes. In this episode, Stuff You Should Know on ropes.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:25)
Yeah, I had this idea, and this is one of those where it was a very distinct situation that made me think of it, which was on our trip to Nantucket, when Emily and I went there for the first time, not too long ago. We did a sailing trip on a kind of an old school boat, sailing boat, and they let me, I volunteered to help out. So I was hoisting sails and raising jibs and things. I don't know if that's proper terminology.
And I had that rope in my hand, and I kind of looked at it, and it was the old school, you know, rope, rope, not synthetic. It was clearly made from natural fibers, and it was braided and very thick and heavy. And I was like, man, rope. It's like, what a, what a undersung invention.

**Josh Clark** (1:11)
Had you taken mushrooms?

**Chuck Bryant** (1:13)
No, not at all.
Well, maybe a microdose. But it was definitely one of those moments where I was like, what an undersung invention. Like if you pulled 100 people, you would get lots of wheels or maybe gears or fire or slice bread or the toaster or whatever. But like, I doubt if you would get more than like a 10 percent, unless you work in like a sailing industry or another industry that heavily relies on rope, I doubt if you would get a ton of people that said, yeah, rope, that's up there as one of the greatest inventions of all time. But it has touched so much of humanity and the forward progress of humanity.

**Josh Clark** (1:51)
Yeah, I mean, you make a great point. I hadn't thought about it either. I probably would not have said rope.
But Julie helps us with this, I think. And I mean, like, if you want to till some like really hard ground to try to grow crops in it, try to do that with an ox and a plow, but no rope, sucker.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:13)
Yeah. If you want to shoot a wild boar from 30 feet away, what are you going to shoot it with? Are you going to shoot it with a bow that has a kind of rope? And we should point out that what we're talking about is cordage, so any kind of bundled fiber that's braided together.
That's all sort of a kind of rope. We wouldn't have had musical instruments. We wouldn't have had undersea cabling to make the Internet possible.
And then once sailing came around, that, you know, you think about, yeah, big deal, it helps sailing, but sailing is what helped discover the world.

**Josh Clark** (2:50)
Yeah, you gotta think of it beyond the America's Cup.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:53)
Yeah, for sure.

**Josh Clark** (2:56)
So, like you said, let's talk about rope. Let's get into it, shall we? Let's do it. I learned a lot in this. And like you said, rope is a type of cordage. Not all cordage is rope. Rope is essentially made of different types of smaller ropes bundled together. Like you said, braided, you can also twist them, and you can make it out of everything from synthetic fibers like jute or sisal. Sisal comes from the agave plant. Did you know that? I did. Oh, I didn't.
And you can make it out of wire. A little bit. You can make it out of wire.
There's all sorts of stuff you can make it out of, but the point is that all of them follow essentially the same method of making a rope that if you strip away all of the bells and whistles that you have today, they're putting this stuff together in the same way that people put it together from the very outset of rope making.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:50)
Yeah. And I think that's the other thing that appealed to me, was I was looking at this rope and saw an individual strand was frayed, perhaps.
And I saw how just human hair like that was. And I just loved the idea that somebody was like, you know, this thing weak, but put all this together and it's strong.

**Josh Clark** (4:09)
Yeah. It's very clever. And I never thought about it either, but the way that rope is made strong and stable and all of that is because they're twisted in opposing, like the fibers are twisted in opposing directions held to tension.