Stuff You Should Know - Rope, yeah ROPE!

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Rope is one of the unsung heroes of the world of inventions. Think about it. Then let us tell you about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought. opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.

Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. 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. Yeah, I had this idea.

And this is one of those where it was a very distinct situation that made me think of it, which was on our trip to Nantucket when Emily and I went there for the first time, not too long ago. We did a sailing trip on kind of an old school boat, sailing boat. And they let me, I volunteered to help out. So I was hoisting sails and raising jibs and things. I don't know if that's proper terminology. And I had that rope in my hand. And I kind of looked at it, and it was the old school, you know, rope rope, not synthetic.

It was clearly made from natural fibers and it was braided and very thick and heavy. And I was like, man, rope. It's like, what a undersung invention. Had you taken mushrooms? 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 sliced bread or the toaster or whatever. But I doubt if you would get more than like a 10% unless you work in like a sailing industry or another industry that heavily relies on rope, I doubt if you would get a ton of people that said, yeah, rope, that's up there is one of the greatest inventions of all time. But it has touched so much of humanity and the forward progress of humanity. 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. Yeah. If you want to shoot a wild boar from 30 feet away, what are you going to shoot it with? You're going to shoot it with a bow that has a kind of rope.

And we 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 what sailing came around, that, you know, you think about, yeah, big deal. It helps sailing. But sailing is what helped discover the world.

Yeah, you've got to think of it. beyond the America's Cup. Yeah, for sure. 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. You can make it out of everything from synthetic fibers like jute or sysol. Sysol 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 it. But the point is that all of them follow essentially the same method of making a rope that if you strip away all of like the bells and whistles that you have today, they're putting this stuff together in the same way that people put it together from the very outset of rope making. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's the other thing that appealed to me was I was looking at this rope and saw the, like, an individual strand was frayed perhaps. And I saw how just like human hair like that was.

And I just love the idea that somebody was like, you know, this thing weak, but put all this together in it strong. Yeah. It's very clever. I never thought about it either. But the way that a rope is made strong and stable and all of that is because they're twisted and opposing, like the fibers are twisted. in opposing directions held to tension. And the impression I have is that you're actually storing somehow some energy or force in the rope when you start braiding it and twisting it under tension. Yeah, it creates something that has high torsional stability.

So it can hold its shape even though rope is moving around and being tied into knots and it's constantly twisting around. and getting pulled on. And, you know, it depends on what kind of rope you have. But, you know, if you see these, those giant ropes that they still use to tie in like a cruise ship or something. Yeah. I mean, it's still the same stuff. It's fascinating to me.

That's right. Let's talk specific jargon, baby. I love it. I'll let some jargon. All of this stuff is cordage, like we said. A cord is a rope that's 3.16th of an inch or less. That's right. Use metric. T.S. It's still a cord. You have to use inches for that.

That's right. A rope is a rope if it is above 3.16th of an inch. And then a cable is when you have several ropes that are twisted together. And these can be made from all kinds of things, like we said. Obviously, the organic fibers, you mentioned some. We also have hemp. You may have said hemp and cotton. We'll get into synthetics. When that came along, it was a real game changer because that provided a little stretch. So nylon and polyester and polypropylene, stuff like that. And then wire.

Wires usually steel. And, you know, we might call something like that a cable. But it's still the same concept. It's a kind of rope. A steel rope is basically a cable. Yeah. Wire rope is rope. A cable is a bunch of ropes.

You can make it out of Sisol if you wanted to, a cable. Sure. And then a bunch of cables twisted together is called a super duper rope. Right. That's right. Good jargon. So let's keep going. Let's talk jargon in as far as construction goes. You said you can braid ropes. You can also twist them. I'd never thought about this. And I watched two videos. One is it was a how it's made video. God bless how it's made. That's a good one.

If you ever run into a written or verbal explanation or something where you're like, what? Go find the how it's made version and you'll see it with your own eyes. They've always done a great job. There's a lot, in fact, there's a lot of good rope-making videos online. I watched like three or four others. They're mesmerizing. They kind of are. There's another one we found called How Do They Braide Rope?

And it's from the National Film Board of Canada, the Boards of Canada. And it doesn't even have narration. The only soundtrack is the factory sounds. Like, that really is mesmerizing. And so you see the two different ways rope is made. And the first how it's made one uses Twist, which is a chemistry. conventional rope. And as I was saying, when I started talking, I never realized that most ropes I've ever seen in my life are twisted. I always just assume they were braided. And that was just wrong, wrong, wrong. Yeah. And when you look at them up close, though, you can definitely see the difference between a braid and a twist. I love a twisted rope. This is when you have twisted strands that are counter twisting around each other. Usually it's three strands, and that's called a Halzer laid twist. But you can also have a four-strander. which is shroud laid, and that's, if you've ever had a rope,

and then you've seen at the end of the rope a little guy right in the center of it running through the core, that's the fourth strand. It's like a little core at the center of it all. And that is the shroud laid. Yes, and we should say another piece of jargon. You don't make rope or produce rope or anything like that. You lay rope. That's right, just like you lay a cable.

Oh, yeah, I never thought about that. I thought that meant like actually putting it down, but yeah, no, totally. So what about the braid? The braid is something to see. Watching a braided rope being created is amazing because there's all these little spools during this amazing like ballroom dance with one another. It's really cool. Yeah.

But braiding is where you take a bunch of strands and you braids, well, you braid them together into an interlocking structure. usually it has a core and the core can be twisted and have like a braided shell around it and when you're braiding stuff you can use way more strands than you can usually with a twisted rope.

Yeah and they're generally a little stronger and more pliable than a twisted rope but I like a good old school rope. I do too. A good natural fiber rope that you can't even get your thumb and fingers to touch because it's so thick that's amazing.

Agreed. They've been using rope for probably hundreds of thousands of years. Part of the problem with specifically dating rope is that the early ropes were obviously organic

in their nature and their fibers. And so that stuff's not going to stick around forever. We do have some, you know, kind of cool evidence like 34,000 years ago in the Republic of Georgia

where they saw flax fibers embedded in clay. And so that was like, all right, it's embedded in clay, where it's sort of preserved, and these were twisted and knotted up. So clearly people were using rope back then, but there's other evidence of older stuff, too, right? Yeah, this is like implicit evidence.

It's not direct, like finding an actual piece of cordage. This is, like, where they found a weaving tool, 40,000 years old in Germany. It's made of ivory. And essentially, it was designed to keep the strands separate when braiding or twisting the rope together, which is still a technique that's used today. Yeah.

And then also they found beads, stone and shell beads, that start appearing in the prehistoric record 300,000 years back. And, I mean, try to wear a bead around your neck without some sort of cordage. You can't do it. No, those puka shells are just falling all over the floor. Yeah. I mean, maybe you could hold one under your chin between your chin and your neck, but who wants to walk around like that? Just use a cord. That's right.

The idea for all of this probably came from early on when they use roots and vines for stuff like this. And, you know, I've got my camp up in the North Georgia Mountains. There are some trees that have a, like a vine hanging down that, like, it might as well be just nature's rope. Yeah, for sure. What is that? I know exactly what you're talking about, but I've never stopped and wondered what it was. I guess it's a vine. Sure.

Like it can't be a root if it's coming down like from up top, right? Yeah, I didn't know if you knew what kind of vine it was. No, I don't know what kind of vine it is, but you know, you can sometimes you can like swing on that stuff if it's attached. But be careful. I mean, I guess that's what Tarzan used in the old movies, right? Yeah, he wasn't carrying around rope and slaying it over tree branches. No. The other thing about rope is that it seems to have been developed pretty much universally, like every,

group, including ones that were never in contact with one another, figured out how to make rope on their own. Yeah. And then they just used whatever local types of fiber was available. Like in North America, indigenous people used sinew, like tendons of, say, deer. I saw red deer sinew rope making video. Yeah, or hair. Yeah, hair.

Papyrus in Reed and Egypt. Coconut fiber and bamboo and south. East Asia. Like essentially you're like, okay, can you make fibers out of this? Yes. Well, then you can make a rope out of it too. Yeah.

And, you know, like we mentioned stuff like, you know, to string a bow, obviously, but also making netting to catch fish, shelter to weave together, you know, rope to help like lift up a heavy frame of a hut or something. Mm-hmm. Hauling stuff, lashing things together. And this is one I didn't really think of,

but early bridges were, made of rope. Yeah, if you want to get from here to there and you can't do it, one of the earliest things you could do is build a rope bridge.

I would just not have gone across. I'd be like, oh, well, or I'd have to go around. But there was a Herodotus wrote in his histories about Xerxes, the first army in the second Persian war. I failed to look where this,

like when this took place, but this was ancient Greece, obviously. But they apparently bridged something like a kilometer wide straight using rope and their ships to basically stretch the rope and then put boards over these two or three rope

strands that were going all the way across the street to go invade grease. Yeah, good use of rope. So rope is being used for a ton of things for many thousands of years. Then all of a sudden, around 3,500 BC, sailing became a thing. Yeah.

And all of a sudden it was on. Everyone was like, all right, rope is the key to all of this happening. Can't raise a sail without rope. Can't tie up a can't moor a ship or can't anchor a ship without rope. So it's key to what we're doing. And, you know, people sailed around for a little while. But then the 15th century rolls around and the age of discovery starts unfolding. And all of a sudden, if you were a nation that was really good at sailing,

you could, and they did, you could go around the world and start claiming places as your own. Yes, and so rope became a really hot commodity during the age of discovery or the age of colonialism, I guess. Yeah. There was another industry that came along after, say, like the navies of the world had started sailing, and that was the whaling industry.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The whaling industry needed way. more rope than a typical like, you know, battleship or cutter needed. Because in addition to all the ropes that like your typical sailing vessel needs, they also needed lots and lots of rope, strong rope, to connect to the harpoon that they would harpoon a whale with and then drag the whale around with them for the rest of the time they were at sea. And there was a, I guess in Moby Dick, still haven't read it yet. Melville talks about how the rope was.

was coiled so precisely by like a professional rope layer in the bow of the boat, this rope that was connected to the harpoon, because if there was any kind of like kink or loop or something in it, it would just take your arm clean off. Like if you got your arm caught in this thing and a whale was rushing away with a harpoon in it, it would, your arm was just gone. Yeah. And you know what? I'm remembering now, too, this was another reason for rope because in Nantucket, they had the whaling. Museum there. Oh, yeah. And so I went to the Whaling Museum, which I thought was super interesting. And I've never been more close than reading Moby Dick. Like, I'm right there.

I'm just, I'm working on a book right now. The next horror book coming out soon from Keith Rosson, the guy who I've been reading lately, is called Crone. By the way, it's great. But Moby Dick is right there. And the thing that really pushed me over the edge is I just saw that Rob Delaney, you know, the actor and comedian Rob Delaney, he's got a podcast. out now called Exploring the Greats that I haven't listened to yet,

but he and a professor named Hester Bloom are doing Moby Dick one chapter at a time. Awesome. And I love Rob Delaney. I was like, you know what? I think everything in life is telling me to finally read Moby Dick and maybe listen to this podcast as I go along and be a good way to do it. Okay. Do it.

So I'm right. As soon as I finish Keith Rosson's book, I'm going to think I'm going to dive into Moby Dick. You can do it, man. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right, we're going to take a break, and we're going to talk about how rope is made right after this. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches,

there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94. month, price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear. saying shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up.

Without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out of. Alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community. of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you between the pages. So, Chuck, like we were saying, that ivory weaving tool 40,000 years ago in Germany, it's essentially like, it's still definitely a part of how rope making was made. traditionally and then still today. But there is essentially, if you were making a rope, say, pre-20th century, you were following essentially four steps. You have to prepare the fibers. You spin those fibers into yarn.

You twist the yarn into strands and then you twist the strands into rope. Because like I was saying before, a rope is actually just increasingly large ropes twisted or braided together. Yeah. And when we say yarn, that's a, term that you might think of as twine. If you like bought it in a store, we're not talking about crafting yarn. No, but it counts. Yeah, for sure, but maybe think twine. And we'll go over these steps. We're not going to get like super, super in the weeds because we've learned that, you know,

trying to describe a, like a process, a factory process with just your mouth is the easiest thing to do. It's hard. So I would encourage everyone to go look up a rope walk on YouTube. And like we said, There are a bunch of different videos. Just pick one of them. And if that doesn't fancy, that isn't your fancy. Isn't your fancy? Cat fancy. I love your remark is just to shout out cat fancy.

If that one's not your liking, then there will no doubt be another one. But we're talking about like up until the 1700s, they used something called a rope walk, which was a configuration of machines at opposite ends of a long space. Sometimes it was an open field, sometimes it was a big, huge open, like, barn. But you had a flaming tarpit nearby, which we'll see why in a minute. Maybe you had a water wheel helping out, but it was generally human-powered. And it needed to be long because they were making long ropes. And in order to make a long rope, you just have to walk this thing down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet until it's twisted up.

Yep. I mean, that's essentially that. And you have to start with fiber. And again, whatever local fiber you had works. But you need fiber to spin yarn. And yarn is step two. Fibers you have to prepare, you do all sorts of things to them. Like you beat them, you soak them.

You call them names. And then once they dry out, you run them through like giant combs. You pull them through combs to basically individuate them, right? Yeah. Then you start spinning those fibers into yarn. Now you're in the rope making. this. For sure. So you've got a spinning wheel at this point. You've got a person with a bundle of fibers coiled around their waist. It's hooked to a spindle and then they just very slowly walk

backward feeding those fibers in until you get to the end of the rope walk. And then you have your yarn. But in order to make that yarn into the strand, you got to soak that in tar, ring it through a roller. And then you've got like a usable yarn or twine that you've got. You you roll around a, or wind around a big bobbin. Yes. And now that you have yarn, which is essentially to think of it as a bunch of really, really thin ropes, right? Mm-hmm.

Now that you have your yarn, you've got your first component of rope. Now you take the yarn and you twist it or you braid it into strands, right? So you take a bunch of different lines of yarn. You pull it through a tube, which smooths the fibers, compacts it, right? And then you also have it under tension. You want it to be tense. And again, a machine basically pulls it down the length of this rope walk, which are really long. I don't know if you said or not.

Some of them are like 1,000 feet long. Right? Yeah. Depends on how long you need your rope. Sure. Yeah. And then there's a forming machine that essentially separates the yarn. And on the other side of the forming machine is whatever machine they use to twist or braid it.

And then as you just keep walking backward, that more and more. yarn gets turned into rope where it all comes together at the center and it's twisted or braided, you get to the other end, now you have a strand. You do that a bunch of times, then you have the components you need to make a rope. That's right, and you're going to twist those strands into rope. Three or four of those strands are going to stretch between a couple of twisting machines, and they have, again, you've got to really look this thing up because all of this is possible, of course, because of two other key inventions, the wheel and the gear. Yeah. Because it's, you know, it looks like a sort of like a little horse cart moving very slowly backwards.

So that's on wheels. And then you had these gears moving in different directions that's making a thing that all these strands are tied to goes in a circle. So it just starts twisting it. And you got to have this other thing, though. Man, I forgot about the cone. Yeah. front, it would be a triangle. But it just runs through those, I guess, cutouts from the cone to kind of keep everything from getting, like, twisted in a bad way. Yeah. So on the, on the back

side of that cone, which is called the laying top, it's keeping all those strands separated. On the front side of it, that's where the strands are being brought together and twisted into the rope, right? And again, you just walk backwards. You pull, you pull those strands through that processor that twists them into rope. And once you reach the end of the rope walk, you've got a huge, long length of rope that you cut and you say presto. That's tradition in rope making. You have to shout presto when the rope is finished. Yeah, it's really neat, though. Like when you look at this big, like, rack of bobbins with like maybe dozens of, I guess, yarns feeding through this little donut-like tube to make a strand. And then that,

that all being twisted together with another, you know, these are machines, but it's like the most basic machines you can have. It's a gear, you know, twisting a thing in a circle. So it's like, it's just, I love the really ingenious lo-fi stuff like this. Yeah, for sure. That's what that, how it's made video features is a old rope walk. Apparently, one of the oldest ones that's still around is in the Sweden City of Carl's Krona. It's from the 18th century. It's like a a thousand feet long, 300 meters, and it's Sweden's longest building. Oh, wow. Which makes sense.

I mean, there's probably not a lot of buildings that are 1,000 feet wide in Sweden. Probably just the... No, never mind. Bad joke. That's going to say the Toblerone factory. That's Switzerland, though, isn't it? Oh, that would... That was great, Chuck.

I love that. There was a problem with this early rope up until about the end of the 18th century. And that was, you were pulling these strands. through and they were all the same length when they were twisted together. The problem is, is that meant that the stuff on the outside was under higher tension than the stuff on the inside because they were all the same length. Yeah. Don't look too deeply into it.

Just trust me, that's what happened, right? Never thought about it. So that meant that these ropes were more likely to fray and crack and in turn break and that you needed a really thick, heavy rope to make up for that. And then this captain for the East India Company came along. His name was Joseph Hutter, Captain Joseph Hutter. And at the end of the 18th century, he created the forming plate, which is still very much in use today. And it is so simple, and it makes so much sense that I would love to just explain it real quick.

Are you okay with that? Please. The forming plate is a disc, flat disk, and there's a bunch of concentric circles drilled into it made out of individual holes. the fibers go through each of those holes and then they all come together at a center point where they're twisted or braided, right? Well, because the fibers going through the holes that make up the outer circles

have to technically travel further to that center point because they're being bowed out, they have to go far out and then in, that means that the fibers used in the outside of the rope are longer than the fibers on the inside of the rope, of the rope, which means that they're all under equal tension when the rope is finished. And so basically, Joseph Hutter made it quite possible for much narrower, lighter ropes to do the job of heavier ropes because they resisted fraying and breaking because of the different

lengths of fiber used in them. Again, ingenious. Joseph Hutter seems like one of those guys. My brother is kind of one of these guys. And I have a good friend named John Wolf, who is one of these. guys, just really smart people that when presented with a, almost like a mechanical problem like this, their brains can just see it in a way and say, well, why don't you just do this? And that, I think Joseph Hutter might have been one of those guys where he's like, well, you should

just do this. Yeah, I think you're exactly right, because it's that, it's that basic. Yeah. But it solves the problem so elegantly. It's beautiful. Yeah. But you've got to have a certain kind of brain to think that way, and I don't. Absolutely.

I'd be like, I still don't understand why the outer edges are fraying you when they're all the same length. A quick example is I have a system at my camp where it draws water out of the creek and there's a propane hot water heater so we can have like hot water in a sink. Awesome. For washing dishes. And it wasn't, it was too long of a pull at one point. And the motor, I guess, was getting weaker and it wasn't pulling far enough.

And I was like, I don't know what to do, man. This thing won't pull. I wonder if they have a bigger one. and John Wolf was there and he's like, yeah, I ought to just get, like when I worked for Coke years ago and we had really long lines,

we would just put another pump in the middle, so it would just get to that point and then that pump would pump it to the other pump. He said, you should do that. And I was like, that is so simple. That's either something like Ruby tells me

or that you tell me because I would never been able to figure that dumb thing out. That's awesome. Yeah, that kind of brain I just really admire. Did you do it? Oh, yeah. And it worked? It worked like a charm.

You should see the flow. That's awesome. That's funny. John Wolf always works how he used to work for Coke into every conversation. Oh, man. You know Wolf. So is it break time yet, or are we still going? No, let's take a break.

Okay. We're taking a break, everybody. Just watch us. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.

Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted. shocked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. Yeah. I'm obsessed. So I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can

hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is of true. Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. All right.

So we've covered up through the 1700s, told everyone how rope is made. When it comes to the 1800s and the industrial revolution starts happening, all of a sudden we have steam-powered machines. And so rope is evolving at the same time and, like, how it's used and applications and stuff like that. So you need, like, better rope, bigger rope, longer rope, stronger rope. And all of a sudden, with steam power, you could do that. And, you know, it's basically the same way you're just using,

like, kind of like everything with the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, you could just do it on a much bigger scale using machinery. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like the Industrial Revolution, changed the demands that were put on rope, and that at the same time, it changed the ways that rope could be made to satisfy those demands. Pretty cool. Good point.

And it all comes down to steam power. One of the cool things about making rope with steam power, with an automated factory, even like this is early 19th century, you need rope because they would use rope that ran through the whole factory around like a central steam engine. We've talked about this before, and I don't remember what it was in. Maybe diesel generator? I don't remember. But that main engine spun, it moved the rope, and the rope ran around and moved these individual machines.

It's one long, continuous thing of rope. It's like the idiom says you need rope to make rope. Yeah. It's a good idiom. I think so, too. I don't know what it means, but it sounds like it. Well, they also had innovations in textiles at the time, so they were kind of co-opting some of that. stuff to make better ropes. Like one example I guess is they were able to shrink a lot of

stuff to much smaller things. So the spinning jenny that used to be this you know mammoth machine all of a sudden you could fit in a room and because it's in a room and you didn't have this like 2,000 foot rope walk you could like fully enclose that and you could make rope year round and it could be heated and you could hire women to work in there because they already had experience working in textile so now they could help make rope. So, yeah, the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution essentially, well, revolutionized how rope is made, even though it's still using the same technique. It's just now the work is being done more and more by machines, right? Well, that's Industrial Revolution at its core.

But it didn't really kind of change the types of rope that were being produced as much. One thing that did come out of the 19th century was wire rope. That was a brand new thing that the Germans gave us in the 1830s because they needed it for their mining industry. And now all of a sudden, you could build bigger and bigger ships and make them out of metal because you didn't need to use fiber rope any longer. You could use metal rope, which people call cable. But again, it's still just wire rope.

That's right. And things stayed humming along pretty great until the 1900s came along. And all of a sudden, in the 20th century, we had synthetics upon us. So nylon was the next, like, real big game changer when it was introduced by the DuPont Chemical Company in 1939 as toothbrush bristles when people are like, hey, if you make these super long

and they're not just for toothbrushes, we can make this into rope, and I think it'll be stronger, I think it'll be stretchier. Yep. And within a couple of years, you know, World War II definitely helped when they had blocked, like, using raw materials for rope making.

So that's when nylon really had a chance to shine. Yeah, and then shortly after that, polypropylene and polyester followed, too. And so synthetics were basically everybody was like better living through chemistry in the second half of the 20th century, and that certainly applied to rope making too. And it's still around today. I mean, like synthetics are, you can find both natural fiber rope and synthetic rope as well. But just because of the kind of operations that you see in modern rope making facilities and factories, it'd be almost weird to see somebody make a fiber rope in one of the modern factories.

Like synthetic nylon and other kinds of material ropes just make sense. Yeah, for sure. And the process is really similar because you're still physically doing the same thing. But in this case, you're starting out instead of, you know, like long fibers that you're running through a steel comb, you're starting out with pellets that came from processed crude oil, like little rice-sized pellets of like, you know, nylon, let's say. And then you've got to melt those down in an extruder and push it through like smaller and smaller nozzles until you get down to the diameter of a hair, let's say. And then you have this long filament. and, you know, you have to put it in a cooling bath, and so it holds a shape and stuff like that.

You stretch it out some on some rollers. Apparently the stretching causes the polymer chains to align, which is really going to strengthen it. But after that, aside from having to treat it a little differently, it's kind of the same process as an old ropewalk and then a factory as far as twisting this stuff together. Exactly, except that these are done by machines that can spin at like 1,000 RPMs as they're twisting these things.

It can make rope super fast. They do that with yarn and then onto strands and then onto rope. And yeah, it's essentially the same stuff. Again, back to that 40,000-year-old ivory weaving tool. But once you have the rope made, then it kind of jumps back into the modern era because you have to do things with nylon rope

that you don't have to do with fiber rope, which is like you have to heat set it with steam. That helps keep those. polymers locked in that same direction. They test them. I'm sure they do this with modern fiber ropes, too, but they stretch them. They jump on them.

They beat them up. They do all sorts of stuff. And they have sensors that detect what's going on within the rope. And then once the rope passes some sort of certification, its maximum operating capacities are stamped on the label, and it's coiled up and sold. Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about a few specific.

kinds of rope because it gets, depending on what you need to do, you might need a rope that's like stretchier or, I don't know, stiffer, let's say. So if you want to talk about shock cord, that is bungee cord. Yeah. And that is, you know, I've never bungee jumped, but I did learn at one point that a bungee cord was just a lot of rubber bands twisted into a rope. And I don't know if that made me feel better or worse about the whole process? Well, yeah, so this is, it's silicone to begin with silicone rubber, and it's vulcanized, and usually they're made of 16 different strands, and then that's just the core. There's a synthetic fiber shell that goes around the cord.

Yeah. And, yeah, I think shock cords are pretty, pretty reliable for the most part. Yeah. They apparently stretch to about 130% of their original length, and then bend and snatch back, to their original length again without being mauled. Without breaking? Sure, or without losing their elasticity. Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's what I mean. Well, eventually they do over time, though, I guess, because just using regular bungee cords around the house, like old old ones aren't as stretchy as they used to be. Good point. And you probably want to go bungee jump at a place that's reputable enough that they're not overusing their bungee cords. Agreed.

Great point. You've also got SpotCord, and that is not super strong or anything, but it has a high resistance to snags. And the cool thing about SpotCord, it's a cotton rope that's braided. And it's been produced by the Samson Cordage Company for about 150 years. Yeah. And if you go to like a big box hardware store or something and you just get like a little 50-foot small, thin rope, it's probably a spot cord. Yeah, they feel real nice because they're cotton. Yeah.

If you've ever used the clothes line that's not wire. Yeah, there you go. It's probably a spot cord. Yeah. Do you've ever tied up your neighbor to a chair? Yeah. Probably using spot cord if you're not into the duct tape thing. And came into the room saying, well, well, well, look how the tables have turned.

That's right. I hope that comes across as a joke. I know I'm sure that's real world violence. Or although you could just be tying them to a chair to make them watch The Simpsons or something. Let's say that's what I was talking about. Okay. And then another special rope, and these are very special ropes, by the way, it's the lariat. And lariat is the correct term for what a lot of people call lassoes.

But I looked it up, Chuck. Lassow is a verb, and it's what you do with a lariat, which is a noun. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You lasso a horse or something? Yes, exactly. And you and I both have our own lariots. Do you remember Kathy with the K and Phoenix gave them to us at the Phoenix? Matthew, I thought it was Denver, but was it Phoenix?

Phoenix. Okay, yeah, I still have mine. It's hanging up at the camp. Yeah, I can't tell you how many steer I've wrestled with mine already. These are traditionally made with horsehair or rawhide. Today, they're usually braided with nylon or polyester maybe. But the key to this thing is that it's stiff. Like I said, sometimes you might need a stiff rope.

So, you know, if you've never used to or tried to lasso something, you might be surprised to know. that it's a, you know, it's stiff. It's very stiff. Super stiff. And it barely fits in your suitcase from Phoenix back home to Atlanta. I know. We managed it, though. Yeah, the way they work, though, is a Honda knot,

which slides up and down the rigid rope or stiff rope very easily. So when you get it around a steershorns, you pull it and the loop closes, but it doesn't close mid-air on your way, on its way to the steershorns like it would if you made it out of a spot cord. That's right. There's also, we can't not talk about climbing ropes, Chuck. Yeah, that's what keeps you alive if you're into repelling and rock climbing.

Yep. They used to be made out of plant fibers before nylon, just like any other rope that we're talking about, of course. But, you know, if you've seen an action movie from the old days and that rope is being, you know, wearing against that rock at the top of a cliff. Yeah. And it starts going, doing, dying, doing, doing. And you're worried about your action hero, then you need to go to a nylon rope because one of the important things about a nylon rope

is not going to fray as much, like, in the movie. And also, if you fall, it's going to be a little stretchier. Right. So in the old days, if you fell, like, off of Everest in the old days with a fiber rope, like the entire force of falling is just stops in an instant because there's zero stretch, and that's no good.

No, that produces rope trauma. Ha ha ha. Very nice. It can cut you just clean in half. That's what I've heard. So with climbing ropes in particular, there's a special type of rope construction that's used called the Kern Mantle Construction. And it refers to the Kern, the core, like a kernel. And that's made of nylon rope.

And then there's a mantle, the shell, that is made of braided nylon that protects the internal nylon rope. So the internal kern rope is load bearing. The outer shell rope protects that internal load bearing one. But because they're both so strong, if one failed, the other would be able to keep you dangling. And they're stretchy enough that rope trauma is brought to almost nil the possibility of it when you fall off of a cliff wearing a Kern Mantle rope. That's right. They came around in 19 and 53. Yep, the odds.

And I guess that's kind of it on rope, right? That's it. One thing that struck me, I could not find an answer for it, is that in the United States alone, in 2025, $3.5 billion worth of rope was sold. Pretty impressive. But they're projecting it to increase to $6 billion in less than 10 years. By 2033, I could not find why. What do we need more rope for? I don't know.

Maybe Gen Z is going to find. finally discover rope in 233? I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to think of how like a data center uses rope or something that's like something really like growing fast right now. Oh, yeah. I guess maybe if you include fiber optic cable. Oh, maybe. A fiber optic rope, I should say, in that that might account for it. Good call on. Well, that's it for rope, everybody, which means it's time for listener mail. This goes back to the Voice of God, Dan LaFontaine, the famous movie trailer guy in a world.

Don? We did a, what did I say, Dan? No, that was his brother. He should have heard his voice. Hey, guys. Don LaFontaine. I think we did a shorty on him. Wasn't it a shorty?

Yeah, Voice of God. So, hey, guys, been meeting to write for a while. And when I heard this short stuff, I was like, bam, now I have to write. because my father was a sound editor in New York City and worked on movie trailers. The sound mixes for them in recording the voiceovers. He met many actors over the years and also Don LaFontaine,

who became a good friend of our family. When my younger brother Travis was born in 1971, Don became his godfather even. My mother loved Don and always said he was such a neat guy and fun, and they spent some time partying with him back in the day. I have some old pictures of Don and my parents, those little square ones with the rounded off corners

where everything looks like shades of brown and orange and yellow. You know the ones, guys. If I can lay my hands on one, I'll attach it, which did not happen, by the way. No. But I'd be tickled to death if you selected my email to be read on the air. Like, you have no idea, L-O-L. You can even edit down, and I won't mind.

Smiley face. Yours, both of you, truly. That is from Tegwin-Alan Stockdale, or the nickname Teg. What a name. That is a great name. Agreed. Well, thanks a lot, Teglin Allen Stockdale. I don't think I would ever say your name other than to use all three.

Agreed. Oh, great. If you want to be like Teglin Allen Stockdale and email us with a great story about something we talked about, we love that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I survived nine months in captivity,

and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and

prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride

on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility.

Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.