BY: Tim Queeney (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)
Review by Bob Glenn, Editor and Publisher
When I took over this publication in 2016, I began taking note of everyplace you find wire rope, constantly pointing it out to my high school age daughters – and if you really look, it’s everywhere. They feigned irritation, but now they send me pictures whenever they find it someplace a little unexpected. They have no idea how much more intense it would have been had I focused on cordage more generally!
Wire rope is just one small part of the vastly broader world of rope products. In this recently published book, author Tim Queeney takes on the topic of cordage in a sweeping survey from its invention – hard to trace as the natural fibers from which it was made disintegrate quickly – to its future.
The book is structured in three Parts broken into multiple Strands or chapters. Fibers from the Earth includes nine Strands that span from ancient times through the Age of Sail. Beyond Plants include four Strands that introduce synthetics and steel, and the final Roping in the Future follows cordage into space.
The author states his case quite succinctly in the Introduction, writing that “The ingenuity and invention of the earliest human minds gave us a tool with which we made the world.”
He goes on to build a case that rope or cordage in any sense is a fundamental human invention close behind mastery of fire and stone tools. Fire freed ancient man from working only by daylight and cooks nutritious protein. Stone tools provide better methods of cutting wood and killing prey. Some rudimentary form of cordage – twisting strands of some manner of thready material together to enhance its strength and durability – provides a way of lashing a rock to a stick, greatly enhancing its utility.
Any manner of ancient cordage would have been made of organic material which would be expected to have long since reverted to compost. The author traces the oldest known specimen of cordage to the Abri du Maras site in the southeast of France. There, researchers found preserved examples of three-strand cordage where each strand consists of a set of fibers twisted in one direction, and then the strands are twisted together in the opposite direction. These samples were dated to 50,000 years ago.
The author provides a great deal of discussion around this finding informed by speaking directly with Kenyon College anthropologist Dr. Bruce Hardy, who conducted the examination of these early rope discoveries. This is a persistent feature of the book – Mr. Queeney has conducted a vast number of first-person interviews to colorfully inform almost every aspect of the subject matter that he shares here. There is also an extensive Bibliography and a large array of footnotes to key specific material to those sources. This is a well informed and we believe well written book.
In subsequent chapters of the Fibers from the Earth part of the book, the writer explores uses of rope in ancient Egypt. Rope was essential for Egyptian boat building – it was critical to their craft’s structural integrity lacking fasteners or adhesives. A good example of boat from this era has been discovered so their methods there are well-understood. While rope was no doubt an essential tool for building the pyramids as well, the method by which that was accomplished remain highly debated among experts.
He covers a range of other users and application for rope derived from organic material. These chapters span range from the construction of Stonehenge – concurrent with the pyramids, but with no certainty as the nature of ropes used in transporting and erecting the various stones – to the building of enormous cathedrals across Europe during the Middle Ages. He traces the early development of the lifting crane from a simple windlass (a shaduf depicted in Egyptian wall painting from 1300 BC) to a treadwheels of various sizes, some still found in roof spaces of cathedrals.
Rope has served mankind in myriad ways. The book details how rope enabled explorers to venture from home in many parts of the world, played a crucial role in obtaining seafood over many eras, and served essential functions in crime and punishment from flogging to the noose. It even serves to support a form of language, known as khipu. Essentially, a khipu is a length of rope which may be made of varying materials, with varying colors, varying arrangements and types of knots.
The khipu is most closely associated with the empire of the Inca, which at its peak from 1438 to 1533 stretched from Ecuador to Chile and Argentina encompassing 770,000 square miles. Khipu were a critical part of their communication and record-keeping, but no method of translation exists. Some scholars believe they were strictly numerical records, while others believe they convey narrative descriptions. Interestingly, they only use three kinds of knot – a figure 8, an overhand, or a long knot – and the number of loops included in a long knot can vary.
In our mind, the two chapters in the first part of the book that live at the heart of the matter deal with the Age of Sail, and the industrialization of ropemaking.
Rope is as essential as wind to sailing – you have to harness the wind and rope is required for any method of doing so. The advent of the square rigger, a ship with multiple masts, each carrying multiple square sails, produced an explosive demand for rope. You not only have to hoist and control each of those sails through what is known as running rigging, you have to ensure that your masts are stood firm in their attachment and orientation to the vessel through standing rigging. That become more critical as mast heights necessitated their assembly from multiple elements – exceeding the height of readily available tree.
By the 1800’s, the scale of sailing vessels became immense. The USS Pennsylvania was the largest U.S. sailing warship ever built. Commissioned in 1837, the three-deck, 130 gun-rated vessel would be expected to put to sea with 159,000 feet of ropes of various fibers and uses according a source cited by the author. That’s more than 30 miles!
Given that level of demand, the industrial revolution could not possibly happen fast enough for ropemakers. While tools emerged in the 1700’s, ropemaking took place in ropewalks where rope, increasingly made primarily from hemp, was laid out, twisted and tarred (for water resistance) in what the author characterizes as a smelly and dangerous process. In fact, he recounts a disastrous Boston fire in 1794 that destroyed seven ropewalks (including all of their stock and material) and a total of 95 structures. What machinery the process included was powered by humans, animals, or in a few cases water. You might think of this as trade craftsmanship – that’s our term, not that of the author.
The chapter or Strand on mechanization, dubbed “Cashing In”, traces the history of the Plymouth Cordage Company as an exemplar of the times. The business was founded in 1824 with $20,000 in capital, using a traditional ropewalk of the time. That’s more than $6 Million in today’s dollars, making the firm well capitalized but hardly massive. Over the course of the 19th century the company built multiple mills on it’s 45 acre waterfront site in Massachusetts. They brought in raw material by sea, and after 1845 gained rail access for inbound material and outbound production.
Less than a century after its founding, in 1916 the company had completely mechanized the ropemaking process. It nonetheless employed 2,000 people as the world’s largest ropemaker. It had 370,000 square feet dedicated to warehousing its raw material inputs. The author quotes the company’s 1916 book The Story of Rope where it describes having completely changed production “from a laborious task – dependent for its success on the skill of the individual expert – into quick, sure operations where every problem is met with the unfailing accuracy of a perfect machine.” Steam tubes replaced open pits of tar for treating ropes, and spinning machines operating at 1,500 rpm were fed mechanically rather than directly by operators.
In the Part 2 – Beyond Plants, the author serves up chapters detailing the development of steel wire rope and synthetic rope, much more familiar subjects to our readers. On wire rope, he provides a good account of William Albert’s early wire rope, tested in the mines of Germany’s Harz Mountains. He includes comments from Roland Verreet to get perspective on Albert’s rope design, which had three strands wrapped around a fourth.
Naturally, he recounts a good history of Roebling, and also the development of cable-powered urban rail systems which were on the verge of becoming widespread when power from overhead electric lines largely replaced them.
The author gives an excellent account of the development of synthetic fiber which I will not attempt to summarize for you here. He reaches out to first-person sources once again here, adding comments and insight from John Flory (co-founder of Tension Technology International) and David Petruska (“an expert on deep water moorings based in Houston”) and additional material for the aforementioned Roland Verreet.
The second part of the book goes on to explore use of rope in the entertainment industry and for outdoor adventure (climbing and caving).
In the third and final part of the book Roping in the Future, the author takes two looks at the future or rope. In the first, he covers the challenges of landing on Mars, in particular for the mission to deliver the Mars rover Curiosity, which would be NASA’s heaviest rover to land on Mars. This Strand explores the use of cordage to manage the parachute used to slow the descent, and the “skycrane” used to soften the landing. He notes with irony that while the rope is remarkably more sophisticated, it’s perhaps the only thing on the lander that would be of a recognizable purpose to a Neanderthal man!
He concludes with an exploration of the concept of a space elevator as a theoretical means of more efficiently placing matter into orbit. A key to making this feasible at some future date will be development of graphene super laminate (GSL), which can yield amazingly strong structures in a very thin sheet. This would yield something that while conceptually related, would not be recognizable as “rope”.
My only challenge in reading this book was following the author’s narrative descriptions of certain physical structures or systems, such as tying a specific knot. As a visual learner, I do much better being shown than told. Some of these are illustrated elsewhere in the book, others are not. I suspect our engineering-oriented readership will not share that challenge.
Apart from that, the narrative structure of this book is deeply engaging and enjoyable. Highly recommended!