My book on the history and development of rope as one of mankind’s earliest and most useful tools is coming from St. Martin’s Press this August 12. But don’t wait, you can preorder it today so you don’t miss a day of reading the best nonfiction book of the century (I might be biased). Even if you can’t tie a single knot you’ll love this story of human ingenuity, industry and, sadly, sometimes cruelty too. Click here to preorder.
A big guitar at the entrance to Paracho de Verduzco, Michoacán, Mexico. Kevin Read/Wikipedia
In Mexico, the settlement of Paracho de Verduzco is guitar town. And just as in centuries past, rope is still used as a tool in assembling the higher-end handmade instruments.
The town has several guitar manufacturers and custom makers. According to Laura Fraser writing in Craftsmanship magazine, almost everyone in town is connected to the craft of guitar making.
“Today, locals estimate that 90% of the people who work in Paracho make guitars or guitar parts (the population is about 35,000), producing some one million instruments per year.”
While most of that one million number are mass produced guitars, some of the instruments are high-end models crafted by highly skilled luthiers (guitar makers are called luthiers from the French luth for lute). And they make use of cordage to impart a uniform compressive force on the bodies as opposed to the use of clamps.
Miguel Huipe is a Paracho luthier who makes guitars for use in flamenco music. To keep the body in proper alignment while the glue is drying he employs the traditional approach of tying the body of the guitar with cordage in an intricate pattern proven by years of practice.
A flamenco guitar made by Miguel Huipe. Andrew Sullivan photo. www.andrewsullivanphoto.com
And Mexico doesn’t just make traditional acoustic guitars. In the 1980s the Fender guitar company began making some of its signature telecaster and stratocaster models at a factory in Ensenada on the Pacific coast south of Tijuana. Those are solid body electric guitars manufactured from a single slab of wood, however, so the company eschews the use of rope!
It was great fun to meet host Willa Paskin and producer Evan Chung and be a guest on the Slate.com podcast “Decoder Ring.” Paskin and Chung’s idea for this episode was to look at books that describe history and society through the lens of a single object — which, of course, in my case was rope! Give it a listen and follow “Decoder Ring” — a great pod for curious people.
@StMartinsPress #ropebook
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoder-ring/id1376577202?i=1000700830640
Archeological site in Niah Cave on the island of Borneo. Azreey/Wikipedia
The story of human civilization is tied to rope! According to a paper published in the Journal of Archeological Science recent archeological finds in the Philippines and Indonesia suggest that Southeast Asian people were far more advanced in boatbuilding, offshore fishing and voyaging than previously thought and much of their expertise was based on their use of rope. These societies appear to have had more advanced technology 40,000 years ago than those in Africa and Europe, which previously were considered the leaders in these techniques.
The study found evidence of plant fiber usage and the “extraction of fibers necessary for making ropes, nets, and bindings essential for boatbuilding and open-sea fishing.” These people apparently used rope not only for fishing nets and tackle but also structurally for lashing together their boats. In my book Rope I write about the amazing seafaring and navigation skills of Austronesian people in settling the Pacific islands and how rope was an essential tool in that great ocean voyaging effort. You can preorder the book here.
Okay, that’s a pretty weak way to draw you in with a silly pun that uses the title of my book Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. But it could have been worse. I could have written Get Twisted! (so many ways to do that! But this is a family blog) or Get Bundled! (maybe not so intriguing) or Get a Backbone, dammit! (yeah, stand up for yourself!) Or even Get Civilization! but that might send you off to buy the latest version of Sid Meier’s Civilization game — which is a great game but that was hardly the point I was trying to make.
Maybe the best thing at this point is to just provide you with the info that you can enter to get a giveaway copy of Rope by clicking on this link.
Now I’ll just sidle away inconspicuously.
Big Rock (or Orotok in the native Blackfoot language) is a massive glacial erratic eight kilometers (five miles) west of Orotoks, Alberta in Canada. Coaxial/English Wikipedia
Rope Ends – bits and pieces on cordage. In my upcoming book Rope, I write about the use of cordage to move big hunks of rock for little construction projects like the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in southern England. One theory has it that bluestones used at Stonehenge were glacial erratics — large boulders pushed by glaciers during the Ice Age that when the ice melted were left behind amidst the different local rock (the glacially-moved rock has to be different from the local rock to make it an erratic. For example, the 400-ton Yeager Rock on the Waterville Plateau in Washington is not a true erratic since it is of the same type as the rock surrounding it).
When it comes to moving rock, glacial power is mind bending — the largest known erratic is a megablock in Saskatchewan with dimensions of 18 miles by 23 miles, or more than 400 square miles of bedrock carried or pushed along by an advancing ice sheet. This little stone chip is 100 meters or 330 feet thick in places.
Stonehenge in 2007. Old Moonraker/Wikipedia
When 2,000-foot thick glaciers moved southward to cover the British Isles, the ice sheets pushed one or two ton rocks like they were grains of sand. Some scientists say the bluestones from Wales were transported south to the Salisbury Plain and deposited there when the glaciers retreated. The builders of Stonehenge took advantage of the bluestone lying at their feet. Of course, even if this theory is true, the bluestones weren’t all left at Stonehenge’s doorstep. They would still need to have been dragged some miles to the building site, likely on wooden sledges with long ropes to allow for plenty of workers to put their backs into it.
Apple Computer, that firm highly protective of its intellectual property (IP), didn’t always follow the rules when it came to other folks IP rights. On January 24, 1984 Apple Computer started selling the original Macintosh computer, which had, unbelievably, a mere 128k of RAM.
Apple introduced the computer with a highly produced commercial directed by film director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, etc.). The commercial ran during Super Bowl XVIII and was called “1984” and referenced George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name. The one minute spot was shot for more than $300,000. Scott incorporated local British skinheads to play the part of the shuffling drones, which visually echoed Fritz Lang’s SciFi masterpiece Metropolis.
The ad was only broadcast on network TV once. One reason for that may have been attorney & producer Marvin Rosenblum. He owned the film and TV rights to the novel, which he had purchased from Orwell’s widow, Sonia. After seeing the ad, he sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action if the ad were to run again. Rosenblum went on to executive produce director Michael Radford’s film of 1984, starring John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton & Richard Burton. The film had its own controversy when Virgin Films replaced parts of the Dominic Muldowney’s original orchestral score with songs from the group The Eurythmics. #Apple #1984 #SuperbowlAds #intellectualpropertyrights #IP #1984AppleAd #RidleyScott #JohnHurt #RichardBurton #MichaelRadford #TheEurythmics #dystopianfilms #dystopianmovies #scifimovies
The Elizabethan poet Sir Edmund Spenser
On January 13, 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser died in London. Spenser, who was famous for his poem “The Faerie Queen” that celebrated the Elizabethan era and for frequent poetic subjects of love and beauty, had a less beautiful side. He served in Ireland and was said to have been present at the massacre of Italian and Spanish soldiers who had surrendered to the English following the Siege of Smerwick in 1580. Sir Walter Raleigh, who led the beheadings, was later charged with the crime when he fell out of favor with Queen Elizabeth. For that and other charges Raleigh himself was beheaded in 1618.
An 1860s illustration imagining the beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618.
Later, in 1596, Spenser later wrote a controversial treatise on English rule in Ireland that called for the eradication of all Irish laws, customs and the Irish language to pacify the island and forestall further Irish rebellions. Spenser called for a scorched earth policy to deprive “carrion-eating” rebels of sustenance and their ability to live off the land. The tract was never published in Spenser’s lifetime.
It was ultimately printed in 1633 by Anglo-Irish historian James Ware. In 1936 British writer C.S. Lewis, who was born and spent his early boyhood in Northern Ireland, harshly criticized the poet, writing that Spenser was corrupted by the “wickedness” of the Elizabeth policy in Ireland.
#SirEdmundSpenser #Elizabeth I #ElizabethanEra #SirWalterRaleigh #England #Ireland #SmerwickMassacre #IrishRebellion #EthnicCleansing #massacre #SecondDesmondRebellion
OTD in 1785 the first airmail letter was delivered – by gas balloon. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American Dr. John Jeffries climbed aboard the gondola of their balloon and ascended from Dover Castle before heading out over the English Channel. Unlike hot air balloons, this balloon was filled with lighter than air hydrogen as the method for providing lift.
First hydrogen balloon flight in Paris December 1783
The balloon was weighted down with what proved to be useless items like a hand-operated propeller and even silk-covered oars for rowing the balloon forward. Losing altitude over the water, they were forced to throw all of it overboard – including Blanchard’s trousers – to stay aloft. They managed to cross the beach at Calais to mark the first air crossing of the Channel.
And when over French soil Jeffries dropped a letter to the ground below, marking the first delivery of mail by an airborne vehicle. Air mail! A monument to Blanchard & Jeffries’ achievement was put up at Guines where they safely landed.
Column at Guines put up by order of Louis XVI to commemorate the first Channel crossing via balloon.
Every day more than 1,000 jet airliners cross the Atlantic on scheduled flights. Before the advent of this air bridge, however, the usual way to travel across the sea was via ocean liner. These swift passenger ships vied for the Blue Riband honor, which was accorded to the ship making the fastest average speed while crossing between Europe and North America. The ship that still holds the Blue Riband is SS United States which captured the honor in 1952 driven by the work of a naval engineer named Elaine Kaplan who designed the ship’s four propellers.
Naval engineer Elaine Kaplan at a luncheon with Frederic H. Gibbs aboard United States. Image courtesy SS United States Conservancy.
Kaplan was an undergraduate mathematics major at Hunter College in Manhattan when she began working for Gibbs & Cox naval architects in New York City. The Second World War was underway and Kaplan with her meticulous math ability was involved in the design of USN battleships and aircraft carriers. After graduation she worked at the naval architecture firm full time and her responsibilities rose quickly due to her excellent skills in designing naval propulsion systems. When Gibbs & Cox was awarded the contract to design the fast new ocean liner that was to became SS United States, Kaplan was tasked with a major role in devising propulsion for the ship.
One of the problems that naval architects must solve with high-speed propellers is the phenomenon of cavitation. As propellor blades move through the water, if they are not designed properly, they can cause pressure differences that lead to the formation of bubbles. These bubbles reduce the efficiency of the propellor, produce harmful vibration and can actually damage the metal prop blades when the bubbles collapse. Since United States was planned as a fast ship with four big props, Kaplan had to design around this issue.
The solution was brilliant in its simplicity. Instead of trying to make all four props the same configuration, she realized that the ship could use four-bladed props for the two outboard propellors and employ five-bladed props for the two closest to the ship’s centerline where the waterflow was more turbulent and bubble formation more likely. Kaplan also worked hard to design the pitch angle of the blades to further reduce cavitation. Kaplan’s efforts allowed United States to secure the Blue Riband honor establishing a record never broken by another liner.