Photos

I suppose I got roped into this (groan).


Seen on a visit to Liverpool to see the 'Tall ships'.


From Wikipedia.

The use of ropes for hunting, pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times and has always been essential to mankind's technological progress. It is likely that the earliest "ropes" were naturally occurring lengths of plant fiber, such as vines, followed soon by the first attempts at twisting and braiding these strands together to form the first proper ropes in the modern sense of the word.
Fossilised fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" were found in Lascaux cave, dating to approximately 17,000 BC.

The ancient Egyptians were probably the first civilization to develop special tools to make rope. Egyptian rope dates back to 4000 to 3500 B.C. and was generally made of water reed fibers.
Other rope in antiquity was made from the fibers of date palms, flax, grass, papyrus, leather, or animal hair.
The use of such ropes pulled by thousands of workers allowed the Egyptians to move the heavy stones required to build their monuments.
Starting from approximately 2800 B.C., rope made of hemp fibers was in use in China.
Rope and the craft of rope making spread throughout Asia, India, and Europe over the next several thousand years.

In the Middle Ages (from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth century), from the British Isles to Italy, ropes were constructed in so-called rope walks, very long buildings where strands the full length of the rope were spread out and then laid up or twisted together to form the rope.
The cable length was thus set by the length of the available rope walk.
This is related to the unit of length termed cable length. This allowed for long ropes of up to 300 yards long or longer to be made.
Short ropes are useless on tall ships which require ropes to be long, relatively uniform in diameter, and strong.
Short ropes would require splicing to make them long. The strongest form of splicing is the short splice, which doubles the diameter of the rope at the area of the splice. This would cause problems in the rigging hardware such as buckles and pulleys.

Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of a concept for a ropemaking machine, but just like many other of his inventions, they never got built.
Nevertheless, remarkable feats of construction were accomplished without advanced technology: In 1586, Domenico Fontana erected the 327 ton obelisk on Rome's Saint Peter's Square with a concerted effort of 900 men, 75 horses, and countless pulleys and meters of rope. By the late 1700s several working machines had been built and patented.

Rope continued to be made from natural fibers until the 1950s when synthetic fibers such as nylon became popular.