Tim Queeney

And now you have your hull.

But the Egyptians actually did it in a completely different way and other cultures as well.

It wasn't just the Egyptians.

They actually stitched their boats together.

They took the planks and they cut these V-shaped grooves in the planks and they actually threaded rope through these V-shaped grooves to either end of the collection of planks and then tightened them up and then they had a hull.

And they would put...

ribs in after they'd stitched these boats together, but the ribs were there just in addition to the rope to hold the planks together.

So rope is absolutely essential for a boat even to float in that era.

So that's pretty amazing.

And as I said, it wasn't just the Egyptians, but also a lot of Arab boat building was done in a similar fashion with stitched boats.

But going back to the age of sail, they needed just tens of thousands of feet of rope to equip these vessels.

And as you point out, when you have that much rope required, it ceases to be a cottage industry and the whole process becomes industrialized.

And the people who really kicked this off were the British with their need to keep their large Royal Navy establishment going at all times and keep all these ships alive.

That hundreds of ships available to go to sea.

So they had a series of dockyards where they manufactured rope along with other things.

And some maritime historians say that it really was the Royal Navy that kicked off the Industrial Revolution because the whole process really needed to be industrialized to make all this rope.

I don't think that there's any one event like that.

It was kind of a continuous process, much like rope itself, that went from rope being made outdoors in these rope yards where they would twist the rope because you need a lot of space to do all this twisting, to an indoor activity because they no longer could take the time off for when it snowed and rained.

You needed to make rope every day to meet the needs, as I said, of something like the Royal Navy.

You needed to really produce rope on a massive scale.