Tim Queeney

And the needs of something like a large sailing ship where you need to have some very long ropes, specifically the longest rope being the anchor road or the rope that you tie your anchor to so you can anchor in deep water, that had to be 742 feet long.

And so in order to make a 742-foot long, in the last part of the process of making rope, when you're putting the strands together, the rope actually gets shorter because you're twisting it.

But you have to start out with 1,000-foot-long strands that you're twisting together to make the final rope that ends up being 740 feet long.

So...

You need a huge building to do this.

And so these rope walks that were built in the various dockyards around the world, it wasn't just the British who were doing this.

They were built in the U.S.

and all maritime nations were doing this and even non-maritime nations because you need a rope for other things.

But these rope walks really were the thing that industrialized the process and allowed you to make very long, very big ropes.

Yeah, that's a great question because it actually was a strategic material.

There was something called naval stores.

The British called them naval stores, which was pitch from pine to use for waterproofing.

And then the actual pine trees themselves, the trunks to use for masts.

And then finally, the hemp that was used to make rope because most of the rope made during the Age of Sail was made from hemp fibers because it actually makes spectacularly good

rope, because you can grow these hemp plants very, very tall, and the fibers that you can strip out of them are very long.

And the longer the fiber, the stronger the rope is.

These were strategic materials that the Royal Navy, for example, was always looking towards its supply of these materials.

When the U.S.

was a colony of Great Britain,

The parliament actually passed a law that required or asked or prompted American farmers to grow hemp plants so the hemp fiber could be sent back to Britain for use in making rope.