Tim Queeney

Reasons why it works is because if you lose one strand, if one strand breaks, the entire rope doesn't fail.

It has a very easy failure mode where it takes multiple strands to break for the wire rope to fail.

So it was very useful in that industrial setting

And there was another German engineer who emigrated to the US and his name was John Roebling.

And he actually read, there's actually a piece that William Albert wrote in a journal, an industrial journal that John Roebling read and became very interested in making his own wire rope, which he started doing.

And his wire rope was superior.

And in the 1840s, and he started a business of making wire rope.

And then he got into designing suspension bridges.

Of course, he and his son, Washington Roebling, were responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge, all made up with wire rope.

Space elevator.

Yeah, it's great.

Whenever I give a talk, I always ask, how many people here have ever heard of a space elevator?

And never more than a quarter of them raise their hands.

I'm surprised.

I thought more people knew about it.

But it's actually a physics idea that goes back to the 19th century.

The idea being that any point on the equator of the Earth is moving at 900 miles an hour.

If you were to attach a tether to the Earth, and then you were to extend that tether out into space with a weight on the end, 100,000 kilometers out, then what would happen would be, of course, it'd be the same as if you took a piece of rope.

like this, and I attached a rock on the end of the rope, and I twirled around in a circle, what would happen to the rope?

The rope would go really tight, as it was preventing that rock from flying away.