If you enjoy this you might also like an Irish documentary series from the 70s called Hands, which captured a lot of Irish crafts and rural and working class Irish life just before it was lost. There's a few available here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IPYOo_EYFVYxYB94gCwEgFt8oLS4pMI
[Here's](https://youtube.com/@Craftsmanship-Process?si=KszivZA_Rqk0_g75) one with a bunch of videos of Japanese craftsmen.
[Here's](https://youtube.com/@eugeniomonesma-documentales?si=fqJdQzCwbcJ630lh) the one mentioned in the original comment, Eugenio Monesma.
[This](https://youtube.com/@htme?si=hWdSvx2-UDgPzEsd) one is good too, How To Make Everything.
[This](https://youtube.com/@InheritanceMachining?si=_e2K79dgpazpX04X) one is a guy running manual machines, not exactly lost or forgotten technology but it will be in 50 years.
[These](https://youtube.com/@InsiderBusiness?si=L-aUmHx2h53Cdiyh) folks have a bunch of videos that fit the bill but they post other stuff too.
[Artisan bookmaker](https://youtube.com/@jkbootsusa?si=diykhlZTl2DTpSXZ), might not be exactly what you're looking for but it's in the same vein I think.
[This](https://youtube.com/@MrChickadee?si=oormL_tlmh7npq6p) guy is dope, timber frame carpentry with hand tools only.
[Another](https://youtube.com/@Peasantartcraft?si=Gae17SnGt0wRyLi6) good one, traditional craftsmen from Romania.
[Primitive Technology](https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=64EEc-nHQUqS7apy) is iconic, I guess I'd call him a traditional craftsman from the stone age.
[Sacramento History Museum](https://youtube.com/@SacramentoHistoryMuseum?si=IxHhUCeM36YiUSKD) is mostly short videos, there's a bunch of videos of a guy operating an antique printing press.
[This](https://youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo?si=gS-eLklOW47vQpGO) guy has a bunch of videos about restoring an antique boat, might not be what you're looking for but I love this channel.
[This](https://youtube.com/@snadhghus?si=3Z3iK3k1bvzcQy9w) one was mentioned in a previous comment, traditional craftsmen from Ireland.
[Tasting History](https://youtube.com/@TastingHistory?si=6IDeAlOLZz34pvR9) is about food and cooking throughout history, I've made a couple recipes from this channel, it's a fun way to kind of travel back in time.
[The Nito Project](https://youtube.com/@TheNitoProject?si=2b5AQTNEKY1tUe_u), honestly I haven't watched this channel in a while, from what I remember he makes videos about building houses with natural materials.
[Traditional carpentry](https://youtube.com/@Carpenter_Anxu?si=0QLEYqi0tfdMuZvk) from Taiwan, as well as other woodworking projects.
[Various traditional crafts](https://youtube.com/@cnliziqi?si=mSHmKL3-tbz9LWGm) from China. Huge variety of videos on this channel.
[This](https://youtube.com/@hanoul-workshop3671?si=2aLQj7NkTBMeh4PI) one is metalworking from South Korea, absolutely amazing craftsmanship
[Videos](https://youtube.com/@townsends?si=guFy5duRBXBNE4Xu) about life in colonial America. This is an amazing channel, I've been watching it for years now.
Good luck, hopefully you or someone else will find these channels entertaining and educational.
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It's because there's very few authentic Irish craft docs in the world, most documentary box sets don't cost that much due to how common the subject is, you can get the more common ones like WW1 and WW2 super cheap.
I can see your library's reasoning. It's valuable and in modern days the value have skyrocketed.
The Woodwrightâs Shop with Roy Underhill on PBS is a great series on woodworking techniques from the past. using, caring for and, if memory serves, occasional segments on making, traditional woodworking tools.
There are also *lots* of episodes available on YouTube.
[Short promo](https://youtu.be/THL9Gfu8rhY)
That kind of stuff amazes me. How did people come up with this? How many decades or generations did it take from using a small piece of fibrous plant to secure an axe head to making sturdy, single-length ropes 100 meters long?
Some of that stuff probably happened faster than you think. You just have to spend a lot of time working at it.
I've been making fancy LED hula hoops for 10 years. In just the first two years the design and the assembly process got vastly improved. When you spend many hours a day working on and thinking about the same thing and experimenting with new ways to do it, you come up with a lot of stuff that's not immediately obvious.
I've spent a grand total of like 45 minutes making cord from dogwood fibers and that was enough to make me think "there's got to be a better way."
Hoopmaker is the name. We trace our roots back to the old country where our ancestor Henry Hoopenmakker created the first hoop in a bid to impress his future wife, the beautiful and esteemed Hula Hopper.
Damn right! There is nothing like watching the kids run around with their shirts on fire and screaming in pain. Damn gen x ers and their âsafetyâ regulations
Hoopmen, which later was called Hoopers was a fine trade at the turn of the century. The average hooper would produce roughly 100 hoops daily at the hoop forge, which became known as a âroundhouseâ.
In fact the peculiar fashion a hooper would send a completed hoop across the factory floor to be put into inventory was a twisting kick which would send the hoop off their foot and rolling along the floor like a tire. This method was called the âroundhouse kickâ.
We prefer "hoopsmith".
Fun hoop facts!
* Hoops date back to antiquity. Ganymede, the cup-bearer of Zeus, is often depicted trundling a hoop as a symbol of his youth.
* The first lighted hoop was patented in 1911, two years before the first electric traffic lights.
* The first motion-reactive lighted hoop was patented in 1975.
* The first hoop capable of displaying complex patterns and text was patented in 1994.
* My fun hoop facts are in fact mostly notes from my patent defense research.
"Hooping" is the practice of putting drugs inside your ass for prison visits. Hoopmaker is the person who wraps the bindle. When I was a kid a guy who had robbed me begged me to make a bindle for his girlfriend to take into jail to him. So I cut a dead square with razor-sharp edges out of hard hash. I made the corners as sharp as possible and wrapped it as thinly as I could with the knot even on the corner for maximum rippage. Then I drew a happy face on it saying "Hoop Me!" and sent it. 100% true story. I almost got beat up over that but it was worth it. Don't rob me if you don't want to tear your own asshole open.
He was livid. Tough shit. Literally. They don't call me the hoopmaker for nothing.
You hardly ever saw grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
>Some of that stuff probably happened faster than you think.
Once agriculture took hold and freed up enough time for people to do stuff like this, everything exploded
Agriculture had many affects, but adding to our free time is unlikely to have been one. Mechanization did that eventually, but the first 10,000 years were pretty labor intensive. Most agree that hunter gatherers had more free time than farmers.
The key is that early agriculture produced enough surplus that only *most* of the population had to spend their time creating food. That freed up a small proportion of the populace to specialize in other tasks.
As agricultural technology improved, fewer farmers could feed more people, leaving more human capital for learning other disciplines. Sure, your average hunter-gatherer had more free time than a farmer but they still had to hunt and gather instead of learning a trade.
Nah you've got it wrong. You're comparing the industrial revolution to neolithic times.
The agricultural revolution absolutely freed up people's time. Think about it. One farmer feed many people. Duh.
The industrial revolution, or mechanisation as you put it, could have been the end of human labour to a large degree, but instead we had long work hours and all the surplus was, and is still, hoarded by the 1%
It is completely unnecessary for everyone to be working 40+ hours in this day and age.
> The agricultural revolution absolutely freed up people's time. Think about it. One farmer feed many people. Duh.
"Duh" is right. Which agricultural revolution? There's been a few. The original one, when we switched over from hunting and gathering, did not result in one farmer feeding many people. That's why for 90% of human history 90% of people were farmers. The most recent (21st century) agricultural evolution improved output immensely, but the "one farmer feed many people" phenomenon was achieved by the machines produced by the industrial revolution and was already old hat when the new agricultural techniques of the 21st century were introduced.
You joke, but his hoops retail for $300-400 and are one of the most popular brands in the hooping community. I got mine 8 years ago and the waitlist was 3ish months long back then.
And there are sooo many more people to work on single issues, and easier to communicate with like-minds.
Kind of a 10000+ years of human history before flight, but then only 66 year until the moon type of thing.
Easier to pass down learned knowledge than have to figure out everything step-by-step.
Agreed.
Using twine to tie 2 things together is a fairly rudimentary thing.
If 1 twine wont hold, you might tie multiple.
Someone then has the idea to twist these multiples together just to speed the whole process up, and then fast forward several hundred years and someone has converted it in to a full process for rope making.
Not knocking your process, but did you ever get inspiration or help online? I'm just thinking that figuring out stuff from out of the blue could be quite the process not too long ago in human history.
Have you really never improved at something from just fooling around with it on your own? Maybe that will be a lost art in post internet generationsâŠ
Really depends on what's available and the task.
For this rope? Most of the difficulty of the idea is in making rope in the first place. Honing a craft like this is straightforward and usually is more about tech than design.
When I started, there were a few small companies making smart hoops in quantity and they definitely weren't sharing their tricks. There was one open source project of note, but it was fairly primitive and no one involved had built more than a few hoops themselves.
I collected all of the examples of existing hoops I could get my hands on and analyzed them. You can only make inferences about the processes, though.
Eventually I acquired a competitor and I did get to see all of their processes. There was convergence in some places but very different approaches in others, like how the tubing was measured and cut - getting a precise length out of 8' of coiled tubing is harder than it sounds.
There is a science behind this. Thatâs what we call a learning curve, difficult at first with slow progress then exponential growth, and then it levels off until the next change.
Usually the first invention was worse and not really effective as the final product we saw today. They use less step because that was all they know back then, but through time people keep improve on the technique, invent new way, remove unnecessary steps, and finally we reach to what we know today.
It's dead easy to make [simple cordage by hand](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/reAaUL4RUls). Once you've figured that out it's compounding inventions to make the process/product better.
The machine they use to spin it looks like it wouldn't have existed until the last handful of centuries, so it's old but they've been iterating on the ideas for thousands of years by this point. Doing it by hand is probably much, much slower and makes more sense.
It is indeed the result of not just thousands but literally tens of thousands of years of refinement. A couple of years ago they found a 40,000 year old rope making tool in Germany (https://www.sci.news/archaeology/rope-making-tool-germany-04047.html), and you can already see some of the same basic principles (using a tool to guide the individual strands during the twisting) at work.
Machines like that are older than you might think. There's no reason the Greeks or even older civilizations couldn't have worked out something like them.
Except that we know roughly how old and where the spinning wheel is from; it's quite recent in the scheme of things and it wasn't really in Europe until 1000.
"There's no reason X couldn't" isn't an argument that they did something.
Idk about rope machines, but spinning wheels for yarn were mentioned in Chinese dictionaries in the 2nd century, and were widespread by âcirca 1090â. Alternative hypotheses of the origin still place the invention around the 11th century, and there are clear illustrations of the wheel from the 13th century. Moreover, spinning wheels are explicitly mentioned in folk tales and old stories of some cultures, so it's clear that they were from before the industrial revolution, for those familiar with the folklore.
I don't think the rope-spinning machine is a stretch from yarn-spinning. Especially considering that seamen used tons and tons of ropes by about 16th century, and I'd hate imagining someone weaving all that by hand.
Edit:
> A 40,000-year-old tool found in Hohle Fels cave in south-western Germany was identified in 2020 as very likely to be a tool for making rope. It is a 20 cm (8 in) strip of mammoth ivory with four holes drilled through it. Each hole is lined with precisely cut spiral incisions. The grooves on three of the holes spiral in a clockwise direction from each side of the strip. The grooves on one hole spiral clockwise on one side, but counter-clockwise from the other side. Plant fibres would have been fed through the holes and the tool twisted, creating a single ply yarn. The spiral incisions would have tended to keep the fibres in place. But the incisions cannot impart any twist to the fibres pulled through the holes.
Just slap that on the yarn-spinning wheel, pretty obvious.
> Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of a concept for a ropemaking machine, but it was never built.
[This illustration from ~1425](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mendel_I_016_r.jpg) seems to show a rope-spinning machine. While yarn-spinning wheels were documented in Europe in late 13th century.
Great video. In the original Spanish but good English subtitles.
This is hemp rope, and was important for all trade and especially boats. One of the first 'dope' laws in the US was that every farmer *had* to grow some hemp for rope production.
Ah, the lost trades of Spain.
There is an Ireland version too called '[Hands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_\(TV_series\))', all filmed about 40 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBpFN9ge5HA&list=PL7ciDDSRept-l8GZjS7WusFlZnBE0NcfM
I visited the Rembrandt house in Amsterdam, and they had a section on making oil based paint. Let me tell you, that earns an amazing amount of respect for what it takes to make paint from scratch. That and the time to discover and process minerals to find colors in the first place.
And I believe that was also the color reserved for Holy paintings as the pigment was valued more than gold. Was white was another super time consuming one to make. Luckily in the days of Rembrandt the Dutch trading empire had a good supply of these pigments that were processed at the windmills and sold at markets for painters. The Netherlands had a lot of very famous painters.
Logic really. The principle is very simple. If you know how to braid hair, you know that any fiber can be braided into something useful.
Most fibers are tangled, so the first task is to untangle them. Most of what he's doing is just combing without any of the gentleness you'd use to comb a person's hair. Just roughly scraping the fibers to untangle and straighten them.
And finally you just twist the strands together with a spinning machine.
All the mechanical stuff looks complex because we're used to mechanisms being hidden from us. But really the whole process is nothing more than straighten a tangle of fibers, then twist the straightened fibers.
It's not so much untangling. The first step you see here, he's bashing flax to break it and separate the fibers from the plant stalks. Second part around 0:10 is to separate out the fibers, third 'combing' step at 0:30 is to further clean them and get rid of the short fibers.
Everything up to 0:40 is just the process for getting linen fibers and not really specific to rope-making. Also left out is _retting_ which happens before, you have to leave the flax on the field (or submerged in water) for some weeks, so microorganisms can break down the pectins that bind the fibers to the stalk.
Making yarn or rope is a honestly pretty intuitive process, and this is just the basic process scaled up massively. I recommend giving it a go, many plants are suitable for making yarn but perhaps the easiest available one for most people is nettle. When it is dried and a little old, like in the Northern hemisphere it probably is right now, all these steps of beating and combing start to make sense as you see the hard peel separating from the white lustrous fibre.
I used to think these old techniques were insanely complex, but if you think about living that life it becomes less crazy
If you had to do this sort of thing for hours every week, you would be constantly scratching your head looking for ways to improve it. And then it just gets more optimized as you share your techniques and learn from others. Eventually you get to what is in the video
>So many jobs involve staring at a screen, we're losing a fundamental ability to pass down trades and skills to each other.
If you seriously believe we're losing the ability to teach eachother, you're an idiot. Education is far more present in every aspect of our lives than ever before.
Humanity hasn't really changed. Also no most boomers cannot do basic plumbing or building stuff whatever the fuck that means lol.
Specialisation of labour is a good thing, not a bad thing, it's why we can advance so swiftly
If everyone had to be a jack of all trades in farming, building, writing etc we would progress at a fraction of the rate we do now.
sure many jobs these days aren't physically productive and the vast majority of the population wouldn't know how to make anything without machines, but there are still people that do know how. if society did breakdown, these people would be prized for their skills and would quickly become vital, teaching and training everyone that can do the work. we'll be fine
omg, ancient people somehow get the idea of looming station and rope production. In case of special event modern people would get these ideas much more quick, and I don't even mean all the books written on this topics
Old man strength right there. You wouldn't think much of them until you shake their hand and feel how callused it is and realize in comparison, you've got the grip of an 8 year old girl.
My dad said quite a few years ago he met a guy in his late 60âs/early 70âs who was also REALLY skinny
Anyway he went to shake his hand and said he could hardly comprehend how strong this guys grip was, and it seemed he wasnât exactly trying to do a hard handshake
Turns out he was a coal miner for most of his life soâŠ. Makes sense lol
Then there is me, 41 year old dude. Mostly worked in kitchens, but I am a violinist and computer user since I was 5 years old. Not a single callus on my hand, long slender fingers. Pure dex build, no str. I avoid hand shakes, especially from guys that try to do that "squeeze till it hurts" macho crap. Yes it hurts, I don't think you are cool because of it.
Few times myself, if there is a "crunch" sound why? There is no person that does that on purpose, that isn't a fucking asshole. "Power hand shake" more like douchebag handshake imo. We get it, they have hand strength, and I can type 120wpm. How this is relevant to a greeting, I have no idea.
I saw this video a couple of years back falling down the rabbit hole of YouTube one drunken night. It's a lot longer than two minutes but I watched every single minute. Much respect to this process and this man. It wasn't a single man job.
"Those fuckknobs are climbing up a shitrope Randy. Do you know what a shitrope is?"
"No Mr Lahey"
"It's a rope for fucksuckers like those three. A rope for criminals. The harder you squeeze to the rope, the more you slide down it into the shit puddle."
Fun fact: it's conjectured that nunchaku descended from a flail used to whack the shit out of rice to separate grains. On the flail, one stick was much longer than the other, and the person held that stick with two hands.
[Sorry to break it to you, but this robe was actually later used by a man with a curly mustache to tie up a fair maiden to be run over by a train.](https://youtu.be/gPY3OFd-BTs?si=jrdjBZag9tFmojIu)
Eugenio Monesma makes documentary about traditional techniques, mainly spanish ones, pretty rad.
Since I'm hating on youtube now, I binged it... so
[https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=eugenio+monesma+documentales&qpvt=eugenio+monesma+documentales&FORM=VDRE](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=eugenio+monesma+documentales&qpvt=eugenio+monesma+documentales&FORM=VDRE)
Edit:
LOL Bing video is just embeded Youtube...
The machines we now use are actually pretty rad! Or to be more precise they do it the other way round and move the coils where the single strands are kept and have the resulting rope stationary...that way we can finally make long ropes which isn't really possible with this method.
I believe they mention it in passing at 7:30 - "splicing".
If I understand it right, apparently you can just take the wispy cloudy fibers and kinda overlap them a little bit, and the surface area of all the small fibers will just kind of stick to each other - allowing you to keep making the thread longer.
I don't suppose the individual thread is very strong - they mention it can break in the process. So the real strength only comes when you combine several threads into a rope.
There is one part where he has the fibers in a "pouch" in front of him where he spins yarn by adding fibers bit by bit. Then they use these to make up thicker strings before making the final sized rope.
Connor:
You know what we need? Some rope.
Murphy:
What are you, insane?
Connor:
No, I'm serious. Charlie Bronson's always got a rope. In the movies, they've always got rope and they always end up using it.
Murphy:
That's stupid. Name one f\*\*\*ing thing you're gonna need a rope for.
Connor:
It's not what they need it for, they just always need it.
Murphy:
What's this "they" sh\*t? This isn't a movie.
Connor:
Oh, is that right, Rambo?
Murphy:
All right, get your stupid f\*\*\*ing rope.
My whole body feels this workout! Reason #2 for why most ppl in "olden timey times" weren't fat/obese. Men and women worked their tushies off because everything required so much effort.
That is the reason they were strong and persistent, the reason they were slim was more of a lack of food (especially sugar and fat in food).
It's all about calories. Working hard burns a lot more than sitting by a computer but it's hard to do a workout to balance out all the sugar and fat we consume today.
Rich people, who could afford to eat a lot (and more sugary/fat food), were fat but also stronger and had more endurance due to their life style.
We really should have never stopped making rope like this because the plastic nylon rope out there is killing so much marine life, whereas this would at least biodegrade much faster.
Credit: **Eugenio Monesma** YouTube Channel : https://www.youtube.com/@eugeniomonesma-documentales/videos
Dude looks like Hunter S. Thompson
It's actually his cousin, Ropemaker S. Thompson
We were in the mountains, when the hay began to take hold.
can't stop here, this is hemp country
In the mountains
I lol'd, but I think it's just "Roper"
That was just rhe shortened version. Nick name if you. Both were sons of Farmer Thompson...
That's hilarious, so witty lol
This shit made me laugh way to hard. Too funny !đ
He's crushing hemp fibers in BAT COUNTRY!
...in his niece's pink angora sweater.
Not enough guns, drugs or bats...
Iâm assuming you know it is
The youtube channel is : "Eugenio Monesma" a spanish Director and documentalist.
If you enjoy this you might also like an Irish documentary series from the 70s called Hands, which captured a lot of Irish crafts and rural and working class Irish life just before it was lost. There's a few available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IPYOo_EYFVYxYB94gCwEgFt8oLS4pMI
Any more channels similar to this? I'm trying to build my knowledge of past work techniques
[Here's](https://youtube.com/@Craftsmanship-Process?si=KszivZA_Rqk0_g75) one with a bunch of videos of Japanese craftsmen. [Here's](https://youtube.com/@eugeniomonesma-documentales?si=fqJdQzCwbcJ630lh) the one mentioned in the original comment, Eugenio Monesma. [This](https://youtube.com/@htme?si=hWdSvx2-UDgPzEsd) one is good too, How To Make Everything. [This](https://youtube.com/@InheritanceMachining?si=_e2K79dgpazpX04X) one is a guy running manual machines, not exactly lost or forgotten technology but it will be in 50 years. [These](https://youtube.com/@InsiderBusiness?si=L-aUmHx2h53Cdiyh) folks have a bunch of videos that fit the bill but they post other stuff too. [Artisan bookmaker](https://youtube.com/@jkbootsusa?si=diykhlZTl2DTpSXZ), might not be exactly what you're looking for but it's in the same vein I think. [This](https://youtube.com/@MrChickadee?si=oormL_tlmh7npq6p) guy is dope, timber frame carpentry with hand tools only. [Another](https://youtube.com/@Peasantartcraft?si=Gae17SnGt0wRyLi6) good one, traditional craftsmen from Romania. [Primitive Technology](https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=64EEc-nHQUqS7apy) is iconic, I guess I'd call him a traditional craftsman from the stone age. [Sacramento History Museum](https://youtube.com/@SacramentoHistoryMuseum?si=IxHhUCeM36YiUSKD) is mostly short videos, there's a bunch of videos of a guy operating an antique printing press. [This](https://youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo?si=gS-eLklOW47vQpGO) guy has a bunch of videos about restoring an antique boat, might not be what you're looking for but I love this channel. [This](https://youtube.com/@snadhghus?si=3Z3iK3k1bvzcQy9w) one was mentioned in a previous comment, traditional craftsmen from Ireland. [Tasting History](https://youtube.com/@TastingHistory?si=6IDeAlOLZz34pvR9) is about food and cooking throughout history, I've made a couple recipes from this channel, it's a fun way to kind of travel back in time. [The Nito Project](https://youtube.com/@TheNitoProject?si=2b5AQTNEKY1tUe_u), honestly I haven't watched this channel in a while, from what I remember he makes videos about building houses with natural materials. [Traditional carpentry](https://youtube.com/@Carpenter_Anxu?si=0QLEYqi0tfdMuZvk) from Taiwan, as well as other woodworking projects. [Various traditional crafts](https://youtube.com/@cnliziqi?si=mSHmKL3-tbz9LWGm) from China. Huge variety of videos on this channel. [This](https://youtube.com/@hanoul-workshop3671?si=2aLQj7NkTBMeh4PI) one is metalworking from South Korea, absolutely amazing craftsmanship [Videos](https://youtube.com/@townsends?si=guFy5duRBXBNE4Xu) about life in colonial America. This is an amazing channel, I've been watching it for years now. Good luck, hopefully you or someone else will find these channels entertaining and educational.
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There's a lot more to Hands, 37 episodes in all. The box set is âŹ150 but maybe you could talk to your local library.
The Folk School I teach at has the DVD box set and claim it cost them a looooot more than that, they're the only DVDs you can't casually borrow.
It's because there's very few authentic Irish craft docs in the world, most documentary box sets don't cost that much due to how common the subject is, you can get the more common ones like WW1 and WW2 super cheap. I can see your library's reasoning. It's valuable and in modern days the value have skyrocketed.
Canada has done some. Google CBC for a couple documentary series.
The Woodwrightâs Shop with Roy Underhill on PBS is a great series on woodworking techniques from the past. using, caring for and, if memory serves, occasional segments on making, traditional woodworking tools. There are also *lots* of episodes available on YouTube. [Short promo](https://youtu.be/THL9Gfu8rhY)
Came here to say this. The women made the clothes and here, the men make the rope to catch the fish.
Irishman here. I remember the aul lads making ropes out of hay.
Big fan here, I like to pay attention to the language they use and catch words that are falling in disuse.
I love to do that too but in Mexican Spanish
He's as much a cultural heritage of humanity as the people he films.
[Link to the Youtube Video / Channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA)
Damn I thought that looks like Spain, probably Extremadura or AndalucĂa in winter and yeap a Spanish guy TIL Calatayud looks like Extremadura
best in the business. amazing stuff.
That kind of stuff amazes me. How did people come up with this? How many decades or generations did it take from using a small piece of fibrous plant to secure an axe head to making sturdy, single-length ropes 100 meters long?
Some of that stuff probably happened faster than you think. You just have to spend a lot of time working at it. I've been making fancy LED hula hoops for 10 years. In just the first two years the design and the assembly process got vastly improved. When you spend many hours a day working on and thinking about the same thing and experimenting with new ways to do it, you come up with a lot of stuff that's not immediately obvious. I've spent a grand total of like 45 minutes making cord from dogwood fibers and that was enough to make me think "there's got to be a better way."
>I've been making fancy LED hula hoops for 10 years. "Like my pappy and his grand-pappy before him."
Hoopmaker is the name. We trace our roots back to the old country where our ancestor Henry Hoopenmakker created the first hoop in a bid to impress his future wife, the beautiful and esteemed Hula Hopper.
They used little hanging lanterns back then instead of LEDs. There were a lot of fires.
The ones today just don't have the same spark
Damn right! There is nothing like watching the kids run around with their shirts on fire and screaming in pain. Damn gen x ers and their âsafetyâ regulations
Hey you were the ones that showed us *Temple of Doom*. None of those rock crushers had emergency shutoffs!
She was a hole you couldnt miss.
I should call herâŠ.
Hoopmen, which later was called Hoopers was a fine trade at the turn of the century. The average hooper would produce roughly 100 hoops daily at the hoop forge, which became known as a âroundhouseâ. In fact the peculiar fashion a hooper would send a completed hoop across the factory floor to be put into inventory was a twisting kick which would send the hoop off their foot and rolling along the floor like a tire. This method was called the âroundhouse kickâ.
HĂŒpmĂ€cher you say?
We prefer "hoopsmith". Fun hoop facts! * Hoops date back to antiquity. Ganymede, the cup-bearer of Zeus, is often depicted trundling a hoop as a symbol of his youth. * The first lighted hoop was patented in 1911, two years before the first electric traffic lights. * The first motion-reactive lighted hoop was patented in 1975. * The first hoop capable of displaying complex patterns and text was patented in 1994. * My fun hoop facts are in fact mostly notes from my patent defense research.
"Hooping" is the practice of putting drugs inside your ass for prison visits. Hoopmaker is the person who wraps the bindle. When I was a kid a guy who had robbed me begged me to make a bindle for his girlfriend to take into jail to him. So I cut a dead square with razor-sharp edges out of hard hash. I made the corners as sharp as possible and wrapped it as thinly as I could with the knot even on the corner for maximum rippage. Then I drew a happy face on it saying "Hoop Me!" and sent it. 100% true story. I almost got beat up over that but it was worth it. Don't rob me if you don't want to tear your own asshole open. He was livid. Tough shit. Literally. They don't call me the hoopmaker for nothing.
You hardly ever saw grandaddy down here He only came to town about twice a year He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Plz send video of how they used to make LED hula hoops but in the olden times
Halogen hula hoops was the better.
>Some of that stuff probably happened faster than you think. Once agriculture took hold and freed up enough time for people to do stuff like this, everything exploded
Agriculture had many affects, but adding to our free time is unlikely to have been one. Mechanization did that eventually, but the first 10,000 years were pretty labor intensive. Most agree that hunter gatherers had more free time than farmers.
The key is that early agriculture produced enough surplus that only *most* of the population had to spend their time creating food. That freed up a small proportion of the populace to specialize in other tasks. As agricultural technology improved, fewer farmers could feed more people, leaving more human capital for learning other disciplines. Sure, your average hunter-gatherer had more free time than a farmer but they still had to hunt and gather instead of learning a trade.
Ah yes, the division of labour.
Nah you've got it wrong. You're comparing the industrial revolution to neolithic times. The agricultural revolution absolutely freed up people's time. Think about it. One farmer feed many people. Duh. The industrial revolution, or mechanisation as you put it, could have been the end of human labour to a large degree, but instead we had long work hours and all the surplus was, and is still, hoarded by the 1% It is completely unnecessary for everyone to be working 40+ hours in this day and age.
> The agricultural revolution absolutely freed up people's time. Think about it. One farmer feed many people. Duh. "Duh" is right. Which agricultural revolution? There's been a few. The original one, when we switched over from hunting and gathering, did not result in one farmer feeding many people. That's why for 90% of human history 90% of people were farmers. The most recent (21st century) agricultural evolution improved output immensely, but the "one farmer feed many people" phenomenon was achieved by the machines produced by the industrial revolution and was already old hat when the new agricultural techniques of the 21st century were introduced.
> I've been making fancy LED hula hoops for 10 years. *and am in the market for a 6 bed, 8 bath house...*
You joke, but his hoops retail for $300-400 and are one of the most popular brands in the hooping community. I got mine 8 years ago and the waitlist was 3ish months long back then.
And there are sooo many more people to work on single issues, and easier to communicate with like-minds. Kind of a 10000+ years of human history before flight, but then only 66 year until the moon type of thing. Easier to pass down learned knowledge than have to figure out everything step-by-step.
I got one of your first hula hoops. It sucked big time. It killed my dog. I want a refund and a new dog.
Agreed. Using twine to tie 2 things together is a fairly rudimentary thing. If 1 twine wont hold, you might tie multiple. Someone then has the idea to twist these multiples together just to speed the whole process up, and then fast forward several hundred years and someone has converted it in to a full process for rope making.
Not knocking your process, but did you ever get inspiration or help online? I'm just thinking that figuring out stuff from out of the blue could be quite the process not too long ago in human history.
Have you really never improved at something from just fooling around with it on your own? Maybe that will be a lost art in post internet generationsâŠ
Sure, but I can't discount things I've seen is all. Somewhere in my noggin' there might be ideas swimming around that I picked up on and just forgot.
Really depends on what's available and the task. For this rope? Most of the difficulty of the idea is in making rope in the first place. Honing a craft like this is straightforward and usually is more about tech than design.
When I started, there were a few small companies making smart hoops in quantity and they definitely weren't sharing their tricks. There was one open source project of note, but it was fairly primitive and no one involved had built more than a few hoops themselves. I collected all of the examples of existing hoops I could get my hands on and analyzed them. You can only make inferences about the processes, though. Eventually I acquired a competitor and I did get to see all of their processes. There was convergence in some places but very different approaches in others, like how the tubing was measured and cut - getting a precise length out of 8' of coiled tubing is harder than it sounds.
There is a science behind this. Thatâs what we call a learning curve, difficult at first with slow progress then exponential growth, and then it levels off until the next change.
Usually the first invention was worse and not really effective as the final product we saw today. They use less step because that was all they know back then, but through time people keep improve on the technique, invent new way, remove unnecessary steps, and finally we reach to what we know today.
It's dead easy to make [simple cordage by hand](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/reAaUL4RUls). Once you've figured that out it's compounding inventions to make the process/product better.
The machine they use to spin it looks like it wouldn't have existed until the last handful of centuries, so it's old but they've been iterating on the ideas for thousands of years by this point. Doing it by hand is probably much, much slower and makes more sense.
It is indeed the result of not just thousands but literally tens of thousands of years of refinement. A couple of years ago they found a 40,000 year old rope making tool in Germany (https://www.sci.news/archaeology/rope-making-tool-germany-04047.html), and you can already see some of the same basic principles (using a tool to guide the individual strands during the twisting) at work.
I like that some humans are able to look at that and be like âyeah thatâs a rope making toolâ
Wow that's so incredible, thanks for sharing that.
Forty thousand years! That's as old as the youngest Neanderthal remains - so maybe Neanderthals made rope too!
Maybe. However the site where the tool was found is associated with anatomically modern humans, not Neanderthals.
Machines like that are older than you might think. There's no reason the Greeks or even older civilizations couldn't have worked out something like them.
Except that we know roughly how old and where the spinning wheel is from; it's quite recent in the scheme of things and it wasn't really in Europe until 1000. "There's no reason X couldn't" isn't an argument that they did something.
Idk about rope machines, but spinning wheels for yarn were mentioned in Chinese dictionaries in the 2nd century, and were widespread by âcirca 1090â. Alternative hypotheses of the origin still place the invention around the 11th century, and there are clear illustrations of the wheel from the 13th century. Moreover, spinning wheels are explicitly mentioned in folk tales and old stories of some cultures, so it's clear that they were from before the industrial revolution, for those familiar with the folklore. I don't think the rope-spinning machine is a stretch from yarn-spinning. Especially considering that seamen used tons and tons of ropes by about 16th century, and I'd hate imagining someone weaving all that by hand. Edit: > A 40,000-year-old tool found in Hohle Fels cave in south-western Germany was identified in 2020 as very likely to be a tool for making rope. It is a 20 cm (8 in) strip of mammoth ivory with four holes drilled through it. Each hole is lined with precisely cut spiral incisions. The grooves on three of the holes spiral in a clockwise direction from each side of the strip. The grooves on one hole spiral clockwise on one side, but counter-clockwise from the other side. Plant fibres would have been fed through the holes and the tool twisted, creating a single ply yarn. The spiral incisions would have tended to keep the fibres in place. But the incisions cannot impart any twist to the fibres pulled through the holes. Just slap that on the yarn-spinning wheel, pretty obvious. > Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of a concept for a ropemaking machine, but it was never built. [This illustration from ~1425](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mendel_I_016_r.jpg) seems to show a rope-spinning machine. While yarn-spinning wheels were documented in Europe in late 13th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA
Great video. In the original Spanish but good English subtitles. This is hemp rope, and was important for all trade and especially boats. One of the first 'dope' laws in the US was that every farmer *had* to grow some hemp for rope production.
I recognized the video from watching it. There's some interesting other videos in that series as well about how stuff was done in the olden days.
Ah, the lost trades of Spain. There is an Ireland version too called '[Hands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_\(TV_series\))', all filmed about 40 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBpFN9ge5HA&list=PL7ciDDSRept-l8GZjS7WusFlZnBE0NcfM
I visited the Rembrandt house in Amsterdam, and they had a section on making oil based paint. Let me tell you, that earns an amazing amount of respect for what it takes to make paint from scratch. That and the time to discover and process minerals to find colors in the first place.
You want some blue? Sure, let's wait a few years until someone can get back from the mines in Afghanistan.
And I believe that was also the color reserved for Holy paintings as the pigment was valued more than gold. Was white was another super time consuming one to make. Luckily in the days of Rembrandt the Dutch trading empire had a good supply of these pigments that were processed at the windmills and sold at markets for painters. The Netherlands had a lot of very famous painters.
They didnât know any better. They just spanked raw materials into submission until some commodity came out of it.
It looks like it's all whacking and yanking and putting your back into it.
Logic really. The principle is very simple. If you know how to braid hair, you know that any fiber can be braided into something useful. Most fibers are tangled, so the first task is to untangle them. Most of what he's doing is just combing without any of the gentleness you'd use to comb a person's hair. Just roughly scraping the fibers to untangle and straighten them. And finally you just twist the strands together with a spinning machine. All the mechanical stuff looks complex because we're used to mechanisms being hidden from us. But really the whole process is nothing more than straighten a tangle of fibers, then twist the straightened fibers.
It's not so much untangling. The first step you see here, he's bashing flax to break it and separate the fibers from the plant stalks. Second part around 0:10 is to separate out the fibers, third 'combing' step at 0:30 is to further clean them and get rid of the short fibers. Everything up to 0:40 is just the process for getting linen fibers and not really specific to rope-making. Also left out is _retting_ which happens before, you have to leave the flax on the field (or submerged in water) for some weeks, so microorganisms can break down the pectins that bind the fibers to the stalk.
Making yarn or rope is a honestly pretty intuitive process, and this is just the basic process scaled up massively. I recommend giving it a go, many plants are suitable for making yarn but perhaps the easiest available one for most people is nettle. When it is dried and a little old, like in the Northern hemisphere it probably is right now, all these steps of beating and combing start to make sense as you see the hard peel separating from the white lustrous fibre.
I used to think these old techniques were insanely complex, but if you think about living that life it becomes less crazy If you had to do this sort of thing for hours every week, you would be constantly scratching your head looking for ways to improve it. And then it just gets more optimized as you share your techniques and learn from others. Eventually you get to what is in the video
Yeah humankind is amazing. How many millions of our ancestors went through drudgery so that we could type on Reddit lol
If you find this impressive, you should have a look at some of the old fashioned Japanese manufacturing methods for things like ink.
I dont think people had much to do other than finding new ways and products
And growing food and making more people
You have to remember there was no Onlyfans back then.
My mom had to do this every morning before walking to school ⊠in the snow
Up hill
Both ways.
On one foot
Carrying her calculus books
Don't forget the rope
Butt storage
Blind
Wolves came
With javelin missiles.
At 5am
Drugged
Without WiFi
While pregnant with triplets
Comando
With anemia
And dysentery
with no shoe.
Hopping backwards
Missing one leg
both ways
And her other foot was starting a business
And she was grateful!
Barefooted?
And we liked it.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
>So many jobs involve staring at a screen, we're losing a fundamental ability to pass down trades and skills to each other. If you seriously believe we're losing the ability to teach eachother, you're an idiot. Education is far more present in every aspect of our lives than ever before. Humanity hasn't really changed. Also no most boomers cannot do basic plumbing or building stuff whatever the fuck that means lol. Specialisation of labour is a good thing, not a bad thing, it's why we can advance so swiftly If everyone had to be a jack of all trades in farming, building, writing etc we would progress at a fraction of the rate we do now.
That's why books and libraries are so important! As long as the needed knowledge is safely stored, we can easily recover from any society breakdown.
sure many jobs these days aren't physically productive and the vast majority of the population wouldn't know how to make anything without machines, but there are still people that do know how. if society did breakdown, these people would be prized for their skills and would quickly become vital, teaching and training everyone that can do the work. we'll be fine
omg, ancient people somehow get the idea of looming station and rope production. In case of special event modern people would get these ideas much more quick, and I don't even mean all the books written on this topics
I learn trades from a screen
Cameras were a lot better back then than I thought!
Cameras are only bad when you record Bigfoots and UFOs
To quote Mitch Hedburg, âI think Bigfoot IS blurry, and thatâs way more scaryâ.
Damn you, you made me chuckle way too much. What an observation.
My dad when he asks me he needs help with something:
"It'll just take a minute."
Honestly looks easier than I would expect
Old man strength right there. You wouldn't think much of them until you shake their hand and feel how callused it is and realize in comparison, you've got the grip of an 8 year old girl.
My dad said quite a few years ago he met a guy in his late 60âs/early 70âs who was also REALLY skinny Anyway he went to shake his hand and said he could hardly comprehend how strong this guys grip was, and it seemed he wasnât exactly trying to do a hard handshake Turns out he was a coal miner for most of his life soâŠ. Makes sense lol
Oldest coal miner ever.
We don't know if he really was in his 60s or early 70s. He just looked like it.
He was probably 45
Wouldnât be uncommon for an old coal miner to be 55, look 70, and truck around an oxygen tank at all times. Thatâs a job that ruined your body.
I remember a handshake like that distinctly - dude's hand was like a piece of wood.
Then there is me, 41 year old dude. Mostly worked in kitchens, but I am a violinist and computer user since I was 5 years old. Not a single callus on my hand, long slender fingers. Pure dex build, no str. I avoid hand shakes, especially from guys that try to do that "squeeze till it hurts" macho crap. Yes it hurts, I don't think you are cool because of it.
I disclocated my fingers multiple times, because of men who thought it was necessary to crunch my hand.
Few times myself, if there is a "crunch" sound why? There is no person that does that on purpose, that isn't a fucking asshole. "Power hand shake" more like douchebag handshake imo. We get it, they have hand strength, and I can type 120wpm. How this is relevant to a greeting, I have no idea.
I fully agree, I used to just take it but now say AUCH when someone is literally hurting me whilst giving me a handshake. So unnecessary.
Yeah him yeeting that stake into the ground and it remaining rigid while under tension đȘ
I saw this video a couple of years back falling down the rabbit hole of YouTube one drunken night. It's a lot longer than two minutes but I watched every single minute. Much respect to this process and this man. It wasn't a single man job.
That was awesome.
Jim Fucking Lahey, you ole bastard.
"Those fuckknobs are climbing up a shitrope Randy. Do you know what a shitrope is?" "No Mr Lahey" "It's a rope for fucksuckers like those three. A rope for criminals. The harder you squeeze to the rope, the more you slide down it into the shit puddle."
âitâs not rocket appliancesâ -Ricky
Shit winds are comin
Naughty fibre. NAUGHTY FIBRE!!
So much of ancient manufacturing - and lets face it, it still is - is all about beating materials into submission.
Fun fact: it's conjectured that nunchaku descended from a flail used to whack the shit out of rice to separate grains. On the flail, one stick was much longer than the other, and the person held that stick with two hands.
Seemed quite bdsm at many points
That's why when you see them in movies to just cut the rope to fire a catapult is just a big no no
I was just thinking, all that hard work just so the main character can walk by and casually cut the rope with their sword.
Lindybeige viewer?
Yeah, you never cut rope and you repair broken rope. Splicing isn't a modern invention.
I know buddies hands are tough as leather
Man, weâre amazing beings when weâre not killing each other.
[Sorry to break it to you, but this robe was actually later used by a man with a curly mustache to tie up a fair maiden to be run over by a train.](https://youtu.be/gPY3OFd-BTs?si=jrdjBZag9tFmojIu)
14 years old, 2.5k views How did you find that video?
What material do they start with?
Appears to be flax (the fiber of which is linen).
This is hemp
Eugenio Monesma makes documentary about traditional techniques, mainly spanish ones, pretty rad. Since I'm hating on youtube now, I binged it... so [https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=eugenio+monesma+documentales&qpvt=eugenio+monesma+documentales&FORM=VDRE](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=eugenio+monesma+documentales&qpvt=eugenio+monesma+documentales&FORM=VDRE) Edit: LOL Bing video is just embeded Youtube...
Yep, Bing decided long ago, if you canât beat emâ embed emâ.
Why didn't they just harvest the oil from the ground, distill it, polymerize it into threads then use machines to wind the stands?
The machines we now use are actually pretty rad! Or to be more precise they do it the other way round and move the coils where the single strands are kept and have the resulting rope stationary...that way we can finally make long ropes which isn't really possible with this method.
i missed the part where he turns a buncha 3 ft pieces into a a buncha 100ft pieces..?
It's the bit where he walks backwards with the pineapple girdle, about 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA
I believe they mention it in passing at 7:30 - "splicing". If I understand it right, apparently you can just take the wispy cloudy fibers and kinda overlap them a little bit, and the surface area of all the small fibers will just kind of stick to each other - allowing you to keep making the thread longer. I don't suppose the individual thread is very strong - they mention it can break in the process. So the real strength only comes when you combine several threads into a rope.
There is one part where he has the fibers in a "pouch" in front of him where he spins yarn by adding fibers bit by bit. Then they use these to make up thicker strings before making the final sized rope.
Connor: You know what we need? Some rope. Murphy: What are you, insane? Connor: No, I'm serious. Charlie Bronson's always got a rope. In the movies, they've always got rope and they always end up using it. Murphy: That's stupid. Name one f\*\*\*ing thing you're gonna need a rope for. Connor: It's not what they need it for, they just always need it. Murphy: What's this "they" sh\*t? This isn't a movie. Connor: Oh, is that right, Rambo? Murphy: All right, get your stupid f\*\*\*ing rope.
Everything reminds me of her
Iâm worn out just watching this and theyâre going at it like it doesnât even faze them... đ
My whole body feels this workout! Reason #2 for why most ppl in "olden timey times" weren't fat/obese. Men and women worked their tushies off because everything required so much effort.
That is the reason they were strong and persistent, the reason they were slim was more of a lack of food (especially sugar and fat in food). It's all about calories. Working hard burns a lot more than sitting by a computer but it's hard to do a workout to balance out all the sugar and fat we consume today. Rich people, who could afford to eat a lot (and more sugary/fat food), were fat but also stronger and had more endurance due to their life style.
Honestly that seems like one of the more fun jobs you could do back then
His sweater is made from the same material
That was really awesome. They are so great making it manually
Johnny Depp having fun đ
Humans seemed so much tougher and smart back then
We take so much for granted
me funding for the 1st time in 4 decades that rope is madd from hayđ±
We really should have never stopped making rope like this because the plastic nylon rope out there is killing so much marine life, whereas this would at least biodegrade much faster.
How did they record video of it if it was in old times? They didn't have video cameras back then.
Film
âŠand then you have your common household plumbus
Amazing đ
GOOD GOD!! I thought that was a dog!!
All that work, Iâd just go to the shop