Two amazing articles crossed paths with me this week.

The author of the first piece has a tagline that says,

“String is far more important than the wheel in the pantheon of inventions.”

https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string/

As a spinner myself, I am very open to this idea. I do admit that I have never thought of string itself being an invention, in all my years of spinning. I was much more interested in the evolution of the drop spindle, and then the spinning wheel. When someone claimed that Columbus crossed the ocean with sails that were woven from fiber that had been spun without a spinning wheel I had some serious qualms. Using a drop spindle you can spin, oh, maybe five feet of thread at a time. Then you must stop and wind that fiber around your spindle, and start again. And I assume that for a sail, you also ply that thread because two or three-ply thread is much stronger than single ply. (Plying means that you take two threads and spin them together.) That is a LOT of hand spinning.

A picture of four thousand year old rope graces the article. You can see that two or three large strands have been twisted together to make the final rope but if you look closely, you can see that each large strand is made up of many multiples of smaller strands. In a book from 1982, “…And Ladies of the Club”, Helen Hooven Santmeyer wrote about a fictional businessman in the 1850’s who brought a ropewalk to a small town. His business was, unsurprisingly, making rope. I learned there what the Hakai article doesn’t quite mention. You need to cooperate with others to make those huge ropes. Two men walk backwards from each other for about 150 feet, steadily twisting the fiber between them and holding it tightly. Quite strenuous.

Also, as the descendant of a clipper ship captain I was fascinated by this description of a clipper ship.

…certain full-rigged ships were so bedecked with line and linen that they looked more like parade floats than instruments of trade and war.

Found through https://almatcboykin.wordpress.com/2025/08/31/little-technologies/

The other article I loved came through the New Advent aggregation. https://www.newadvent.org

Dark Sky International ran a photo contest and is publishing the 2025 winners. The winning photos in a contest should be seen, not commented on. For encouragement though, look for 1) the moon over Paris, 2) the Starlight highway, 3) the Vimy WWI trenches, 4) an owl, and 5) two little children with a comet.

https://darksky.org/what-we-do/events/photo-contest/2025-winners/

Happy Friday.