Fluther: How long is the longest rope ever manufactured?

How long is the longest rope ever manufactured?

Asked by lonesome-dog (253

) January 19th, 2021
6 responses
“Great Question” (2

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Looking out a bus window and staring up about 30 floors of unfinished building, I noticed a rope dangling from the crane. It was looped through a pully near the end of the crane. A workman on the ground grabbed both ends, so there’s a good chance it was one piece. I’m guessing there’s about 10 feet per story so, both ways, that’s 600feet.

But what if the building were 110 stories, that would make the rope 2200 feet. That’s a hell of a long rope, or might there be an even longer one?

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Topics: engineering, Math and object speculation, rope making, strength calculation.

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Answers

https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/5hq0z9/whats_the_longest_single_length_of_rope_one_can/

”The World’s longest piece of rope was made by Wesley and Charles Supine in Gibraltar, in 1842. It was made in a ‘ropewalk’ in the British Naval Dockyards, to create a barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar. The rope was six inches in diameter, and 24 miles in length. Accurate measurement was impossible due to the rope’s changing length with changes in humidity and tension.”

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-rope

A rope measuring 251 m (823 ft) long, with a diameter of 2.2 m (7 ft 2 in), was made from rice straw and was used for tug of war by citizens of Uiryeonggun, South Korea during the Righteous Army Festival on 22 April 2005. Weighing 54,500 kg (120,150 lb), it is the largest rope made from natural materials.

SergeantQueen (12874

)“Great Answer” (9

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I have always had questions about cables in elevators – especially for skyscrapers.

Take the Empire State Building or the old World Trade Center. Somewhere around 90 floors plus the basements. There are several cables – the one that pulls and pushes the elevator car, plus electricity, telephone, and other wires.

Those have to be thousands of feet long and they are being flexed all the time. Amazing that they don’t break.

elbanditoroso (33161

)“Great Answer” (0

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It’s the capacity the wire has to flex that assures they will not break. I don’t know of any catastrophic event where the cables were at fault. It usually takes something like fire or collision to damage an elevator cable. The most famous elevator fall of, I believe, 80 or more stories happened in 1945 to the Empire State Building. A B25 crashed into the building with considerable loss of life.

But the fall in question happened after the crash. The operator of a damaged car was thrown from her car on the 80th floor, then put in another elevator only to fall to the basement in it. The car had also sustained cable damage.

She fell some 80 floors to considerable injury, a broken pelvis for one, but lived. It’s the highest anyone ever survived an elevator fall. And that’s a lousy was to end up in the Guinness book of records.

lonesome-dog (253

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