Cross-Pollinated Rigging

   Rigging is a vast subject, partly because there are so many applications for it, both afloat and ashore, partly because the tools that make it possible - the lever, the inclined plane, dynamic as well as static inertia, the myriad forms of rope, etc. - are so profoundly versatile, and partly because human beings, over a tremendous spectrum of contexts, have worked so diligently at exploiting and refining those applications and tools.

   All of these factors have contributed to rigging evolution, as have two other important ones: time and isolation. Time has been important, not only because it gives us opportunities to accumulate and store information, but because it implies the effects of shifting cultural and technological waves, both of which serve to enrich rigging. For example, people have been lashing things together since prehistoric times, gradually refining techniques, design, and materials. But lashing reached a whole new level, so to speak, when the medieval cultural mandate to build ever-higher cathedrals necessitated scaffolds that had to be lashed together steeple-high. Centuries later, developments from these same techniques are being applied, using exotic fibers that are many times stronger than steel per pound, as a way to eliminate bulky, expensive hardware for everything from America's Cup boats to emergency structural repairs.

   Isolation has been perhaps the most significant promoter of rig evolution. Just as it did for language, clothing, food, and every other aspect of human endeavor, isolation spawned unique manifestations of rigging. For instance, the Romans recruited sailors to construct the first retractable stadium roof, using sail-hoisting technology. This was a more or less straight transfer of knowledge from sea to land. But in the intervening centuries, theater rigging has existed in isolation from sailboat rigging, developing its own extraordinarily specialized techniques, even its own vernacular. It might have started out as an offshoot of sailing vessel rigging, but the effects of isolation, and the peculiar demands of theater sets, turned it into something that can be very difficult for today's sailors to relate to. And of course sailors have been locked away in their own world for all those centuries as well, working up ways of getting boats to move that would have puzzled a Roman rigger.

   Of course, isolation is a relative term; there has always been some degree of contact among rigging's various worlds. And sailors, as the people who are both most rig-reliant and most nomadic, have always been the dominating influence, with effects felt in ranching, industry, forestry, mountaineering, etc. But until very recently, this cross-pollination has been very slight, and each of these rigging enclaves has developed along its own lines, with only minor influence from elsewhere. The biggest reason for this was that the demands of each discipline were and are so distinct; the various disciplines simply had little of obvious value for one another. Wire rope was developed for Cornish coal miners, and made the jump to standing rigging, but it took decades, and nothing else that sailors cared about made its way out of the mines. Similarly, the carabiner has made its way out of the mountains and into every aspect of rigging; the rope that mountaineers use, and how they use it, doesn't translate to other fields nearly as well.

   But the barriers are crumbling. Nowadays it is easy to find people who both climb and sail, for example. Or who do both industrial and stage rigging. I know a man who both installs communications towers and teaches climbing to elite military units. And another who works with oil rigs as well as historic sailing vessel replicas. The opportunities for cross-pollination are intense, and we are beginning to see the results.

   First, and very important, juxtaposing previously insulated disciplines can reveal very clearly what doesn't work. Safety factors, load accelleration rates, load magnitudes, rig lifespan, cost, and a host of other factors must be considered in any rigging application - they just mean different things in different enclaves. If you are a mountaineer, for instance, you might have rappeling and traversing down cold, yet be in serious trouble if you use those same techniques, with the same considerations, in a SWAT context. Your gear will be too heavy, too shiny, and too vulnerable to abrasion and melting. You won't be equipped to deal with anchoring or releasing lines, and you probably won't be able to apply your technical skills to office buildings, let alone be able to keep the rope from getting tangled up in your weapons.

   So one result of cross-pollination is to reveal the depth of specificity that happens with time and isolation. Looked at another way, though, it reveals hard-won, time- proven tools, that only require of us an awareness of right context for us to put them to use. If you are sufficiently familiar with the demands of both hostage rescue and Alpine mountaineering, both disciplines will benefit.

   Cross-pollination also works directly, so that elements of one rigging area can be translated directly, with mimimal interdisciplinary knowledge, to another. The above- mentioned wire rope and carabiner are classic examples, as are cable clamps (industry), ratcheting blocks (sailing), and heat-resistant fibers (rescue and firefighting). These are things that were evolved for purposes in one art that have near-relatives in other arts, with mimimal cans of variables to slow the transfer.

   And then there are the serendipitous connections that just somehow happen. A man named John Smith invented the Icicle Hitch, which happens to be one of the most useful new knots of the last century. But his interest was purely theoretical, and he had no idea that his invention, a hitch for lengthwise pull on smooth, cylindrical surfaces, came along at exactly the point in history when traditional knots for the same purpose were proving to be no match for modern rig materials and loads.

   And then there's just plain old ingenuity, finding out-and-out improvements in things that, as the saying goes, "everyone has looked at, but nobody has seen." Think of parallel-fiber-core construction, for rope as well as slings, Petzl's new Ball-lock carabiner, Harken's Air Blocks, and so many more delights. The important thing to remember with ingenuity, however, is that it is useless without a firm grounding in the fundamentals; one important function of tradition is to preserve and clarify the distillation of experience. It's what we're left with after we are through making mistakes, and the older the tradition, the more that has been tried and found wanting, the more clearly we can see what actually works, and the less there is to discover. If you are going to be ingenious in something as ancient as rigging, you had better be sure you are not re- inventing a lopsided wheel.

   Fair leads,

      Brion Toss