Talk Nerdy To Me: MIT Students Grasp Tight Onto Their Thick, Sinewy Vines; Build Bridges Inca-Style

Students in Course 3.094 (Materials in Human Experience) at MIT were able to build a 70-foot fiber bridge in the style of the Incas:

The Incas had no wheel, no arch and no system of writing. But they knew how to twist and braid countless miles of grasses and slender branches into ropes–sometimes as thick as a wrestler’s waist.

Hot!

The weekend’s burst of activity was preceded by what the students estimated was 360 hours of rope-twisting as the 50 miles of sisal twine was turned into rope.

Working together as a group was part of the exercise. “A third of the time was spent learning to work together,” one of the students said. “But after a while, we were banging those cables out.”

Those Incas had it going on and it’s all been downhill ever since. Today you can’t even place a simple order at Babeland without the package ending up somewhere in Idaho. Bad vibes, man. Bad vibes.

Fiber bridge connects Incan, student engineers [MIT news]