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Comment by greengreengrass | Hacker News Reader

Agree with the other commenter - this is very charming! I find it a wonderfully romantic idea to contemplate that, at some point in human past, studying and developing new knots (or even stumbling upon new knots and sharing that idea) would have been a realistic endeavour that expanded the boundary of human knowledge and gave us newer or safer ways of building and achieving things.

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It isn't a hobby of the past. Arborists are professionals still using knots and studying them (especially with the modern rope materials changing the old knowledge around knots). Rock climbing is a hobby but knots are life-or-death for them.

Knots are still being invented nowadays. Or variants of existing knots.

Here are PACI's systematic studies on a few vital knots:

https://www.paci.com.au/knots.php

Here is a recent (2025) paper on the stability of the bowline:

https://www.epfl.ch/labs/flexlab/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/...

Thanks! Oh I have every confidence we are still studying this, and that it's a thriving field – forgive me for implying that it wasn't.

I was (badly) getting at the fact that back then, as a function of the totality of knowledge we had, discovering a new knot could be quite transformational – whereas now it's just one of many professional fields of modern research. Not implying it was then, or now, merely a hobby.

The number of hitches which come out of the arborist community is pretty mind bending. It's one of my favorite things about climbing.

Tons of tree climbers are pretty experienced splicers as well. State of the art there continues to advance year after year.

NASA uses knots instead of cable ties, for example on the Mars rovers [1] so they remain with us (I use a half dozen regularly myself)

1: https://www.planetary.org/articles/20120905-knots-on-mars

You would be surprised. New useful knots are still being found. E.g. The Zeppelin bend is exceptionally good and was invented in the 60s. The icicle hitch is from the 90s. Some fishing knots are less than 20 years old.

> The Zeppelin bend is exceptionally good and was invented in the 60s.

I'm not so sure about that. The history of the Zeppelin bend is incredibly contentious and apocryphal.

Can we at least agree that it does not appear in ABOK when it was published in the 40s?

Yeah, that's fair.

On the history, everything I know is from this excellent article, so might as well cite it here for the curious, and just in case you haven't seen it:

https://www.paci.com.au/downloads_public/knots/KnotBio_zeppe... (password: copyright)

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