Vertical caving terminology and methods > SRT basic terms
Going down (descending) a rope in a controlled manner, typically using a descender, but can also be done using a body abseil in some cases. Not the same as falling.
This history section is very much abbreviated to show only the origins of abseiling and the terminology, with much more detail provided in the sections on body abseil and descenders. See those sections for more information, including details about how they were first used for vertical caving.
Abseiling has existed in some shape or form for as long as ropes have been used to build buildings, hold the masts of ships, or to dig wells. An early mention is from 1479, when Scottish prince Alexander Stewart and a servant slid down a rope made from bedsheets. Sailors from the 1500s to the 1800s slid down ropes which they gripped with their legs, and either slid their hands down, or gripped it one hand at a time. Two descenders are known from the 1500s, with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim making one in the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany) from metal in around 1520-1530, and sailors in the Holy Roman Empire (now Italy) experimenting with a simple stick descender in 1549-1550. Polymath Galileo Galilei described an early descender in 1638. Improvements to it were made to it around 1648 by French inventor Nicolas Grollier de Servière (published in 1719), and again in 1725 by German engineer Jacob Leupold, then details were published again in Oekonomische Encyklopädie volume 13 (page 82 and appendix) by Johann Georg Krünitz, in 1778 in Berlin, Prussia, Holy Roman Empire (now Germany). The same publication also described how to slide down a rope using hands instead of a descender, and also described how mountaineers made it easier by using doubled rope technique to reduce the strength needed, which is the first known mention of that approach. It is likely to be far older, possibly used by some sailors or well diggers during previous centuries. In 1787, Genevan mountaineer Horace Bénédict de Saussure used a walking pole as a descender, while descending from Mont Blanc in the French Alps. Many gymnastics books gave details of how to descend ropes safely, as early as 1793. Fire escape descenders started to appear in 1860, initially in the USA, and in many other countries over the next 40 years, so many people had tried abseiling as a result. British mountaineer Edward Whymper used a very basic descending technique that used only his hands during a solo attempt on the Matterhorn in Switzerland in 1862. Though he is actually far from being the inventor of abseiling, French mountaineer Jean-Estéril Charlet-Straton is often mistkenly claimed to have invented it, because he used another very basic descending technique inspired by Edward Whymper's, which also used only his hands (the same way that Johann Georg Krünitz had already described), during an 1876 ascent of Petit Dru in the French Alps. Neither of those were really abseiling, and were both really just ways to use a handline, that sailors had already been doing for centuries. See the sections on body abseil and descenders for more details of the developments in each of them. By 1897, German mountaineers called abseiling "Kletterschluss", meaning "climbing finish". It was first called abseiling in 1930, as the German word for going down a rope. This german name "abseilen" was used in Anwendung des Seiles, published by the Bavarian section of the German Alpine Club in München in that year. The German verb "abseilen" (pronounced "AB-zile-en") literally means "to off rope"; to use a rope to get off a cliff (the word had already been used during the 1600s, but at that time it meant lowering and removing someone from a rope that they had been tied up with, not sliding down it). The French word "rappel" had originally meant to use (in any manner, not just abseiling) a doubled rope, which could then be pulled-through afterwards, or used as a pull-up cord. The word literally means to "recall" or retrieve the rope, and has nothing to do with sliding down it. French mountaineer Roger Frison-Roche is credited with convincing some English speakers to use the word "rappelling" in 1944 (French caver Henry P. Guérin wrote about it using the same word in 1944), and Americans decided to use that word, even though there was already a perfectly good word for it. Both words spread into other languages.
This history section only covers abseiling. This article also has a detailed history of many of the other devices and techniques that are used for vertical caving.
<< SRT (pronounced as 3 separate letters), kamikaze caving (former name) | Body abseil, classic abseil, hot seat, shoulder abseil ("hasty rappel", "arm wrap" or "arm rappel" in USA), gym abseil, Kletterschluss, leg wrap, over the shoulder abseil (body abseil), double leg wrap, two leg seat, shoulder wrap, over-the-hip, neck wrap, Dülfersitz, Dolomite abseil, Dülfer-Kletterschluß, French neck wrap, Gènevoise method >>
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