A Brief History of Ladders;
or,
Scaling New Heights

As with many useful but prosaic items, there's a regrettable lack of information on the history of ladders. With our monkey heritage, however, it seems likely that people have been using ladders to reach high places since the first proto-human realized what a silly mistake his ancestors had made in abandoning the safety of the trees for the ground, where any old wolf, hyena, or lion could snack on you. The first ladders were probably made of tree-trunks with the limbs lopped off. The stumps where the limbs had been made great places to put your feet and hands and, when the trunk was propped up against something, all it took was a little agility to get up to where you were going. Ladders of this sort were used extensively by the ancient cliff dwellers of the Southwest, who used them to clamber around their multistory communal homes, where they'd developed apartment living to a fine art not seen again until the Industrial Age.

Ladders with a single center pole and rungs on each side, however, are inherently unsteady: it's too easy to tip to one side or another. Not only that, whole tree trunks are heavy and hard to lug around. Though it would take a few thousand years and the development of metal tools, ladder evolution eventually resulted in the type of ladder we use today: two upright stiles joined by a series of steps or rungs. Ladders like these are inherently sturdier than the other kind, because they distribute one's weight more evenly and restrict lateral movement. This doesn't mean, however, that they're safe to dance the samba on. One should always be careful on a ladder, no matter how safe it seems.

The most famous ladder ever is probably the one that the prophet Jacob saw as he lay sleeping after running away from an angry brother. However, it's generally accepted that Jacob's Ladder was merely symbolic, a way of envisioning the path from Earth to God (kind of like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," but two thousand years and many hallucinations earlier). Possibly most famous real-life ladder was the one used to snatch the child of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh from an upper floor of their home in 1932. The poorly-made ladder broke during the commission of the crime, and was discarded at the scene. Later analysis of the wood matched it to wood from the attic of the prime suspect, Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant.

Also prominent in ladder lore is the old "don't walk under a ladder" superstition. Along with triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number thirteen) and the fear of Friday the 13th, or Friggatriskaidekaphobia (say that one fast three times!), this is one of the Western world's most enduring superstitions. Everyone you ask will give you a different reason why walking under a ladder is unlucky, but one thing's for certain: this superstition makes more sense than many others, given the very real possibility that something could fall on you from above -- maybe an apple, maybe a can of paint, maybe a ladder complete with climber.

The ascendancy of ladders in reaching high places was, sadly, not destined to last. Eventually, someone made the connection between leaning a ladder shallowly against something and making the rungs extra wide for better traction, and invented stairs -- and so the heyday of ladders as the best way to get from down-here to up-there was over. But ladders still had their uses, especially when only temporary access to a high place was needed, or when space restrictions limited the use of stairs.

On to part two :: Types of Ladders: Metal, Wood, or What? :: Back to the Index