Single tail

What is a single tail?

Single tail is the umbrella name for whips with one long strand instead of a bundle of falls. It is not a particular object but a family: the bullwhip belongs to it, and alongside it the snake whip, the signal whip, and the Australian stockwhip. What they share is one point that carries the whole strike.

The family, and why the bullwhip is only one of it

By one technical detail per member. The encyclopedic description of whips sets them side by side, and they are each small differences with large consequences:

• The bullwhip has a handle of 20 to 30 cm that the thong joins in line, or that it fully encloses, and at the end a fall of 25 to 75 cm.
• The stockwhip from Australia carries its handle separate from the strand instead of inside it, and that is what sets it apart within this family.
• The snake whip has no handle inside at all and can therefore be rolled up like a snake. What that costs and gives is on its own page.
• The signal whip is the only member without a fall, and precisely that missing part is what its page is about.

So single tail and bullwhip are not synonyms. The bullwhip is a species, single tail the genus. Comparable to clamps and amerikaantjes.

What happens in forty-five centimeters

More than you would think, and much shorter. Krehl and colleagues filmed a whip crack at nine thousand frames per second in Shock Waves. The tip accelerates over about 45 centimeters from Mach 1 to Mach 2.19, with a peak acceleration of fifty thousand g, and is then back below the speed of sound within twenty centimeters. Supersonic it is for only about 1.2 milliseconds.

The nicest thing about their measurement is when the crack falls: not the moment the whip comes taut, but the moment the cracker reaches the turning point and is whipped around at high speed. Where that turning point lies decides everything, then, and it is exactly that stretch that is hardest to steer with a strand meters long.

Where this fits on this site

A single tail rarely comes out with me, and never at a first time. What can happen and how calmly that starts is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• The puzzle of whip cracking. Uncovered by a correlation of whip-tip kinematics with shock wave emission. P. Krehl, S. Engemann & D. Schwenkel, Shock Waves 8(1), 1–9, 1998 (DOI 10.1007/s001930050093, checked at Crossref; only the abstract is freely accessible and only that has been drawn from. The authors’ first names are not listed at Crossref either). Provides the recording technique at 9 kHz frame rate, the acceleration of the tuft over about 45 cm from Mach 1 to a maximum of Mach 2.19, the peak acceleration of 50,000 g, the duration of about 1.2 ms in which the tip is supersonic, the drop back below Mach 1 within 20 cm, and the finding that the shock wave is emitted the moment the cracker reaches the turning point of the strand and is whipped around at speed.
• Whip. Wikipedia. Provides the classification of the single-tailed whips: the stockwhip family with a long strand and short handle to which the bullwhip also belongs; the bullwhip with a handle of 20 to 30 cm, thong of 1 to 6 meters, and fall of 25 to 75 cm; the Australian stockwhip, whose handle is not in the thong but hangs loose from it; the signal whip, which differs from the snake whip in having no fall; and the snake whip with no handle inside. The dimensions and the build per member are on the four separate pages, each with the same source.

Related terms

• Bullwhip. The best-known member of this family, with the build and the crack in detail.
• Snake whip. The member without a stiff core, with the weight in the strand and a Dutch name that appears three times in the newspaper.
• Flogger. The opposite: many supple falls that smear out the strike.
• Chain whip. The metal variant, and why it does something entirely different.
• Cat-o-nine-tails. The nine-strand whip, historic and heavy.
• Riding whip. The short, stiff striker you need no room for.
• Impact play. The family a single tail is the far end of.
• Bruising. What there is to see in the days after.
• Warm-up. The first ten minutes, and why they are not skipped with this tool.
• Whip. The umbrella name above it, with the four main types side by side.