text: how des a telephone wire not lose its spiral nature?   day dreamer is correct. the profile of the cable is produced with a twist. distorting it to any other shape than a spiral requires energy, let the cable free and the stored energy used to distort it is used to relax the cable back to its natural shape.  try heating up any plastic object and you find before it goes back to a molten blob it will pass through other shapes ( the shapes it passed through when being produced). its called inbuilt history. to the rather anal people this is a very general description based on the q.