Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (14 page)

Competitive walking and running took the public imagination only in the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, it was improved coach transportation and, later, railroads that promoted them. When the roads were dangerous and disagreeable, only rare eccentrics and occasional foreign travelers joined the poor and criminals on foot. Once even workers could afford cheap railroad tickets, walking
was no longer a necessity but increasingly a recreation, especially since trains also served destinations with picturesque paths. As recreational walking emerged, contests flourished. Beginning in the 1830s, walking footraces in England, the United States, and Continental Europe became mass spectator sports that sometimes attracted over 25,000 people. Usually run for ten to fifteen miles, the
smaller contests took place in enclosures built by the tavernkeepers who sponsored them, but the larger ones were held at horse tracks. The competing pedestrians, as the contestants were called, sometimes wore gaudy clothing like jockeys’ silks. In fact, the footrace was a kind of poor person’s horse race without the expense of the horses. But the “peds” themselves could earn handsome purses and,
along with jockeys, were America’s first professional athletes.
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If the pedestrians used specially built shoes, they did not call attention to them. They were the sports stars of the time—some of the first modern celebrity athletes—and shoe manufacturers would have been natural sponsors. Edward Payson Weston, the most famous of the later nineteenth-century American long-distance walkers, was
supported on one walk by a sewing-machine maker, a druggist, a photographer, and a clothing store in return for promotion of their products. But there was no shoe manufacturer. Weston did advise his many admirers who were taking up walking to get comfortable, low-heeled shoes. But his technique, almost a shuffle with little bending of the knees—to conserve energy—made minimal demands on footwear.
He wore sturdy shoes with high red tops. The leading mid-century distance runner of England and America, William Howitt, billed as “The American Deer,” is shown in a contemporary drawing wearing low, slipperlike shoes similar in shape to the former footmen’s pumps. Only in the 1880s, just before the decline of pedestrianism amid corruption and drug scandals, did shoemakers start to advertise. One
firm, McSwyny of New York, boasted of “Bengal Tiger, Alligator, Porpoise, and Seal Skins, Tanned especially for my use,” with the endorsement of Daniel o’Leary, who had walked 520 miles in 139 hours. But in design these were probably conventional mid-length leather boots.
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Specialized footgear seems to have appeared first in the 1870s, when interest began to turn from marathon walking to speed
running, and amateur associations were beginning to promote track and field for exercise and health. The main innovation, besides the use of lighter leathers, was spikes. Patented for cricket in 1861, they were soon applied to running. Peter R. Cavanagh, a leading biomechanics scientist and athletic footwear analyst, believes that running shoes first diverged from street shoes only in 1865, with
a pair of spiked running shoes made for Lord Spencer. Probably about the same time, a New York shoemaker named John Welsher ran an advertisement before a celebrated race, offering walking shoes for $6.50. For $7.50, they were available with springs: one of the first energy-return systems in athletic shoes. Despite these beginnings, the later nineteenth century was not a great time for running footwear.
Team sports, such as football, cricket, and baseball, as well as participant sports, such as croquet, lawn tennis, and bicycling, were eclipsing pedestrianism. The spiked shoes sold by the A. G. Spalding Company were costly by contemporary standards. In Bolton, England, an amateur runner named Joseph William Foster designed and made his own spiked running pumps in 1892 after finding available
models too heavy; they were the foundation of
an athletic shoe company that later became Reebok. By 1897 the Sears, Roebuck catalogue featured many specialized sports shoes, including calfskin track shoes with spikes, “lace nearly to the toe,” men’s “Kangaroo calf” bicycle shoes, canvas baseball shoes with leather soles and counters, and canvas “gymnasium shoes” with canvas soles. There were “tennis
oxfords” in black sateen and “tennis bals” (“[a]lso used for yachting, baseball and gymnasium”) in white duck, a light grade of canvas. Missing were any shoes for road running or long-distance walking. In fact, most of the men’s and women’s street shoes shown in the catalogue were built on needle lasts that appear grotesquely pointed a century later. But while Sears sold “Feel Ezy” and “Corn
Cure” shoes and police models with wide toe boxes, most of their products must have been agonizing over long distances. The same catalogue featured an assortment of corn and bunion plasters.
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Without help from the shoe industry, runners of the early Boston Marathons of the late 1890s seem to have improvised their shoes from other sports. The 1898 winner, Ronald MacDonald, wore bicycle racing
shoes. His successor in 1899, Lawrence Brignola, used a model with “light leather uppers, lacing nearly to the toes, light leather soles and rubber heels,” according to a newspaper account. Runners of the time used chamois skin inserts covering only the front part of the foot; these probably aggravated blisters. (They also clenched cork grips tightly in their hands, exactly contrary to today’s practice
of avoiding tension in other muscle groups.) Nor were there great improvements for distance running before World War II. The second-prize winner in 1932, John A. Kelley, used indoor high-jump shoes. Despite openings slit in the tight shoes to relieve pressure, Kelley had to drop back with blistered feet. Other runners used de-spiked track shoes and bowling shoes, but these variants do not seem
to have gone into production. “The poorest running shoes manufactured today would be far better than anything we had years ago,” Kelley later remarked. Although a retired English shoemaker named Ritchings custom-made excellent white kid leather shoes for competitors, marathons were agonizing. Runners would soak their feet in beef brine to harden them and rub their shoes with neat’s-foot oil to
soften them.
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Athletic shoes as we know them did not originate with the street shoe industry of a hundred years ago that supplied the pedestrians and most of the early marathoners. They began with the rubber business and a largely
different set of manufacturers and techniques. Native peoples of South America had for centuries used the milky sap of the Hevea tree to coat their
cloaks against rain and even to make shoes and bottles. They filled bowls with
caoutchouc
, as they called the material, and molded it by immersing their feet and then exposing them to flames that solidified the sap, yielding custom-fitting and waterproof if bloblike footwear. In the eighteenth century, French scientists began to study the tree and the process, and to advocate new industrial uses.
By 1770 the first erasers appeared, “[West] India rubbers.” For Northerners as for the Indians, shoes were a natural application for the material, given the rain and mud of both Europe and New England, but processing coagulated rubber was a challenge. Turpentine as a solvent made rubber goods sticky. Newly discovered ether produced better results but was so costly that only personages like Frederick
the Great of Prussia could wear riding boots produced by submerging lasts in a solution of rubber and ether. Nevertheless, by the early eighteenth century consumers were buying footwear of cut sheet-rubber, and (nearly a century before L. L. Bean) a Boston merchant was importing 500,000 pairs of gum shoes made in Brazil on lasts he supplied. In 1832 a U.S. patent was granted for a way of “attaching
India Rubber soles to boots and shoes.” But the fashion was brief. In North America, unlike in England, natural rubber hardened in the cold winters and softened and stuck in the hot summers. By the 1830s the nascent U.S. rubber footwear industry was collapsing.
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In 1839, Charles Goodyear of Massachusetts discovered a combination of sulfur and heat that at last made rubber a serviceable material.
One of his first licensees was the Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company in Naugatuck, Connecticut, later merged into the giant holding company U.S. Rubber, formed out of nine manufacturers in 1892. Today we think of rubber mainly as a tire industry, but even as recently as 1901, half the crude rubber production of the United States was used in footwear, and U.S. Rubber moved into the automotive
market only to diversify and offset fluctuations in the shoe business. Its plants overwhelmingly produced overshoes, galoshes, and boots for miners, fishermen, policemen, and others who worked outdoors or in hazardous conditions. The first sport shoes with rubber were probably the beach slippers first worn in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans and Americans discovered the seashore—previously
considered a desolate, marginal zone of salt-marsh farming—as a summer playground made invigorating by sunlight and salt air. As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has observed, the heat and
shifting movement of sand make it an inviting but exasperating surface. Sand scorches the bare foot but its grains spill into shoes. While Charles Goodyear was developing vulcanization in the United States,
John Boyd Dunlop was finding a way to bond rubber soles to canvas uppers, marketing them as “sand shoes.”
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In the mid-nineteenth century, vulcanized rubber-soled shoes were best known as croquet sandals, specialty footwear selling to the affluent starting in 1868 at $6 per pair, several times the cost of good leather shoes. A few elite pedestrians, at least in England, also used the new material.
Sir John Dugdale Astley, the sport’s reigning arbiter, referred to “india rubber shoes which fitted him like gloves.” In the later nineteenth century, rubber soles spread for special purposes. Thieves and prison guards alike appreciated their silence, hence the enduring nickname “sneakers,” which first appeared in 1873. The rubber joint, called the foxing, between sole and upper reminded others
of the Plimsoll line around ships’ hulls, marking the limit of safe loading. The popularity of the nickname Plimsolls for the footwear suggests that rubber recreational shoes were growing in popularity as early as the later 1870s. New models were introduced for boating, tennis, and cycling.
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The rise of the rubber-soled shoe in the early twentieth century was connected with basketball rather
than with track. Spalding introduced a gum rubber marathon shoe in 1908 but returned to leather in 1913 after complaints of excessive wear. Meanwhile, basketball had originated as a winter sport at a school for YMCA instructors in 1891; by the early twentieth century it was swelling YMCA memberships. It was partly for this market that U.S. Rubber developed its Keds brand, introduced in 1916–17. Several
companies had trademark claims on
Peds
, and
Keds
was less a play on
kids
than a neutral word inspired by the recent success of Kodak. But the name did attract children and parents and helped give the company an identity; until then, U.S. Rubber had remained more of a trust than a modern corporation, with thirty plants and thirty rival brands. Converse All-Stars also appeared in 1917. With B. F.
Goodrich, Dunlop, and Spalding, these competed for the growing sneaker market. Converse, kept out of other outlets by the rubber companies, became a specialist in athletic footwear and began to publish a basketball yearbook that has become a standard reference on the game. Until World War II, the athletic shoe industry remained divided between the makers of leather sports shoes and the sneaker companies
rooted, with a few exceptions like Converse, in the rubber industry. Sneakers of all kinds remained largely limited to sports
and children’s wear; only the Duke of Windsor experimented with them as street shoes.
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Specialized athletic footwear was not widely produced until the late nineteenth century. The Schneider shoe, designed for the increasing number of indoor gymnasiums with wooden floors, has “flexible elastic pads” in its heels for absorbing shocks. Whether or not this design ever went into production, the search for optimal resilience in sports shoes has continued
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The 1930s were important for
athletic footwear because of the growing understanding of the relationship between the skills of athletes and the construction of their shoes: technology following technique. Innovations often came from sports rather than from manufacturers’ laboratories. It was in this period that Vitale Bramani, an Italian mountaineer, developed a new sole material after six of his climbing companions perished
because they had discarded their heavy approach boots before being surprised by a storm and had to spend the night in mid-climb in lightweight boots. Vibram made possible a single boot with both strength and grip. Around the same time, the American Paul Sperry introduced a new kind of deck shoe with a superior grip after nearly dying in a sailing accident. The young Bavarian shoe manufacturer Adolf
Dassler, founder of the later Adidas, was also an athlete. Dassler’s great achievement of the 1950s was a new kind of soccer shoe that matched a new style of play. The dominant British-made models were boots of heavy vegetable-tanned leather. Their studs of layered leather were attached with bent-back iron nails that could penetrate the insole when the studs shrank after repeated wearings and exposure
to moisture. Painful as they could be, they were well suited to the prevailing English “kick and rush” method. Dassler worked with West Germany’s international team to make possible a new style of play, based on mobility and control of the ball. To reduce weight and aid passing, he lowered the shoe’s profile and softened the toes, replacing heavy materials with soft kangaroo leather. Interchangeable
spikes replaced the built-up leather studs. To maintain spacing of the eyelets he used stiffer leather trim, stabilized with two and later three stripes across the instep. In 1954, these innovations combined to help the German team win the World Cup from the Hungarians, thanks to their ability to change from short to long studs after rain had drenched the field.
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