The Invention of Roller Skates
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be doing one of our invention episodes. And the subject is roller skates. I was going to say this is kind of a sequel to an episode we did a few weeks ago about the invention of ice skates. But it might be more accurate to say that episode was a prequel to this one because...

From what I recall, Rob, you wanted to look at skating as a subject because your family has gotten into roller skating or blading lately. Is that the case?

Yeah, yeah. And it's not a huge story, really. But essentially, I have some friends who got into roller skating during the pandemic, which, you know, increased my awareness of this individual's involvement in various local skating meetups and so forth. And my now 13-year-old also recently got into the roller skating scene as well. And so I've just been really impressed by, first of all, the fact that roller skating is back. I remember as a kid in the 90s,

seeing various bits of media about rollerblades. And I was just like, oh, well, this is the future. Rollerblades are the future. Roller skating is just done.

Oh, that's funny. I feel like when I was a kid in the 90s, like I considered both roller skating and blading to be in. But blading was the more extreme version in a very 90s television commercial coded kind of way. It's the code red flavor of skating. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely. I mean, there were, of course, plenty of roller skating rinks around. So I didn't think it was it was actually dead. But the thing I would see on MTV and so forth was the roller blading.

And so it seemed like the future. So it's nice to see that it's the roller skating itself is back and with such gusto. And then the other part of the equation is that I was just really impressed by the culture of many of these rollerblading groups. You know, there's a lot of

like progressive and inviting aspects. There's more than a little disco culture still thrown in there. And so I was, yeah, I was interested in the invention of the roller skate. And we quickly realized, well, you can't talk about roller skates without talking about ice skates. And so we ended up doing that whole episode just on ice skates.

Right, because it just so happens that ice skating is an earlier invention. So we had to talk about it first. But here we are. Much earlier. Yeah, much earlier. But here we are with roller skates today. That's right. And I imagine we have a number of skaters out there. I myself am not a roller skater. Oh, okay. I can't remember the last time I was on skates.

I'm not saying I won't pick it up at some point in the future, but as of right now, I just ice skate maybe once a year, though I did not in the past year. So maybe it's every two years I ice skate. But it is indeed a big deal. I was not just basing it on my own observations here. I looked up an article from 2022. It was published on NPR titled Roller Skating Feels a Lot Like Love and Falling is Just Part of the Process. This was by Kia Miyako Nuttese.

And, yeah, this article points out that there was this huge boom in popularity during the pandemic after having fallen sharply in popularity during the late 20th century. Maybe, and I'm just guessing here, lining up with my 90s kid observations of the rise of the rollerblade.

This is funny because you're making this distinction between roller skating and rollerblading, which I consider really the same thing. It's just like different forms of the shoe. It may be an artificial distinction that I'm really harping on here because, again, I'm not a skater. So people who are actually skaters can probably like chime in and they may disagree.

say, well, yeah, I sometimes wear these, sometimes I wear the others. Or maybe there is some, are there differences between roller skaters and roller bladers? I guess some of the events that I've been to and not participated in, I have seen people using both types of skates.

But this author here also aligns the popularity of roller skating during the 1970s with disco. And again, that's probably a strong reason why you see some disco vibes to some of the current skating culture. I think even in the 90s, one of the skating rinks I went to in Tennessee had a disco ball in it. Yeah. So you might be forgiven just via the consumption of media, right?

into thinking that, okay, disco is dead. It's not really dead. It didn't die. You might likewise think, well, skating also fell off in popularity and it's never coming back, but then it did come back and it's still holding on to that popularity as well. It survived in various groups, maybe just under the radar of a lot of the mainstream. And it's apparently big business today. According to business research insights from earlier this year, the roller skating market size is, quote,

It valued at approximately USD 4.8 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 7.9 billion by 2032. So whether you're hip or square, whether you're concerned with the culture or with just the raw numbers involved in it, I think there's no denying the power of roller skating today.

I mean, it's a it's it's great exercise by by most accounts. And it's also a form of social expression. So I think that's great. I also have not tried it since I was a kid, so I have no idea how hard it would be. Like, literally, I could put them on and just pick it right up. Or maybe it would be a grueling discovery that I just can't do this anymore. I have I really don't know. I think you'd be comfortable. Either of us would be comfortable in like an hour or so. Yeah.

That's encouraging. I was going to say I'd like to pick it up, but the

I was just now remembering another reason that it was always kind of difficult when I was a kid because I did have a pair of skates when I was a kid. But it was that my neighborhood is like my house is on a hill. So it was like I always felt like, I don't know if I can like if I go down the hill, can I get back up or am I have to take my skates off or am I going to careen into something? So I don't know. Maybe maybe skating is easier if you live in a very flat place. Wait, are you saying that you were?

trepidatious about skating to the skating rink because there were hills involved? No, no, no. About skating around my house, like around on the sidewalks and streets around my house and stuff. Oh, okay. Yes, I see. Yeah, because to be clear for anyone that's not familiar, like there are different modes of skating. Like you just go and skate in a rink, but then there are plenty of people who go out and skate, you know, on various designated streets and so forth. You know, there are different types of wheels that correspond with exactly what you're skating on.

So one surprising thing that I remember we discovered when we were preparing for the ice skating episode is that the core physics question of how and why ice skating works in effect, why is ice so slippery? Why can you achieve such low friction motion over the top of it?

Uh, that question is not fully solved. We have much better ideas than we used to about the answer to that. Uh, but as of the past few years, it has still been an active area of research, uh,

I do not believe any such mysteries exist with regards to roller skating. It's not like a baffling scientific question. Roller skating does not rely on any strange low friction quasi liquid layers, you know, at the surface of ice. Instead, it's the principle of the wheel and axle, which at the risk of sounding hubristic, I think we've got that one pretty well figured out. Yes. But despite the fact that there's less scientific mystery involved in how roller skating works,

doesn't mean that the history is uninteresting. And there are a lot of twists and turns here.

Yeah, more so than I was expecting. But then again, you get into inventions from this time period, and it often does end up a little more complex with parallel discoveries, parallel breakthroughs, different independent creations of the same thing, and then, of course, folks trying to make money off of those inventions. That's right. So I think one thing we can

Definitely say about the invention of roller skates is that there is no clear moment in history that can be pinpointed as the earliest roller skate.

There was a, from what I can tell, very economically and historically important roller skate model created in the 1860s by an American businessman named James Plimpton. And I think we'll come back and discuss the success of that model in a bit and then other models around it. But it's worth identifying first that we know for certain Plimpton was not the first person to put wheels on shoes. We have many well-documented earlier examples. And then beyond that, I'd say,

Because of how obvious the concept is, like applying the wheel and axle principle to the bottom of a shoe, we can just guess that there were almost certainly even older examples than the earliest ones we know about, probably going back hundreds or even thousands of years. But we simply don't have any evidence of those models, no written records and no physical remains. But it would be foolish, in my opinion, to assume that nobody had ever done this.

Right, right. And this ties in with our past discussions on the wheel itself, because the wheel and the wheeled vehicle as concepts can be found in various cultures and different times, even among people who did not make use of the wheel for practical labor or conveyance.

A wheeled vehicle's usefulness, as we discussed, depends on the underlying state of roads. And then there's a similar situation in play with roller skates to a large degree. Though I was surprised to find out that off-road roller skating does seem to be a thing today. You can find videos of it. You can buy these skates. But for the most part, historically, it was not a thing. Yeah.

Like roller skating in the mud? I guess. People are going out there and getting it. So more power to them. But yeah,

But yeah, I can only imagine just as at various points in the past, probably lost to the myths of history, you know, various people made little toys on wheels. Some of those toys were stepped upon. Some of those toys were intentionally placed under feet. And someone was a joker at a party somewhere. Sorry, when we're done here, I got to look up these off-road skating and see what it's about. I'm imagining people with like monster truck tires on their feet. I think that's kind of the vibe that, uh,

As with all of this, listeners, write in. We want to hear from rollerbladers, rollerskaters, and any off-road rollerskaters out there as well. ♪

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So I mentioned that we know very well about some earlier roller skate models than the ones that achieved commercial success in the 19th century. So what were some of these earlier roller skate models for which we do have solid evidence?

There is a commonly cited book length work on this, which does get into the history out. And fortunately I was not able to get a copy of this book. Uh, it's called the history of roller skating by James Turner with Michael Zaidman published by the national museum of roller skating. I think this is in Nebraska seems to be out of print. You can get a used copy on Amazon for only $360. Should we go in on that? Yeah.

I mean, we could have with more time, I guess. But so anyway, wasn't able to get a copy of this book myself. But Michael Pollack, the author of a short 2015 article in The New York Times called The History of Roller Skates, apparently was able to get a copy somehow. And he says that Turner and Zaidman, the authors of this book, write that the earliest recorded inventor of roller skates.

was an eccentric 18th century Flemish inventor and instrument maker named John Joseph Merlin, AKA the ingenious mechanic. And that's mechanic with a CK at the end. So, you know, it's legit. Yeah.

So John Joseph Merlin lived from 1735 to 1803. I looked this guy up and it turns out he was a real character. So I would like to just sort of go into his biography for a bit. I mean, with a name like that. Yeah. It's got to be good.

So I want to mention a couple of nice accessible sources on Merlin. One is a blog post hosted by the Internet Cello Society because he was also an instrument maker called Magical Merlin. This was written by an American cellist and music professor named Sarah Freiberg. Also, I found a good 2018 post on a historical blog known as London Historians by an author named Mike Rendell.

A bit of basic biography. John Joseph Merlin was born in 1735 in the city of Huy, which is today in the country of Belgium. I think at the time it was in a principality that doesn't exist anymore and I don't remember the name of.

But when he was a young man, Merlin studied for six years at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, where he learned a lot of what would what would become useful in his career as a mechanical inventor and engineer.

In the year 1760, at the age of 25, he moved to London, first, I think, as part of a diplomatic group, shortly after which he made friends with a bunch of fashionable and influential people in London intellectual and artistic circles.

Merlin was a man of many talents. Most notably, he invented a bunch of beautiful and dazzling mechanical automata. Rob, we've done episodes on automata from this period in the past. These were sort of 18th century clockwork robots. The word robot could be a little misleading because robots

That might imply some level of like decision making or agency. These machines did not in any way exercise decision making action independence agency, anything like that. They were more like ingenious, complex windup toys that would go through a series of predetermined motions, but still remarkable engineering achievements. Yeah.

Yeah, as I recall, it kind of varies from creator to creator, from one creation to another. But there was sometimes a vibe of something more like pure novelty. And then other times there was this kind of...

contemplative aspect to it you know sometimes you were supposed to really think about what you were looking at other times it was maybe like just a little more uh for humor's sake oh i know exactly what you're talking about i thought you were going in a different direction though but you're exactly right some of these i think were meant to illustrate they were kind of works of art in a way meant to illustrate philosophical principles to connect to different theories about

about the origin of movements and even theology and cosmology and what it meant for things to be alive. And so, yeah, we've talked about that in the past, how these works connected to those different schools of philosophy at the time. But the other distinction I was making was

Yeah. Yeah.

in the degree to which things were automated. Go back into the archives. I believe we have episodes on the pooping duck. Yes. This being a key focal point of some of these issues. But like I said, despite the fact that they were not actually like independent agentic robots in any way, they were more like very intricate, complex windup toys, still remarkable engineering achievements. And if you want to see one of the,

of, uh, one of Merlin's co-creations that he made actually with the help of a bunch of other people, I think in a project that was, uh, helmed by a guy named James Cox, who I'll get to in a minute. Um, you can look up the silver Swan automaton, which still exists and you can see today, uh, or at least could as of recently, uh, I think probably still today at the Bose museum in Northern England. Uh, so just to describe it quickly.

This is a life-sized swan made out of silver. Apparently a huge mass of silver went into its creation. And it's sitting on a tray, a platform that represents a stream where the water is made out of these long, thin glass rods. And so this thing still works today. You can wind it up and see it move. And when you do that, the glass rods move back and forth and resemble running water. Hmm.

And the stream part is surrounded by silver leaves. Again, you can look up video of this. It's kind of amazing how graceful and smooth and lifelike the movements of the swan itself are. The swan kind of swivels its neck and it does that thing swans do where they turn around and they stick their head back under their wing or toward their back. It does that.

And then it dips its head into the water and catches a fish. Although this very mysterious little tune plays on hidden bells. Part of the, the automaton is a, just a giant music box that plays a selection of several different tunes. Um, so it is a, an amazing thing to watch in action.

Especially realizing that this thing was completed in like the 1770s. Yes, I'm looking at a video that you sent me of this swan in action. And yeah, these are very fluid movements here. I was expecting something a lot clunkier. Yeah, something more kind of start and stop, jerking up and that sort of thing. But no, it's very graceful. And people at the time commented on this, like how graceful and lifelike it was.

Uh, but John Joseph Merlin was not on. Sorry, what? I was just, I was just thinking like, was he still a diplomat at the time? Was there anything to do? I don't know if he was, I don't know how long he stayed a diplomat.

Because a lot of work evidently went into this. Yeah, huge amount. Yeah. But Merlin was not only a clock punk silver swan crafter, he was also just an all-purpose inventor and designer, both of functional items, things like medical devices and measuring instruments.

And also bizarre novelties like a, like a real life-size mechanical chariot with an automatic horse whip that he would ride around in Hyde Park. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

In addition, he was a renowned instrument maker. One of the sources I mentioned that posed by a cellist named Sarah Freiberg, her introduction to Merlin in writing this piece is actually that she happened to acquire a Baroque cello that he himself made in London in 1784.

So Merlin was originally probably trained in the art of clockmaking, and he would end up working for some time beginning in 1766 for this British inventor and jeweler named James Cox. Cox was one of the co-creators of the Silver Swan.

Uh, Cox was also sort of a showman and he operated a museum or actually I think multiple sort of arcades and museums. Uh, one of which was this showroom for mechanical marvels at a street called spring gardens in Westminster. And Merlin was Cox's chief mechanic.

Merlin went into business for himself in the 1770s. He filed his first patent in 1773 for a type of Dutch oven that had a built-in jack for rotating meat. I've seen this described in some sources as like the first rotisserie. I don't know if that.

Uh, because I feel like we've talked about earlier rotisseries. I don't know. Maybe it's the first of some kind of rotisserie. I would, yeah, I would, I would venture that it's something like that. I mean, there's no dog involved in here. No, that's what we talked about. Yes. Animal operated belt. The turn spit dog. Yes. The turn spit dog. That's what it was.

Um, and Merlin also patented improvements to musical instrument designs. Uh, he did some variations on the harpsichord. He also created all new instruments, which as far as I can tell, none of these really caught on. Uh, one example that Freiberg mentions is an instrument called a pentachord, which she describes as a quote, small five string cello, which is tuned C G D a D. Uh, at some point, uh,

James Cox, his, uh, the guy he was working for James Cox's finances kind of went South. And so Merlin decided to set up his own museum. So in 1783, he acquired a property at Prince's street. This is also in most Westminster and he called it Merlin's mechanical museum. I am exerting extreme, uh, self-control to not accidentally call this Merlin's shop of mystical wonders. But I was like, I would start typing that in the notes over and yeah.

Uh, but no, it was Merlin's mechanical museum. I also have, uh,

Heard it said, I think this was by a museum tour guide who was showing off the silver Swan. I think said that it was sometimes called Merlin's cave. But anyway, this place was crammed with dazzling automata, weird furniture and other inventions and collectors pieces. Uh, Rendell and his blog post mentions a bunch of other inventions by Merlin. I just want to highlight a few of them. I already alluded to the mechanical chariot complete with a whip, uh,

Uh, this was interesting because it also had a type of odometer to measure, you know, a distance measuring device, distance traveled, uh, which that ties into another invention episode we've done in the past. We did the odometer at some point, uh, tracing that all the way back to inventions in the ancient world. Uh, but this had a version of an odometer and, uh, Merlin, uh, called that odometer the way wise. And he would apparently ride this chariot around through Hyde park to kind of advertise his magnificent works. He,

He had something else that he created called the Gauty chair. This was a form of wheelchair, uh, not with large wheels on the sides, like you would see on modern devices, but it had a set of four smaller wheels near the floor, uh,

I was looking at, you can actually look up pictures of this that exist today. And so you can see sort of how it was put together, but I couldn't figure out by looking at these or reading descriptions exactly how it works. It looks like it's operated by a pair of hand turned cranks on the arm rests. And I'm, I'm not sure how these would both steer and propel the chair at the same time. Maybe there's some mechanism I'm missing here. Likewise. I can't tell what's going on with like the foot cranks.

pad down there if it's just for resting your feet on or if there's some sort of pressure applied there. Oh, could it be like a pedal that maybe propels maybe? Yeah, but there is kind of a foot rest below the chair. But otherwise, it looks like a regular piece of furniture. It's just affixed with like all these wheels and cranks and stuff. Yeah, designed for individuals suffering from the gout, I assume.

That that's what I assume based on it being called the Gaudi chair, though, I assume it could work for, you know, anybody who has mobility issues and Merlin apparently did design a number of devices like medical devices and devices to help people with various physical disabilities. Yeah.

He designed some kind of prosthetic gripping devices for people without arms and a set of playing cards, which could be read by the blind. This was presumably some kind of precursor to Braille notation. This would have been before Braille, but I guess some kind of bumps or something that could be felt.

And he also invented a bunch of types of mechanical moving furniture or what was sometimes called transforming furniture. And this ranged from relatively mundane creations like, you know, like, you know, a rotating tea table. Okay. It's not hard to imagine. You can, you might see things like that today. Uh,

to something that Freiberg includes in her write-up that was advertised as, quote, the Quartetto Music Cabinet. It contains flutes, violins, and music books, and by touching a spring key, it will rise to a proper height and form music desks for four performers. I think it sounds very futuristic, really. Kind of like adjustable standing desks, sort of, but for musicians, and includes a complex opening and closing cabinet with different compartments.

Uh, he also, uh, I think put together a lot of different kinds of weights and measuring machines, uh, and then also clocks, including he was, he was a co-creator of a so-called perpetual motion clock. This was again with James Cox, uh, dubious about this one because obviously perpetual motion machines that, that doesn't exist in reality. Uh,

Cox, I think, claimed this really was a perpetual motion machine. But from what I've read, it was powered by a mercury barometer responding to changes in atmospheric pressure in order to contract the spring. And of course, this would not be a true perpetual motion machine. It would be requiring this external input. Right, right.

Otherwise, it'd be like saying that a windmill is perpetual motion machine. Exactly. Yes. So Merlin was active in the London social scene of his time, and he was known as kind of weird and flamboyant, and he liked to party. Yeah.

I came across comments written by the English novelist Fanny Burney about Merlin. She spent time with him because her father, the musicologist Charles Burney, was good friends with Merlin. So she knew him well and she wrote about him as follows.

Meaning he does not lack words. He had a big vocabulary. He does not want words, but he arranges and pronounces them very comically.

He is humbly grateful for all civilities that are shown him, but is warmly and honestly resentful for the least slight.

You know, this is exactly the sort of sort of dude that you don't want to slight because I feel like you run a great risk of being reduced in size and forced to play around with the nutcrackers. Yeah, he's septimus pretorius or something. No. Yeah. So he was like fun and weird, but apparently also maybe kind of a big mouth and quick to take offense. And and I've also read in other sources them.

other people mentioning this thing, she says that he was known for having a robust vocabulary for not a native English speaker, but for putting words in a weird order when speaking English. So I'm kind of imagining him as Yoda. Yeah. Yeah. It's also weird the way this is phrased because they're like, oh, he's it's basically sounds like they're making fun of his accent while still crediting his vocabulary and grasp of the English language. This is so funny because he's

conforming to what i would think of as a later storytelling archetype like the eccentric foreign professor with a strange accent yeah who who is like an inventor of curiosities uh but this has got to be before i thought such an archetype existed um so i don't know maybe it's just a coincidence or maybe could it be based on this guy in any way i don't know

I mean, it would not surprise me. We've seen other examples of various historical individuals having a great deal of influence over how various stereotypes are interpreted.

But so anyway, he connected to a bunch of famous people in his time. Johann Christian Bach, the son of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach, apparently performed instruments, performed on instruments made by Merlin. And another very important historical connection, this is mentioned in that blog post by Rendell.

is that there's a firsthand account of a visit to Merlin's museum by a young Charles Babbage, who would go on years later to invent the very historically important mechanical computing device known as the Difference Engine. Babbage's mechanical computer designs and concepts laid the groundwork for the electronic computers that would come to be the basis of most or maybe all of today's digital technology.

Uh, so Babbage wrote about this experience of going to Merlin's cave. He says that Merlin took him on a tour of like a private gallery to show him like the special projects.

And Babbage says, quote, there were two uncovered female figures of silver about 12 inches high. And he describes one of the figures as an admirable Dan Seuss, meaning a female ballerina, and says she had a silver bird perched on a forefinger of her right hand. And then the bird would move. It would shake its tail and flap its wings and also open and close its little beak.

And then of the silver ballerina herself, he said, quote, the lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination and irresistible. And Babbage was so struck by these little mechanical objects, these sort of precursors to robots, that he would come back and buy the exhibits in 1834 after Merlin's death. What a fascinating individual. So very much part of like a very crucial moment

technological ecosystem of the day. And to be clear, like you pointed out, not just creating sheer novelties, but just seemingly constantly innovating. And like, I can only imagine like following every idea, good or bad,

useful or just entertaining that seems to enter into his head. Yes. Yeah. You get the idea of just frenetic energy, constant moving about and doing different things and, and being a perhaps touchy, but also beloved weirdo of the time. Nice. Um, so anyway, uh, onto Merlin's roller skates episode, this is back to back to the main event here.

So one of John Joseph Merlin's now most famous inventions was actually one of the simplest, especially when you compare it to like the intricate, you know, clockwork ballet dancers and the silver avians and all that. And that was the roller skate.

Now, again, was Merlin the first person ever to put wheels on a show on a shoe? Uh, very doubtful in, in her article, Freiberg mentions that Merlin, uh, quote, probably improved skates, which first appeared in Holland in, uh, around 1700. But there is no like credited inventor or further detail of those earlier models. It's just like some things like this probably existed and he improved them. Right.

But again, Turner and Zaidman say he's the earliest recorded inventor of a roller skate. So one of the things that makes Merlin's model historically interesting is that, uh, ever the showman Merlin staged a, a wild public demonstration of his invention at a fancy masquerade ball around 1760. And it went extremely badly. Yeah.

An account of this incident appears in a book called Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes written by Thomas Busby in 1805. And Busby tells the story as follows, speaking about Merlin, quote, one of his ingenious novelties was a pair of skates. This is spelled S-K-A-I-T-E-S. That sounds about right. Yeah. Okay.

a pair of skates contrived to run on wheels supplied with these and a violin. He mixed in the motley group of one of Mrs. Cowley's masquerades at Carlisle house. When not having provided the means of retarding his velocity or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror of more than 500 pounds value, dashed it to Adams, who,

broke his instrument to pieces and wounded himself most severely. Oh my goodness. Don't you hate when that happens? So he's like, I have invented wheels for feet. I have made wheels for feet. Everybody's got to see this. So I'm going to roll around the masquerade. Everybody's got their little, their mask and their fancy costumes. I'm going to play the violin while riding on these things, but he forgot to put brakes in them. And so he crashes into a mirror, shatters it to pieces or to Adams in the words of Busby.

And, uh, and everybody's, I guess, I don't know, were they laughing at him? Were they mad? Were they sorry for him? It doesn't say what the crowd's reaction is. I mean, given that he's also bleeding perhaps severely at this point, I mean, I can only imagine the stunned silence. Uh, so to, to note Merlin's design for these skates, it sounds like it was a, the wheels are an inline orientation, so not side by side and two wheels, each two wheels per foot.

I don't, I'm not a skater myself, so I don't know. It sounds like that wouldn't be enough. It sounds like you want more wheels, maybe. I don't know. Yeah. And I, some of the, the, the, the innovations that would come after Merlin, but before proper, what we would think of as, you know, modern,

more contemporary roller skates tended to have, I think at least three wheels. Yeah. But again, this is, this is important. Merlin's roller skate design did not include brakes, no toe brakes and no back, no heel brakes. So there was no built-in ability to slow down or stop or really change direction. And,

as it says. So, yeah, it was more, this strikes me as more of like an idea than something really like honed in and made practical. Yeah, yeah, very much a novelty that he was willing and excited to pursue there in front of everybody. Again, this is the, seems like the kind of individual who would just follow any mechanical fantasy that seemed to enter his head. ♪

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declare independence from dirty, outdated furniture. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. So that is the John Joseph Merlin roller skating experience. His model obviously would not be the last one. And there were many innovations that would come along in the following decades. People would keep making different kinds of little roller skates. And roller skating did sort of seem to catch on going into the 19th century.

Yeah, Merlin's roller skating story is clearly the best. It's the most entertaining. I think the basic reality is that a lot of the subsequent and probably previous stories

roller skating invention stories were pretty boring and are lost to history. Somebody made this novelty device that you strap onto your feet so you can skate around sort of like an ice skater, but with nowhere near as much speed, power, or control. And then people just forgot that these inventions existed or they forgot about the inventor. But yeah, they were available. And this is where we come back around to James Plimpton,

who lived 1928 through 1911, an American inventor who, this is one of those inventors, invention stories, innovator stories that is also not that exciting because it's somebody like seeing a way they can improve upon something, making that improvement and then being able to own it and sell it and also litigate it.

Those are, I mean, those are also, it's part of invention. We've touched on stories related to that before on the show. But, I mean, it's less magical when it's about just suing people for infringing on your copyright. That's a lot of history. There's, yeah, pursuing intellectual property things or just figuring out a way to market something so that it catches on or finding a way to make something profitable.

to make a design profitable. That's a big thing, too. Yeah. But still, I mean, still, the story of Plimpton is interesting in its own right. He had at least one prior invention because, you know, to call yourself an inventor, you need at least one or two in the portfolio. He invented the 1853 Plimpton cabinet bed.

which, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society's Beehive blog, was seemingly something he invented due to a practical need in his own home, probably due to his own marriage the year earlier. I think, like, at this point, maybe they had a kid on the way. It was his first major invention. And this is another case where he did not invent the cabinet bed, a bed that folds up into a cabinet. But he came up with a variation on it that I'm to understand was aimed at requiring, like, a little less effort to fold and unfold. Mm-hmm.

And so kind of like Merlin, you know, Plimpton seems like he was one of these individuals who was, you know, always thinking about ways to improve on a given device, though perhaps, I mean, more than perhaps, I think certainly with more of an entrepreneurial spirit to things as opposed to just a...

more of a sheer exuberance for invention and mechanisms. And so basically around 1860, according to the Beehive, a

So Plimpton takes ill, goes to the doctor and the doctor says, I think you should take up some physical activity. I think you should take up ice skating. And Plimpton being a northerner would have been familiar with ice skating and, you know, maybe even had some history with it. And maybe he was, you know, falling back on something he did as a kid. I'm not sure. We don't have all the details.

But what happens when summer rolls around is you may find yourself unable to ice skate anymore. And so keen to continue his wellness exercises, he bought himself a pair of roller skates or what was passing for roller skates at the time and proceeded to think about ways to improve upon them. Because much like we were talking about with Merlin's roller skates, these would have been very fixed skates.

strapped onto your boots or your shoes. They allowed you to go forwards or backwards, but not take any turns. And also, I think there may have been some challenges with stopping when you needed to stop.

But yeah, there were various versions of this. I read that there are some early roller skates attributed to a Dutchman by the name of Hans Brintner from the same century. But these were largely considered not true roller skates because you could not turn in them. Hmm.

I mean, think about a roller skating rink. Part of the whole deal of going to the roller skating rink is you're going to go around in a circle over and over again, or at least an oval. Right. So at this point, again, to be clear, commercially available roller skates were very much around. And we've already...

I think firmly established some early examples of things like roller skates. And we speculated on even the ancient existence of things like roller skates. But I know you and I kept both, both of us kept coming across mentions of a 1743 London theater production in which actors had roller skates on,

simulating ice skating, uh, for theatrical purposes. Yeah. I came across mention of this, uh, use in a theater production in 1743 in, uh, in a J store daily article that I think you and I both read. Um,

But I had some questions about that. Did you say you were able to dig into what this claim was about the play? I dug into it more with no real satisfying answers. So I would say first and foremost, kind of following along with things we've been discussing already, the idea that

in the year 1743, or even earlier, or certainly later, the idea that somebody staging a production of some sort in London or elsewhere could have said, hey, what if, in order to create the theatrical illusion of ice skating, what if we used wheelie skates instead? What if we did that? Could we pull that off? It seems perfectly reasonable to assume folks at least tried this out.

If not, perfected it to some degree and did an entire series of performances. Yeah, but what is the origin of this claim? I think that was the thing I was having a hard time figuring out. Yeah, as far as I can tell, looking at various sources that mention this, I just can't find any concrete details. And the details kind of vary, too. Like, for instance...

The JSTOR Daily article mentions something about how it might have been a production of a Tom Lockwood play. And then I try and research that and like, who's Tom Lockwood? No evidence of such a playwright as far as I could tell. Or maybe it's a really obscure playwright, a lost playwright, or it could be an error of record keeping in history.

I found another reference to this idea in a 1999 article by Gilbert Norton, Passing Fashions but No Sustainable Market, A History of Roller Skating in Austria Before 1914. Oh, okay. And it states that this was a performance at the Old Drury Lane Theater, which is still there in London's West End. And this article states that it was a play by Thomas Hood.

Or I should state, I should stress at least a Thomas Hood, but certainly not the Thomas Hood who lived 1799 through 1845. Nor could it possibly be his son, Tom Hood, who lived 1835 through 1874, who lived in the

So we run into a similar situation here. There's some sort of error here. If it was a Tom or Thomas Hood play, it had to be later. Or if it was in this given year of 1743, it had to be a different playwright or a different theater and so forth.

I don't want to presume because I was never able to wrap my head around what the source of the confusion was here. But I wonder if this the error is just that this was not actually a play in the 18th century, but in the 19th century, if it was the 1840s. That would that would streamline things a lot because then it could be a Tom or Thomas Hood play. And even more importantly, it would place it a

alongside a more well-documented case of roller skates being used to create the theatrical illusion of ice skates, that being an 1849 French opera production of Meyer Beers' The Prophet, which featured performers on roller skates. Okay, yeah, that would make sense. But again, we can't adjudicate this question, but this seems possible to me. Yeah, but the reality is...

At some point in history, yes, roller skates were used for perhaps the first time on the stage to create the illusion of ice skating. But OK, so back to the domain of business.

Yes, yes. So Plimpton comes around. He's trying these out. The skates that he's trying are going to be crude. They're going to be awkward. Apparently, some of these you could make turns in, but with difficulty. So nothing close to the maneuverability of ice skating. So especially if you were hoping to trade in your ice skates for roller skates during the summer and have anything like the same experience, you were in for a great deal of disappointment. Mm-hmm.

I was reading about some of these earlier commercially available skates. And according to the birth of the roller skate by John Exel, 2011, on The Engineer, an 1819 patented roller skate, the work of French inventor M. Pieterblad, had metal wheels and were

I don't know if this criticism holds true, but there were arguments that you could barely lift your foot with these on and that on top of it, they were so ugly that the quote fairer sex would never wear them. Um,

Joe, I included an image here of this particular skate. I think you'll agree it neither looks tremendously ugly or really all that heavy, but maybe it was actually heavy. Yeah, maybe it's made of tungsten. I don't know. The wheels are supposedly metal. I can't tell to what extent they are in this image, but... Solid metal, like not even hollow? Yeah, yeah, maybe so. Huh.

Well, yeah. So this would have been a design that comes well after Merlin, but well before Plimpton, kind of in between, in the middle between them. Right.

Another example would be the three-wheel juvenile inline skate. The dates on these are found like 1860 through 1863, including an image here for you, Joe. And basically, it is what it sounds like. Instead of two wheels inline strapped beneath a shoe or boot like we were referencing earlier, this would be three. Yeah.

So this is what Plimpton was working with. And his main adjustments to the skates of his time were just largely related to the exact layout of the wheels. He went with a quad wheel or rocker arrangement that was more comfortable to wear and far easier to turn. And

And for the most part, this is the same design you find on roller skates today. There have been all sorts of minor adjustments to this, but essentially it is accurate to say that Plimpton innovates slash invents the modern roller skate with his patent.

And it largely remains the way people were skating off of the ice until around 1979. And that's when there's an attempt to sort of redo the ice-to-roller transfer, generating a modern roller skate based on modern ice skates. And this becomes the inline skate or roller blade. Okay.

So the history of roller skates really does start, the early designs are pretty much all inline, the roller blade. And then we get the innovation of the quad design, the two axles, each with two wheels in the orientation like a car. This solves a lot of problems with roller skates. And then we find ways to go back to the inline design and make it more comfortable and desirable. Yeah.

Yeah, this really got me to thinking about the way that we might think about inventions based on our own sort of vocabulary of technology. Like growing up, I kind of thought of a roller skate as a car or a toy car that is on the bottom of your foot. But as we've been discussing, the roller skate was invented as a playoff of the ice skate. And it, for the most part, was not created with the idea of strapping small carriages to the bottom of your feet. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times when we're thinking about the history of technology, we like retrospectively, we don't have access to the same chain of a visual analogies that people were using when they were working prospectively. Does that make sense? Yeah. And it, and this is all fascinating when you think like, I, again, I think back to, uh, being a kid in the nineties, seeing rollerblades and thinking, well, that's brilliant. They're making a roller skate like an ice skate. Yeah.

But of course, this was always part of the equation. And the box looks like it has lasers on it. Yeah.

I love this quote, by the way, from The Beehive that kind of sums up what happened next for Plimpton. Quote, James Plimpton spent the rest of his life selling, improving and litigating his patent. So, I mean, no shame is a businessman. But I was reading various accounts of it, you know, in the language of the day talking about protecting the roller skaters in Europe by litigating various patents.

You know, like we're looking after you. We want to make sure that when you roller skate, you're using real Plimpton skates. I don't know why, but this is made funnier by, I looked him up earlier and I know what James Plimpton looks like. And he's not exactly what I expected. He looks kind of like, he's like Garth Hudson of the band. Like a big beard and somehow kind of looks like an artist. Yeah. Hard, hard to imagine him on roller skates. Just looking at some of these images, but I mean, that's awesome.

So roller skating becomes quite the hit, obviously, and you end up with these various phases where things really pick up. They include in the 1880s.

Oh, man, I was I was looking around at some contemporary writings from this time about about roller skating. And I ran across an 1876 book titled Rinks and Rollers by J.A. Harwood. And I want to read just a bit from this because it's it touches on what on some some some some thoughts at that point regarding the future of roller skating. OK.

How long will this rage for rinking last? Everyone is asking, to which the reply generally is, except from rink owners, oh, it will soon wear itself out. For my part, I doubt that it will die away so rapidly and think that rinking is destined to take a permanent place among the institutions of civilized society.

Rinking. Rinking, yeah. And the name Rinking did not stick, thankfully. But I think the idea that it becomes a part of civilized society absolutely does stick.

He continues,

Oh man, it's not good for your bodies to skate this much.

And so basically, as he continued to explain, the rinks were not open long enough. And so people were just really getting it during the two hours that they could skate. And he was like, this is not healthy. We need skating rinks to be open longer. It needs to be cheaper because people cannot physically or monetarily keep up with their desire to go rinking. I love that. Doesn't make sense in like three ways. Yeah.

But, you know, a little snapshot into roller skating fads and enthusiasm of the time. ♪

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Now, I also was looking into this a little bit. I thought it was interesting to think about roller skating in combination with another major invention of this time period, that being the moving picture. And the earliest depiction of roller skating on film is generally considered to be 1916's The Ring, starring the one and only Charlie Chaplin. OK, so not incidental. This is about this is about skating.

Right. Yeah, the whole thing is. And you can find examples of this. They have it on YouTube, probably on Wikipedia, certainly on archive.org. But yeah, the whole thing takes place on a skating rink. You can watch Charlie Chaplin and the supporting characters skate about.

And, you know, it's entirely possible there was some other, you know, very short silent film project that involves someone skating in the same way that there are various old silent films of people doing other things, you know, running around, riding a horse and so forth. But as far as I know, it was lost if such a thing existed. Yeah. Lots of early films were lost. Yeah.

There's also a 1919 silent film titled Don't Shove starring Harry Lloyd. And this one was likely inspired by the rink, I'm to understand. Is it like a public service announcement or that's just what it's called? It's just another funny. That's all it is. It's just another comedy. I think don't shove because there is some shoving that occurs. And this was probably a rule, you know, when you went to the rink, rinkers don't shove each other. Not sure if they were still calling each other rinkers at that point, but.

And then, according to Turner Classic Movies, a couple of other key moments in the history of roller skate cinema include Modern Times from 1936 and Shall We Dance from 1937. And I think it's kind of potentially telling here because even in these just few cinematic examples here, we maybe get an idea of some of the ups and downs of roller skating popularity. You know, we see...

There's like, for instance, another example is a 1938 black and white Popeye short titled A Date to Skate. And at this point, we're very much into the period of the Second World War, during which skating experienced yet another boom period as people in the U.S. looked for distractions from global events.

And so we see, and also I found it interesting that we see some of the early roots of roller derby during this time. Roller derby, of course, would have to be its own episode, but this kind of apparently kicked off as sort of a dance-a-thon on skates that had no real competitive contact sport aspects to it. But the roots of roller derby are there.

How do we get from that to rollerball? Yeah, I mean, there's probably a whole lot you could dissect culturally about the different boom periods of skating. Because, yeah, even just...

Very roughly looking at what we've looked at here, you know, we're looking at the late 19th century. We're looking at the 1930s. We can easily look at skating in the 50s and then again in the 70s, to some degree in the 90s, and then once again, you know, really booming more recently during the pandemic.

Well, it hasn't made its way back into my life yet, but I say fully to it, let the rinking live on. Yeah, I guess one of the key things is to be a rinker, you have to go to a rink. And a lot of skaters don't go to a skating rink or don't exclusively go to a skating rink. So they couldn't really own that terminology, I guess.

They call that de-ranking. De-ranking, yeah. De-rank your mind so you can go outside the rink. We don't need any division in the roller skating community. We don't need like rinkers versus wilders or something. I don't know what the terminology would be. Because ultimately, I think that the message that I've gotten from all this is that roller skating is and should be liberating. Hear, hear. As long as you can recharge your velocity and not crash through a mirror at a fancy ball.

I mean, if anything, the Merlin story has got to be a warning against distracted driving of all sorts. I mean, trying to play the violin while skating, not a good idea, regardless of the skate design, having brakes or not. I mean, that's just not a good idea. Yeah. Also, like the proper environment for testing out your prototype. Is it a masked ball or is it maybe like a padded warehouse somewhere? I think maybe the latter. Sorry. Sorry.

In my mind, the masquerade that he's skating through now is Eyes Wide Shut. I'm sure it wasn't like that. I'm sure it was one of the regular ones. One of the regular ones. Okay.

All right. We're going to go and close out this episode here. But again, we'd love to hear from all of the skaters out there if you have some added insight to throw in here. Just a reminder, the stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes and two season Thursday short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema here.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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