Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 4: And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be
Speaker 4: doing one of our invention episodes, and the subject is
Speaker 4: roller skates. I was going to say this is kind
Speaker 4: of a sequel to an episode we did a few
Speaker 4: weeks ago about the invention of ice skates, but it
Speaker 4: might be more accurate to say that episode was a
Speaker 4: prequel to this one, because from what I recall, Rob,
Speaker 4: you wanted to look at skating as a subject because
Speaker 4: your family has gotten into roller skating or blading lately.
Speaker 4: Is that the case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and not a huge story really, But essentially,
Speaker 2: I have some friends who got into roller skating during
Speaker 2: the pandemic, which you know, increased my awareness of this
Speaker 2: individual's involvement in various local skating meetups and so forth.
Speaker 2: And my now thirteen year old also recently got into
Speaker 2: the roller skating scene as well, and so I've just
Speaker 2: been really impressed by, first of all, the fact that
Speaker 2: roller skating is back. I remember, as a kid in
Speaker 2: the nineties seeing various bits of media about roller blades,
Speaker 2: and I was just like, oh, well, this is the future,
Speaker 2: rollerblades of the future. Roller skating is just done.
Speaker 4: Oh that's funny. I feel like when I was a
Speaker 4: kid in the nineties, like I considered both roller skating
Speaker 4: and blading to be in but blading was the more
Speaker 4: extreme version. In a very nineties television commercial, coded kind
Speaker 4: of way, it's the code red flavor of skating.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean definitely. I mean, there were,
Speaker 2: of course plenty of roller skating rinks around, so I
Speaker 2: didn't think it was it was actually dead, but the
Speaker 2: thing I would see on MTV and so forth, it
Speaker 2: was the roller blading, and so it seemed like the future.
Speaker 2: So it's nice to see that it's the roller skating
Speaker 2: itself is back with such gusto. And then the other
Speaker 2: part of the equation is that I've just really impressed
Speaker 2: by the culture of many of these rollers blading groups.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a lot of progressive and inviting aspects.
Speaker 2: There's more than a little disco culture still thrown in there.
Speaker 2: And so I was, yeah, I was interested in the
Speaker 2: invention of the roller skate. And we quickly realized, well,
Speaker 2: you can't talk about roller skates without talking about ice skates,
Speaker 2: And so we ended up doing that whole episode just
Speaker 2: on ice skates.
Speaker 4: Right, because it just so happens that ice skating is
Speaker 4: an earlier invention, so we had to talk about it first.
Speaker 4: But here we are, sure, yeah, much earlier, but here
Speaker 4: we are with roller skates today.
Speaker 2: That's right, And I imagine we have a number of
Speaker 2: skaters out there. I myself am not a roller skater.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I can't remember the last time I was
Speaker 2: on skates. I'm not saying I won't pick it up
Speaker 2: at some point in the future, but as of right now,
Speaker 2: I just ice skate. Maybe once a year, though I
Speaker 2: did not in the past year, so maybe it's every
Speaker 2: two years I ice skate. But it is indeed a
Speaker 2: big deal. I was not just basing it on my
Speaker 2: own observations here. I looked up an article from twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two who was published on NPR titled roller skating
Speaker 2: feels a lot like love, and following is just part
Speaker 2: of the process. This was by Kia Miyaka Ntez And Yeah,
Speaker 2: this article points out that there was this huge boom
Speaker 2: in popularity during the pandemic after having fallen sharply in
Speaker 2: popularity during the late twentieth century. Maybe, and I'm just
Speaker 2: guessing here lining up with my nineties kid observations.
Speaker 3: Of the rise of the roller blade.
Speaker 4: This is funny because you're you're making this distinction between
Speaker 4: roller skating and roller blading, which I considered really the
Speaker 4: same thing, is just like different different forms of the shoe.
Speaker 2: It may be an artificial distinction that I'm really harping
Speaker 2: on here, because again I'm not a skater, So people
Speaker 2: who are actually skaters can probably like chie in and
Speaker 2: they may say, well, yeah, I sometimes aware these sometimes
Speaker 2: were the others, or maybe there is some are there
Speaker 2: are there differences between roller skaters and rollerbladers. I guess
Speaker 2: some of the events that I've I've been to and
Speaker 2: not participated in, I have seen people using both types
Speaker 2: of skates. But this author here also aligns the popularity
Speaker 2: of roller skating during the nineteen seventies with disco, and
Speaker 2: again that's probably a strong reason why you see some
Speaker 2: disco vibes to some of the current skating culture.
Speaker 4: I think even in the nineties, one of the skating
Speaker 4: rinks I went to in like Tennessee had a disco
Speaker 4: ball in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but so you might be forgiven just you know,
Speaker 2: via the consumption of media into thinking that okay, disco
Speaker 2: is dead, it's not really dead and didn't die. You
Speaker 2: might you might likewise think, well, skating also fell off
Speaker 2: in popularity and it's never coming back. But then it
Speaker 2: did come back and it's still holding on to that
Speaker 2: popularity as well. It you know, survived in various groups,
Speaker 2: maybe just under the radar of a lot of the mainstream,
Speaker 2: and it's apparently big business today. According to Busines Research
Speaker 2: insights from earlier this year, the roller skating market size
Speaker 2: is quote valued it approximately USD four point eight billion
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four and is expected to reach USD
Speaker 2: seven point nine billion by twenty thirty two. So, whether
Speaker 2: you're you're hip or square, whether you're concerned with the
Speaker 2: culture or with just the raw numbers involved in it,
Speaker 2: I think there's no denying the power of roller skating today.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's great exercise by most accounts, and
Speaker 2: it's also a form of social expression, so I think
Speaker 2: that's great.
Speaker 4: I also have not tried it since I was a kid,
Speaker 4: so I have no idea how hard it would be.
Speaker 4: Like I literally I could put them on and just
Speaker 4: pick it right up, or maybe it would be a
Speaker 4: grueling discovery that I just can't do this anymore. I
Speaker 4: really don't know.
Speaker 2: I think you'd be comfortable, either of us would be
Speaker 2: comfortable in like an hour or so.
Speaker 4: That's encouraging. I was going to say I'd like to
Speaker 4: pick it up, but that I was just now remembering
Speaker 4: another reason that it was always kind of difficult when
Speaker 4: I was a kid, because I did have a pair
Speaker 4: of skates when I was a kid, but it was
Speaker 4: that my neighborhood is like my house is on a hill,
Speaker 4: so it was like I always felt like I don't
Speaker 4: know if I can, like if I go down the hill,
Speaker 4: can I get back up or I have to take
Speaker 4: my skates off? Or am I going to careene into something?
Speaker 4: So I don't know. Maybe maybe skating is easier if
Speaker 4: you live in a very flat place.
Speaker 2: Wait are you saying that you were trepidacious about skating
Speaker 2: to the skating rink because there were.
Speaker 4: Hills skating around my house, like around on the sidewalks
Speaker 4: and streets around my house and stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yes, I see. Yeah, Because to be clear,
Speaker 2: for anyone that's not familiar, like there are different modes
Speaker 2: of skating, Like you just go and skate in a rink,
Speaker 2: but then there are plenty of people who go out
Speaker 2: and skate, you know, on various designated streets and so forth.
Speaker 2: You know, and there are different types of wheels that
Speaker 2: correspond with exactly what you're skating on.
Speaker 4: So one surprising thing that I remember we discovered when
Speaker 4: we were preparing for the ice skating episode is that
Speaker 4: the core physics question of how and why ice skating works,
Speaker 4: in effect, why is ice so slippery? Why can you
Speaker 4: achieve such low friction motion over the top of it?
Speaker 4: That question is not fully solved. We have much better
Speaker 4: ideas than we used to about the answer to that,
Speaker 4: but as of the past few years, it has still
Speaker 4: been an active area of research. I do not believe
Speaker 4: any such mysteries exist with regards to roller skating. It's
Speaker 4: not like a baffling scientific question. Roller skating does not
Speaker 4: rely on any strange, low friction quasi liquid layers at
Speaker 4: the surface of ice. Instead, it's the principle of the
Speaker 4: wheel and axle, which, at the risk of sounding hubristic,
Speaker 4: I think we've got that one pretty well figured out. Yes,
Speaker 4: but despite the fact that there's less scientific mystery involved
Speaker 4: in how roller skating works doesn't mean that the history
Speaker 4: is uninteresting. And there are a lot of twists and
Speaker 4: turns here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, more so than I was expecting. But you know,
Speaker 2: then again, and then you get into inventions from this
Speaker 2: time period, and it often does end up a.
Speaker 3: Little more complex, with.
Speaker 2: Parallel discoveries, parallel breakthroughs, different independent creations of the same thing,
Speaker 2: and then of course folks trying to make money off
Speaker 2: of those inventions.
Speaker 4: That's right. So I think one thing we can definitely
Speaker 4: say about the invention of roller skates is that there
Speaker 4: is no clear moment in history that can be pinpointed
Speaker 4: as the earliest roller skate. There was a from what
Speaker 4: I can tell, very economically and historically important roller skate
Speaker 4: model created in the eighteen sixties by an American businessman
Speaker 4: named James Plimpton, and I think we'll come back and
Speaker 4: discuss the success of that model in a bit, and
Speaker 4: then other models around it. But it's worth identifying first
Speaker 4: that we know for certain Plimpton was not the first
Speaker 4: person to put wheels on shoes. We have many well
Speaker 4: documented earlier examples. And then beyond that, I'd say because
Speaker 4: of how obvious the concept is, like applying the wheel
Speaker 4: and axle principle to the bottom of a shoe, we
Speaker 4: can just guess that there were almost certainly even older
Speaker 4: examples than the earliest ones we know about, probably going
Speaker 4: back hundreds or even thousands of years. But we simply
Speaker 4: don't have any evidence of those models, no written records
Speaker 4: and no physical remains. But it would be it would
Speaker 4: be foolish, in my opinion, to assume that they had
Speaker 4: Nobody had ever done this.
Speaker 2: Right right, And this ties ties in with our past
Speaker 2: discussions on the wheel itself, because the wheel and the
Speaker 2: wheel wheeled vehicle as concepts can be found in various
Speaker 2: cultures in different times, even among people who did not
Speaker 2: make use of the wheel for practical labor or conveyance.
Speaker 2: A wheeled vehicle's usefulness, as we discussed, depends on the
Speaker 2: underlying state of roads, and there's a similar situation in
Speaker 2: play with roller skates to a large degree, though I
Speaker 2: was surprised to find out that that off road roller
Speaker 2: skating does seem to be a thing today. You can
Speaker 2: find videos of it, you can buy these skates, but
Speaker 2: for the most part, it was.
Speaker 4: Not a thing like roller skating in the mud is like, I.
Speaker 2: Guess people are going out there and getting it, so
Speaker 2: more power to them. But yeah, I can only imagine
Speaker 2: just as at various points in the past, probably lost
Speaker 2: to the mists of history, you know, various people made
Speaker 2: little toys on wheels. Some of those toys were stepped upon,
Speaker 2: some of those toys were intentionally placed under feet, and
Speaker 2: someone was a joker at a party somewhere.
Speaker 4: Sorry, when we're done here, I got to look up
Speaker 4: these off road skating and see what it's about. I'm
Speaker 4: imagining people with like monster truck tires on their feet.
Speaker 2: I can think that's kind of the vibe that. As
Speaker 2: with all of this listeners right in, we want to
Speaker 2: hear from rollerbladers, roller skaters, and any off road roller
Speaker 2: skaters out there as well.
Speaker 4: So I mentioned that we know very well about some
Speaker 4: earlier roller skate models than the ones that achieved commercial
Speaker 4: success in the nineteenth century. So what were some of
Speaker 4: these earlier roller skate models for which we do have
Speaker 4: solid evidence. There is a commonly cited book length work
Speaker 4: on this which does get into the history out. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: I was not able to get a copy of this
Speaker 4: book it's called The History of Roller Skating by James
Speaker 4: Turner with Michael Zaidman, published by the National Museum of
Speaker 4: Roller Skating. I think this is in Nebraska. Seems to
Speaker 4: be out of print. You can get a used copy
Speaker 4: on Amazon for only three hundred and sixty dollars. Should
Speaker 4: we go in on that?
Speaker 2: How we could have with more time, I guess so.
Speaker 4: Anyway, wasn't able to get a copy of this book myself.
Speaker 4: But Michael Pollock, the author of a short twenty fifteen
Speaker 4: article in The New York Times called The History of
Speaker 4: Roller Skates, apparently was able to get a copy somehow,
Speaker 4: and he says that Turner and Zaidman, the authors of
Speaker 4: this book, right that the earliest recorded inventor of roller
Speaker 4: skates was an eccentric eighteenth century Flemish inventor and instrument
Speaker 4: maker named John Joseph Merlin, aka the Ingenious Mechanic. And
Speaker 4: that's mechanic with a C K at the end, so
Speaker 4: you know it's legit. So John Joseph Merlin lived from
Speaker 4: seventeen thirty five to eighteen oh three. I looked this
Speaker 4: guy up and it turns out he was a real character.
Speaker 4: So I would like to just sort of go into
Speaker 4: his biography for a bit.
Speaker 2: I mean, with a name like that, yeah, it's got
Speaker 2: to be good.
Speaker 4: So I want to mention a couple of nice accessible
Speaker 4: sources on Merlin. One is a blog post hosted by
Speaker 4: the Internet Cello Society, because he was also an instrument maker,
Speaker 4: called Magical Merlin. This was written by an American cellist
Speaker 4: and music professor named Sarah Freiberg. Also, I found a
Speaker 4: good twenty eighteen post on a historical blog known as
Speaker 4: London Historians by an author named Mike Rindell a bit
Speaker 4: of basic biography. John Joseph Merlin was born in seventeen
Speaker 4: thirty five in the city of Hui, which is today
Speaker 4: in the country of Belgium. I think at the time
Speaker 4: it was in a principality that doesn't exist anymore, and
Speaker 4: I don't remember the name of But when he was
Speaker 4: a young man, Merlin studied for six years at the
Speaker 4: Academy of Sciences in Paris, where he learned a lot
Speaker 4: of what would become useful in his career as a
Speaker 4: mechanical inventor and engineer. In the year seventeen sixty, at
Speaker 4: the age of twenty five, he moved to London first,
Speaker 4: I think as part of a diplomatic group, shortly after
Speaker 4: which he made friends with a bunch of fashionable and
Speaker 4: influential people in london intellectual and artistic circles. Merlin was
Speaker 4: a man of many talents. Most notably he invented a
Speaker 4: bunch of beautiful and dazzling mechanical automata rob We've done
Speaker 4: episodes on automatave from the period in the past. These
Speaker 4: were sort of eighteenth century clockwork robots. So the word
Speaker 4: robot could be a little misleading because that might imply
Speaker 4: some level of decision making or agency. These machines did
Speaker 4: not in any way exercise decision making, action, independence, agency,
Speaker 4: anything like that. They were more like ingenious, complex wind
Speaker 4: up toys that would go through a series of predetermined motions,
Speaker 4: but still remarkable engineering achievements.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as I recall, it kind of varies from creator
Speaker 2: to create, or from one creation to another, But there
Speaker 2: was sometimes a vibe of something more like pure novelty,
Speaker 2: and then other times there was this kind of.
Speaker 3: Aspect to it.
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes you were supposed to really think about
Speaker 2: what you were looking at other times it was maybe
Speaker 2: like just a little more for humor sike.
Speaker 4: Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I thought
Speaker 4: you were going in a different direction though, but you're
Speaker 4: exactly right. Some of these I think were meant to
Speaker 4: illustrate there were kind of works of art in a
Speaker 4: wayment to illustrate philosophical principles, to connect to different theories
Speaker 4: about the origin of movements and even theology and cosmology
Speaker 4: and what it meant for things to be alive and so, yeah,
Speaker 4: we've talked about that in the past, how these works
Speaker 4: connected to those different schools of philosophy at the time.
Speaker 4: But the other distinction I was making was the ones
Speaker 4: that are like, here's something interesting to look at and
Speaker 4: you know, being very clear about how it works, versus
Speaker 4: the ones where it was like, this is actually alive
Speaker 4: and it's really making decisions and stuff, yeah, which was
Speaker 4: not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then sometimes there was kind of a little
Speaker 2: trickery in the degree to which things were automated. Go
Speaker 2: back into the archives, I believe we have episodes on
Speaker 2: the pooping duck. Yes, this being like a key focal
Speaker 2: point of some of these issues.
Speaker 4: But like I said, despite the fact that they were
Speaker 4: not actually like in dependent agentic robots in any way,
Speaker 4: they were more like very intricate, complex wind up toys.
Speaker 4: Still remarkable engineering achievements. And if you want to see
Speaker 4: one of one of Merlin's co creations that he made
Speaker 4: actually with the help of a bunch of other people,
Speaker 4: I think, in a project that was helmed by a
Speaker 4: guy named James Cox, who I'll get to in a minute,
Speaker 4: you can look up the silver Swan automaton, which still
Speaker 4: exists and you can see today, or at least could
Speaker 4: as of recently I think, probably still today at the
Speaker 4: Bows Museum in northern England. So just to describe it quickly,
Speaker 4: this is a life sized swan made out of silver.
Speaker 4: Apparently a huge mass of silver went into its creation,
Speaker 4: and it's sitting on a tray a platform that represents
Speaker 4: a stream where the water is made out of these long,
Speaker 4: thin glass rods, and so this thing still works today.
Speaker 4: You can wind it up and see it move and
Speaker 4: when you do that, the glass rods move back and
Speaker 4: forth and resemble running water, and the stream part is
Speaker 4: surrounded by silver leaves. Again, you can look up video
Speaker 4: of this. It's kind of amazing how graceful and smooth
Speaker 4: and life like the movements of the swan itself are
Speaker 4: the swan kind of swivels its neck and it does
Speaker 4: that thing swans do where they turn around and they
Speaker 4: like stick their head back under their wing or toward
Speaker 4: their back. It does that, and then it dips its
Speaker 4: head into the water and catches a fish althile. This
Speaker 4: very mysterious little tune plays on hidden bells. Part of
Speaker 4: the automaton is just a giant music box that plays
Speaker 4: a selection of several different tunes. So it is an
Speaker 4: amazing thing to watch in action, especially realizing that this
Speaker 4: thing was completed in like the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm looking at a video that you sent me
Speaker 2: of this swan in action, and yeah, these are very
Speaker 2: fluid movements here. I was expecting something a lot clunkier.
Speaker 4: Yeah, something more kind of start and stop jerking up
Speaker 4: and you know that sort of thing. But no, it's
Speaker 4: very graceful. And people at the time commented on this
Speaker 4: like how graceful and lifelike it was. But John Joseph
Speaker 4: Merlin was not on Sorry what.
Speaker 2: I was just I was just thinking, like, was he
Speaker 2: still a diplomat at the time, was there anything to do?
Speaker 4: I don't know if he was. I don't know how
Speaker 4: long he stayed in Diplomat, so.
Speaker 2: Because a lot of work evidently went into this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, huge amount.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But Merlin was not only a clock punk silver swancrafter.
Speaker 4: He was also just an all purpose inventor and designer,
Speaker 4: both of functional items things like medical devices and measuring instruments,
Speaker 4: and also bizarre novelties like a like a real life
Speaker 4: size mechanical chariot with an automatic horse whip that he
Speaker 4: would ride around in Hyde Park.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4: In addition, he was a renown instrument maker. One of
Speaker 4: the sources I mentioned that post by cellis name Sarah Freiberg.
Speaker 4: Her introduction to Merlin in writing this piece is actually
Speaker 4: that she happened to acquire a Baroque cello that he
Speaker 4: himself made in London in seventeen eighty four. So Merlin
Speaker 4: was originally probably trained in the art of clockmaking, and
Speaker 4: he would end up working for some time beginning in
Speaker 4: seventeen sixty six for this British inventor and jeweler named
Speaker 4: James Cox. Cox was one of the co creators of
Speaker 4: the Silver Swan. Cox was also sort of a showman,
Speaker 4: and he operated a museum or actually I think multiple
Speaker 4: sort of arcades and museums, one of which was this
Speaker 4: showroom for mechanical marvels at a street called Spring Gardens
Speaker 4: in Westminster, and Merlin was Cox's chief mechanic. Merlin went
Speaker 4: into business for himself in the seventeen seventies. He filed
Speaker 4: his first patent in seventeen seventy three for a type
Speaker 4: of Dutch oven that had a built in jack for
Speaker 4: rotating meat. I've seen this described in some sources as
Speaker 4: like the first rotisseriy. I don't know that, because I
Speaker 4: feel like we've talked about earlier rotisseries. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's the first of some kind of rotisseriy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would venture that it's something like that. And
Speaker 2: there's no dog involved in here, now.
Speaker 4: No, that's what we talked about. Yes, animal operated belt,
Speaker 4: the turn belt dog. Yes, the turnspit dog. That's what
Speaker 4: it was. And Merlin also patented improvements to musical instrument designs.
Speaker 4: He did some variations on the harpsichord. He also created
Speaker 4: all new instruments, which, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 4: none of these really caught on. One example that Freiberg
Speaker 4: mentions as an instrument called a pentachord, which she describes
Speaker 4: as a quote small five string cello which is tuned
Speaker 4: C G D A D. At some point, James Cox
Speaker 4: is the guy he was working for. James Cox's finances
Speaker 4: kind of went south, and so Merlin decided to set
Speaker 4: up his own museum. So in seventeen eighty three he
Speaker 4: acquired a property at Prince's Street. This is also in Westminster,
Speaker 4: and he called it Merlin's Mechanical Museum. I am exerting
Speaker 4: extreme self control to not accidentally call this Merlin's Shop
Speaker 4: of Mystical Wonders, but I would start typing that in
Speaker 4: the note It's over. But no, it was Merlin's Mechanical Museum.
Speaker 4: I also have heard it said. I think this was
Speaker 4: by a museum tour guide who was showing off the
Speaker 4: Silver Swan. I think said that it was sometimes called
Speaker 4: Merlin's Cave. But anyway, this place was crammed with dazzling automata,
Speaker 4: weird furniture, and other inventions and collectors pieces. Rendell and
Speaker 4: his blog post mentions a bunch of other inventions by Merlin.
Speaker 4: I just want to highlight a few of them. I
Speaker 4: already alluded to the mechanical chariot complete with a whip.
Speaker 4: This was interesting because it also had a type of
Speaker 4: odometer to measure a distance measuring device distance traveled, which
Speaker 4: that ties into another invention episode we've done in the past.
Speaker 4: We did the odometer at some point, tracing that all
Speaker 4: the way back to inventions in the ancient world. But
Speaker 4: this had a version of an odometer, and Merlin called
Speaker 4: that odometer the way Wise and he would apparently ride
Speaker 4: this chariot around through Hyde Park to kind of advertise
Speaker 4: his magnificent works. He has something else that he created
Speaker 4: called the gouty chair. This was a form of wheelchair,
Speaker 4: not with large wheels on the sides like you would
Speaker 4: see on modern devices, but it had a set of
Speaker 4: four smaller wheels near the floor. I was looking at.
Speaker 4: You can actually look up pictures of this that exist today,
Speaker 4: and so you can see sort of how it was
Speaker 4: put together. But I couldn't figure out by looking at
Speaker 4: these or reading descriptions exactly how it works. It looks
Speaker 4: like it's operated by a pair of hand turned cranks
Speaker 4: on the arm rests, and I'm not sure how these
Speaker 4: would both steer and propel the chair at the same time.
Speaker 4: Maybe there's some mechanism missing here.
Speaker 2: Likewise, I can't tell what's going on with like the
Speaker 2: foot pad down there, if it's just for resting your
Speaker 2: feet on, or if there's some sort of pressure applied there.
Speaker 4: Could it be like a pedal that maybe propels. Maybe Yeah,
Speaker 4: but there is kind of a footrest below the chair,
Speaker 4: But otherwise it looks like a regular piece of furniture.
Speaker 4: It's just affixed with like all these wheels and cranks
Speaker 4: and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, designed for individuals suffering from the gout.
Speaker 4: I'm assume that's what I assume based on it being
Speaker 4: called the gouty chair, though I assume it could work for,
Speaker 4: you know, anybody who has mobility issues. And Merlin apparently
Speaker 4: did design a number of devices, like medical devices and
Speaker 4: devices to help people with various physical disabilities. He designed
Speaker 4: a some kind of prosthetic gripping devices for people without arms,
Speaker 4: and a set of playing cards which could be read
Speaker 4: by the blind. This was presumably some kind of precursor
Speaker 4: to Braille notation this would have been before braille, but
Speaker 4: had I guess some kind of bumps or something that
Speaker 4: could be felt. And he also invented a bunch of
Speaker 4: types of mechanical moving furniture, or what was sometimes called
Speaker 4: transforming furniture, and this ranged from relatively mundane creations like
Speaker 4: you had, like you know, a rotating tea table, Okay,
Speaker 4: it's not hard to imagine you might see things like
Speaker 4: that today to something that Freiberg includes in her ride
Speaker 4: up that was advertised as quote the Quarteto music cabinet.
Speaker 4: It contains flutes, violins, and music books and by touching
Speaker 4: a spring key it will rise to a proper height
Speaker 4: and form music desks for four performers and thin.
Speaker 2: It sounds very futuristic really.
Speaker 4: Kind of like adjustable standing desk sort of but for musicians,
Speaker 4: and includes like a complex opening and closing cabinet with
Speaker 4: different compartments. He also, i think, put together a lot
Speaker 4: of different kind of weights and measuring machines and then
Speaker 4: also clocks, including he was he was a co creator
Speaker 4: of a so called perpetual motion claw. This was again
Speaker 4: with James Cox. Dubious about this one because obviously perpetual
Speaker 4: motion machines that doesn't exist in reality. Cox i think
Speaker 4: claimed this really was a perpetual motion machine, but from
Speaker 4: what I've read, it was powered by a mercury barometer
Speaker 4: responding to changes in atmospheric pressure in order to contract
Speaker 4: the spring. And of course this would not be a
Speaker 4: true perpetual motion machine. It would be requiring this external play.
Speaker 2: Otherwise it would be like saying that a windmill is
Speaker 2: perpetual motion machine.
Speaker 4: Exactly.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: So Merlin was active in the London social scene of
Speaker 4: his time, and he was known as kind of weird
Speaker 4: and flamboyant, and he liked to party. I came across
Speaker 4: comments written by the English novelist Fanny Bernie about Merlin.
Speaker 4: She spent time with him because her father, the musicologist
Speaker 4: Charles Bernie, was good friends with Merlin, so she knew
Speaker 4: him well, and she wrote about him as follows. He
Speaker 4: is a great favorite in our house. He is very diverting.
Speaker 4: Also in conversation. There is a singular simplicity in his manners.
Speaker 4: He speaks his opinions upon all subjects and about all persons,
Speaker 4: with the most undisguised freedom. He does, not, though a foreigner,
Speaker 4: want words. I mean he does not lack words. He
Speaker 4: had a big vocabulary. He does not want words, but
Speaker 4: he arranges and pronounces them very comically. He is humbly
Speaker 4: grateful for all civilities that are shown him but is
Speaker 4: warmly and honestly resentful for the least slight.
Speaker 2: You know, this is exactly the sort of sort of
Speaker 2: dude that you don't want to slight because I feel
Speaker 2: like you run a great risk of being reduced in
Speaker 2: size and forced to play around with the nutcrackers.
Speaker 3: And the rap cans.
Speaker 4: Yeah he Septimus Prtorious or something. No, Yeah, so he
Speaker 4: was like fun and weird, but apparently also maybe kind
Speaker 4: of a big mouth and quick to take offense. And
Speaker 4: I've also read in other sources them are people mentioning
Speaker 4: this thing. She says that he was known for having
Speaker 4: a robust vocabulary, for not a native English speaker, but
Speaker 4: for putting words in a weird order when speaking English.
Speaker 4: So I'm kind of imagining him as Yoda.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's also weird the way it's his phrase,
Speaker 2: because they're like, oh, he's basically sounds like they're making
Speaker 2: fun of his accent while still crediting his vocabulary and
Speaker 2: grasps with the English language.
Speaker 4: This is so funny because he's conforming to what I
Speaker 4: would think of as a later storytelling archetype, like the
Speaker 4: eccentric foreign professor with a strange accent who is like
Speaker 4: an inventor of curiosities. But this has got to be
Speaker 4: before I thought such an archetype existed, So I don't know.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's just a coincidence, or could it be based
Speaker 4: on this guy in anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, it would not surprise me. We've seen other
Speaker 2: examples of various historical individuals having a great deal of
Speaker 2: influence over how various stereotypes are interpreted.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so anyway, he connected to a bunch of
Speaker 4: famous people in his time. Johann Christian Bach, the son
Speaker 4: of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach, apparently performed instruments
Speaker 4: performed on instruments made by Merlin. And another very important
Speaker 4: historical connection this is mentioned in that blog post by Rendell,
Speaker 4: is that there's a first hand account of a visit
Speaker 4: to Merlin's museum by a young Charles Babbage, who would
Speaker 4: go on years later to invent the very historically important
Speaker 4: mechanical computing device known as the difference engine. Babbage's mechanical
Speaker 4: computer designs and concepts laid the groundwork for the electronic
Speaker 4: computers that would come to be the basis of you know,
Speaker 4: most or maybe all of today's digital technology. So Babbage
Speaker 4: wrote about this experience of going to Merlin's cave. He
Speaker 4: says that Merlin took him on a tour of like
Speaker 4: a private gallery to show him like the special projects,
Speaker 4: and Babbage says, quote, there were two uncovered female figures
Speaker 4: of silver, about twelve inches high, and he describes one
Speaker 4: of the figures as an admirable dan Seuss, meaning a
Speaker 4: female ballerina, and says she had a silver bird perched
Speaker 4: on a forefinger of her right hand, and then the
Speaker 4: bird would move, it would shake its tail and flap
Speaker 4: its wings and also opening close its little beak. And
Speaker 4: then of the silver ballerina herself, he said, quote, the
Speaker 4: lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were
Speaker 4: full of imagination and irresistible. And Babbage was so struck
Speaker 4: by these little mechanical objects, these sort of precursors to robots,
Speaker 4: that he would come back and buy the exhibits in
Speaker 4: eighteen thirty four, after Merlin's death.
Speaker 2: What fascinating individual so very much part of like a
Speaker 2: very crucial technological ecosystem of the day. And to be clear,
Speaker 2: like you pointed out, not just creating sheer novelties, seemingly
Speaker 2: constantly innovating, and like I can only imagine like following
Speaker 2: every idea, good or bad, useful or just entertaining that
Speaker 2: seems to enter into his head.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, you get the idea of just phrenetic energy,
Speaker 4: constant moving about and doing different things, and being a
Speaker 4: perhaps touchy but also beloved weirdo of the time.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 4: So anyway, onto Merlin's roller skates episode. This is back
Speaker 4: back to the main event here. So one of John
Speaker 4: Joseph Merlin's now most famous inventions was actually one of
Speaker 4: the simplest, especially when you compare it to like the
Speaker 4: intricate you know, clockwork ballet dancers and the silver Avians
Speaker 4: and all that. And that was the roller skate. Now again,
Speaker 4: was Merlin the first person ever to put wheels on
Speaker 4: a show on a shoe? Very doubtful. In her article,
Speaker 4: Freiberg mentions that Merlin quote probably improved skates which first
Speaker 4: appeared in Holland in around seventeen hundred, but there is
Speaker 4: no credited inventor or further detail of those earlier models.
Speaker 4: It's just like some things like this probably existed and
Speaker 4: he improved them. But again, Turner and Zeidman say, he's
Speaker 4: the earliest recorded inventor of a roller skate. So one
Speaker 4: of the things that makes Merlin's model historically interesting is that,
Speaker 4: ever the showman Merlin staged a wild public demonstration of
Speaker 4: his invention at a fancy masquerade ball around seventeen sixty,
Speaker 4: and it went extremely badly. An account of this incident
Speaker 4: appears in a book called concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes
Speaker 4: written by Thomas Busby in eighteen five, and Buzzby tells
Speaker 4: the story as follows, speaking about Merlin, quote, one of
Speaker 4: his ingenious novelties was a pair of skates. This is
Speaker 4: spelled skaies.
Speaker 2: That's sounds about right, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 4: A pair of skates contrived to run on wheels. Supplied
Speaker 4: with these and a violin he mixed in the motley
Speaker 4: group of one of Missus Cowley's masquerades at Carlisle House.
Speaker 4: When not having provided the means of retarding his velocity
Speaker 4: or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror
Speaker 4: of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to adams,
Speaker 4: broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely.
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness, don't you hate when that happens. So
Speaker 4: He's like, I have invented wheels for feet. I have
Speaker 4: made wheels for feet. Everybody's got to see this, So
Speaker 4: I'm gonna roll around the masquerade. Everybody's got their little
Speaker 4: their masks and their fancy costumes. I'm gonna play the
Speaker 4: violin while riding on these things. But he forgot to
Speaker 4: put brakes in them, and so he crashes into a mirror,
Speaker 4: shatters it to pieces, or to adams in the words
Speaker 4: of Busby and h and everybody's I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 4: Were they laughing at him? Were they mad? Were they
Speaker 4: sorry for him? I doesn't say what the crowd's reaction.
Speaker 2: I mean, given that he's also bleeding, perhaps severely at
Speaker 2: this point, I can only imagine the stun silence.
Speaker 4: So to note Merlin's designed for these skates. It sounds
Speaker 4: like it was a The wheels are an inline orientation,
Speaker 4: so not side by side, and two wheels each two
Speaker 4: wheels per foot. I don't I'm not a skater myself,
Speaker 4: so I don't know. Sounds like that wouldn't be enough.
Speaker 4: It sounds like you want more wheels. Maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of the the innovations that would come
Speaker 2: after Merlin, but before proper what we would think of
Speaker 2: as you know, more contemporary roller skates tended to have
Speaker 2: I think at least three wheels.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but again this is important. Merlin's roller skate design
Speaker 4: did not include brakes, and no toe brakes and no back,
Speaker 4: no heel breks, so there was no built in ability
Speaker 4: to slow down or stop or really change direction as
Speaker 4: it says, So yeah, it was it was more This
Speaker 4: strikes me as more of like an idea than something
Speaker 4: really like honed in and made practical.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, very much a novelty that he was willing
Speaker 2: and excited to pursue there in front of everybody. Again,
Speaker 2: seems like the kind of individual who would just follow
Speaker 2: any mechanical fantasy that seemed to enter his head.
Speaker 4: So that is the John Joseph Merlin roller skating experience.
Speaker 4: His model obviously would not be the last one, and
Speaker 4: there were many innovations that would come along in the
Speaker 4: following decades. People would keep making different kinds of little
Speaker 4: roller skates, and roller skating did sort of seem to
Speaker 4: catch on going into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Merlin's roller skating story is clearly the best,
Speaker 2: it's the most entertaining. I think the basic reality is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the subsequent and probably previous roller
Speaker 2: skating invention stories were pretty boring in or lost to history.
Speaker 2: Somebody made this novelty device that you strap under your
Speaker 2: feet so you can skate around sort of like an
Speaker 2: ice skater, but with nowhere near as much speed, power
Speaker 2: or control, and then people just forgot that these inventions existed,
Speaker 2: or they forgot about the inventor. But yeah, they were available.
Speaker 2: And this is where we come back around to James Plimpton,
Speaker 2: who of nineteen twenty eight through nineteen eleven, an American
Speaker 2: inventor who This is one of those invention stories or
Speaker 2: innovator stories that is also not that exciting, because it's
Speaker 2: somebody like seeing a way that can improve upon something,
Speaker 2: making that improvement and then being able to own it
Speaker 2: and sell it and also litigate it. Those are the
Speaker 2: I mean, those are also it's part of that, since
Speaker 2: you've touched on stories related to that before on the show.
Speaker 2: But I mean it's it's less magical when it's about
Speaker 2: just suing people for infringing on your copyright.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of history. There's yeah, pursuing intellectual property things,
Speaker 4: or just figuring out a way to market something so
Speaker 4: that it catches on, or finding a way to make
Speaker 4: something to make a design profitable. That's a big thing too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but still, I mean still, the story of Plimpton
Speaker 2: is interesting in its own right. He had at least
Speaker 2: one prior invention, because you know, to call yourself an inventor,
Speaker 2: you need at least one or two in the in
Speaker 2: the portfolio. He invented the eighteen fifty three Plimpton cabinet bed, which,
Speaker 2: according to the Massachusetts Historical Society's Beehive blog, was seemingly
Speaker 2: something he invented due to a practical need in his
Speaker 2: own home, probably due to his own marriage the year earlier.
Speaker 2: I think like at this point maybe they had a
Speaker 2: kid on the way. It was his first major invention,
Speaker 2: and this is another case where he did not invent
Speaker 2: the cabinet bed a bed that folds up into a cabinet,
Speaker 2: but he came up with a variation on it that
Speaker 2: I'm to understand was aimed at requiring like a little
Speaker 2: less effort to fold and unfold, and so kind of
Speaker 2: like Merlin, you know, Plimpton seems like he was one
Speaker 2: of these individuals who was, you know, always thinking about
Speaker 2: ways to improve on a given device, though perhaps I
Speaker 2: mean more than perhaps I think, certainly with more of
Speaker 2: an entrepreneurial spirit to things as opposed to just a
Speaker 2: more of a sheer exuberance for it, for invention and mechanisms.
Speaker 2: And so basically, around eighteen sixty, according to the Beehive,
Speaker 2: Plimpton takes ill, goes to the doctor, and the doctor says,
Speaker 2: I think you should take up some physical activity. I
Speaker 2: think you should take up ice skating. And Plimpton, being
Speaker 2: a Northerner, would have would have been familiar with ice
Speaker 2: skating and you know, maybe even had some history with it,
Speaker 2: and maybe it was you know, falling back on something
Speaker 2: he did as a kid. I'm not sure. We don't
Speaker 2: have all the details, but what happens when summer rolls
Speaker 2: around is you may find yourself unable to ice skate anymore,
Speaker 2: and so keen to continue his wellness exercises, he bought
Speaker 2: himself a pair of roller skates or what was passing
Speaker 2: for roller skates at the time, and proceeded to think
Speaker 2: about ways to improve upon them. Because much like we
Speaker 2: were talking about with Merlin's roller skates. These would have
Speaker 2: been very fixed, strapped onto your boots or your shoes.
Speaker 2: They allowed you to go forwards or backwards, but not
Speaker 2: take any turns. And also I think there may have
Speaker 2: been some challenges with stopping when you needed to stop.
Speaker 2: But yeah, there were various versions of this. I read
Speaker 2: that there are some early roller skates attributed to a
Speaker 2: Dutchman by the name of Hans Brinner from the same century,
Speaker 2: but these are largely considered not true roller skates because
Speaker 2: you could not turn in them. I mean, think about
Speaker 2: a roller skating rink. Part of the whole field of
Speaker 2: going to the old roller skating rink is going to
Speaker 2: go round in a circle over and over again, or
Speaker 2: at least in an oval.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: So, at this point, again to be clear, commercially available
Speaker 2: roller skates were very much around, and we've already I
Speaker 2: think firmly established some early examples of things like roller skates,
Speaker 2: and we speculated on even the ancient existence of things
Speaker 2: like roller skates. But I know you and I kept
Speaker 2: both both of us kept coming across mentions of a
Speaker 2: seventeen forty three London theater production in which actors had
Speaker 2: roller skates on simulating ice skating for theatrical purposes.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I came across mention of this use in a
Speaker 4: theater production in seventeen forty three in a j Store
Speaker 4: Daily article that I think you and I both read.
Speaker 4: But I had some questions about that. Did you say
Speaker 4: you were able to dig into like what this claim
Speaker 4: was about the play?
Speaker 2: I dug into it more with no real satisfying answers.
Speaker 2: So I would say, first and foremost kind of falling
Speaker 2: along with things we've been discussing already, the idea that
Speaker 2: in the year seventeen forty three, or even earlier or
Speaker 2: certainly later, the idea that somebody staging a production of
Speaker 2: some sort in London or elsewhere could have said, Hey,
Speaker 2: what if in order to create the theatrical illusion of
Speaker 2: ice skating, what if we used wheely skates instead? What
Speaker 2: if we did that? Could we pull that off? It
Speaker 2: seems perfectly reasonable to assume folks at least tried this out,
Speaker 2: if not, you know, perfected to some degree, and you know,
Speaker 2: did an entire series of performances.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but what is the origin of this claim? I
Speaker 4: think that was the thing I was having a hard
Speaker 4: time figuring out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as far as I can tell. Looking at various
Speaker 2: sources that mentioned this, I just can't find any like
Speaker 2: concrete details, and the details kind of vary too, Like,
Speaker 2: for instance, the Jay Store Daily article mentions something about
Speaker 2: how it might have been a production of a Tom
Speaker 2: Lockwood play, and then I try and research that, and like,
Speaker 2: who's Tom Lockwood? No evidence of such a playwright as
Speaker 2: far as I could tell, Or maybe it's a really
Speaker 2: obscure playwright or lost playwright, or it could be an
Speaker 2: error of record keeping in history. I found another reference
Speaker 2: to this idea in a nineteen ninety nine article by
Speaker 2: Gilbert Nordon Passing Fashions but no Sustainable market A history
Speaker 2: of roller skating in Austria before nineteen fourteen. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: And it states that this was a performance at the
Speaker 2: old Drury Lane Theater, which is still there in London's
Speaker 2: West End. And this article states that it was a
Speaker 2: play by Thomas Hood, or I should state, they should
Speaker 2: stress at least a Thomas Hood, but certainly not the
Speaker 2: Thomas Hood who lives seventeen ninety nine through eighteen forty five,
Speaker 2: Nor could it possibly be his son Tom Hood, who
Speaker 2: lived eighteen thirty five through eighteen seventy four. So we
Speaker 2: run into a similar situation here like this, there's some
Speaker 2: sort of error here. If it was a Tom or
Speaker 2: Thomas Hood play, it had to be later, or if
Speaker 2: it was in this given year of seventeen forty three,
Speaker 2: it had to be a different playwright or a different theater,
Speaker 2: and so forth.
Speaker 4: I don't want to presume, because I was never able
Speaker 4: to wrap my head around what the source of the
Speaker 4: confusion was here. But I wonder if the error is
Speaker 4: just that this was not actually a play in the
Speaker 4: eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century. If it was
Speaker 4: the eighteen forties.
Speaker 2: That would streamline things a lot, because then it could
Speaker 2: be a Tom or Thomas Hood play, and even more importantly,
Speaker 2: it would place it alongside a more well documented case
Speaker 2: of roller skates being used to create the theatrical illusion
Speaker 2: of ice skates, that being an eighteen forty nine French
Speaker 2: opera production of Meyer Beers the Prophet, which featured performers
Speaker 2: on roller skates.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, that would make it. But again we can't,
Speaker 4: so we can't adjudicate this question. But this seems possible
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the reality is, at some point in history, yes,
Speaker 2: roller skates were used for perhaps the first time on
Speaker 2: the stage to create the illusion of ice skating.
Speaker 4: But okay, so back to the domain of business.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, so Plimpton comes around, he's trying these out.
Speaker 2: The skates that he's trying are going to be crude,
Speaker 2: they're going to be awkward. Apparently you but apparently some
Speaker 2: of these you could make turns in, but with difficulty,
Speaker 2: so nothing close to the maneuverability of ice skating. So
Speaker 2: especially if you were hoping to trade in your ice
Speaker 2: skates for roller skates during the summer and have anything
Speaker 2: like the same experience, you were in for a great
Speaker 2: deal of disappointment. I was reading about some of these
Speaker 2: earlier commercially available skates, and according to the Birth rollers
Speaker 2: of the roller skate by John Exell twenty eleven, on
Speaker 2: the engineer an eighteen nineteen patented roller skate, the work
Speaker 2: of French and Ventner m Petebled, had metal wheels and
Speaker 2: were I don't know if this criticism holds true, but
Speaker 2: there were arguments that you could barely lift your foot
Speaker 2: with these on, and that on top of it, they
Speaker 2: were so ugly that the quote fairer Sex would never
Speaker 2: wear them Joe included an image here of this particular skate.
Speaker 2: I think you'll agree it neither looks tremendously ugly or
Speaker 2: really all that heavy. But maybe it was actually heavy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe it's made of tungsten.
Speaker 2: I did. The wheels are supposedly metal. I can't tell
Speaker 2: to what extent.
Speaker 4: They are in this image, but solid metal, like not
Speaker 4: even hollow.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah maybe so.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, so this would have been a design that
Speaker 4: comes well after Merlin, but well before Plimpton, kind of
Speaker 4: in between, in the middle between them.
Speaker 2: Another example would be the three wheel juvenile inline skate
Speaker 2: that was The dates of these are found like eighteen
Speaker 2: sixty through eighteen sixty three, including an image here for you, Joe,
Speaker 2: and basically it is what it sounds like. Instead of
Speaker 2: two wheels inline strapped beneath a shoe or boot like
Speaker 2: we were referencing earlier, this would.
Speaker 3: Be three yeah.
Speaker 2: So this is what Plimpton was working with, and his
Speaker 2: main adjustments to the skates of his time were just
Speaker 2: largely related to the exact layout of the wheels. He
Speaker 2: went with a quad wheel or rocker arrangement that was
Speaker 2: more comfortable to wear and far easier to turn and
Speaker 2: for the most part, this is the same design you
Speaker 2: find on roller skates today. There have been all sorts
Speaker 2: of minor adjustments to this, but essentially it is accurate
Speaker 2: to say that Plympton Innovates Slash invents the modern roller
Speaker 2: skate with his patent, and it largely remains the way
Speaker 2: people were skating off of the ice until around nineteen
Speaker 2: seven nine, and that's when there's an attempt to sort
Speaker 2: of redo the ice to roller transfer, generating a modern
Speaker 2: roller skate based on modern ice skates, and this becomes
Speaker 2: the inline skate or roller blade.
Speaker 4: Okay, so the history of roller skates really does start.
Speaker 4: The early designs are pretty much all inline. They're the
Speaker 4: roller blade, and then we get the innovation of the
Speaker 4: quad design, the two axles each with two wheels in
Speaker 4: the orientation like a car. This solves a lot of
Speaker 4: problems with roller skates, and then we find ways to
Speaker 4: go back to the inline design and make it more
Speaker 4: comfortable and desirable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this really got me to thinking about the way
Speaker 2: that we might think about inventions based on our own
Speaker 2: sort of vocabulary of technology. Like, growing up, I kind
Speaker 2: of thought of a roller skate as a car or
Speaker 2: a toy car that is on the bottom of your foot.
Speaker 2: But as we've been discussing, the roller skate was invented
Speaker 2: as a playoff of the ice skate, and for the
Speaker 2: most part, is not created with the idea of strapping
Speaker 2: small carriages to the bottom of your feet. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, A lot of times when we're thinking about the
Speaker 4: history of technology, we like retrospectively, we don't have access
Speaker 4: to the same chain of a visual analogies that people
Speaker 4: were using when they were working prospectively. Does that make sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is all fascinating when you think. Like again,
Speaker 2: I think back to being a kid in the nineties
Speaker 2: seeing roller blades and thinking, well, that's brilliant. They're making
Speaker 2: a roller skate like an ice skate. But of course
Speaker 2: this was always part of the equation.
Speaker 4: In the box looks like as lasers on it.
Speaker 2: I love this quote, by the way, from The Beehive.
Speaker 2: That kind of sums up what happened next for Plimpton.
Speaker 2: Quote James Plimpton spent the rest of his life selling,
Speaker 2: improving and litigating his patent. So I mean no shame,
Speaker 2: you know, he is a businessman. But I was reading
Speaker 2: various accounts of it, you know, in the language of
Speaker 2: the day, talking about cotecting the roller skaters in Europe
Speaker 2: by litigating various patents, you know, like we're looking after you.
Speaker 2: We want to make sure that when you roller skate,
Speaker 2: you're using real Plimpton skates.
Speaker 4: I don't know why, but this is made funnier by
Speaker 4: I looked him up earlier, and I know what James
Speaker 4: Plimpton looks like, and he's not exactly what I expected.
Speaker 4: He looks kind of like he's like Garth Hudson of
Speaker 4: the band, like a big beard and somehow kind of
Speaker 4: looks like an artist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hard to imagine him on roller skates just looking
Speaker 2: at some of these images, but I mean, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: So roller skating becomes quite the hit, obviously, and you
Speaker 2: end up with these various phases where things really pick up.
Speaker 2: They including the eighteen eighties. Oh man, I was. I
Speaker 2: was looking around at some, you know, contemporary writings from
Speaker 2: this time about about roller skating, and I ran across
Speaker 2: an eighteen seventy six book titled Rinks and Rollers by J. A. Harwood,
Speaker 2: And I want to you just a bit from this
Speaker 2: because it's it touches on what on some thoughts at
Speaker 2: that point regarding the future.
Speaker 3: Of roller skating.
Speaker 2: Okay, how long will this rage for rinking last? Everyone
Speaker 2: is asking, to which the reply generally is except from
Speaker 2: rink owners, Oh, it will soon wear itself out. For
Speaker 2: my part, I doubt that it will die away so rapidly,
Speaker 2: and think that rinking is destined to take a permanent
Speaker 2: place among the institutions of civilized society. Rinking drinking. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the name rinking did not stick, thankfully, but I
Speaker 2: think that the idea that it's becomes a part of
Speaker 2: civilized society absolutely does stick, he continues. But probably there
Speaker 2: will be some abatement in the present fever in a
Speaker 2: short time, and proprietors will find it expedient to reduce
Speaker 2: their prices of admission. These violent beginnings have violent ends.
Speaker 2: People skate too much now, both for their purses and constitution,
Speaker 2: and rink proprietors grow too rich. If prices were reduced,
Speaker 2: there would not be such a desire on the part
Speaker 2: of the public to have its money was worth, even
Speaker 2: at the cost of excessive bodily fatigue.
Speaker 4: Oh man, it's not good for your bodies to skate
Speaker 4: this much.
Speaker 2: And so basically, as he continued to explain that the
Speaker 2: rinks were not open long enough and so people were
Speaker 2: just really getting it during the two hours that they
Speaker 2: could skate. And he was like, this is not healthy.
Speaker 2: We need skating rinks to be open longer. It needs
Speaker 2: to be cheaper because people cannot physically or monetarily.
Speaker 3: Keep up with their desire to go. Ranking.
Speaker 4: I love. That doesn't make sense in like three ways, but.
Speaker 2: You know, a little snapshot into roller skating fads and
Speaker 2: enthusiasm of the time.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I also was looking into this a little bit. I
Speaker 2: thought it was interesting to think about roller skating in
Speaker 2: combination with another major invention of this time period, that
Speaker 2: being the moving picture, and the earliest depiction of roller
Speaker 2: skating on film is generally considered to be nineteen sixteen's
Speaker 2: The Rink starring the one and only Charlie Chaplin.
Speaker 4: Okay, so not incidental. This is about This is about skating.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, the whole thing is. And you can find
Speaker 2: examples of this. They have it on YouTube, probably on Wikipedia,
Speaker 2: certainly on archive dot org. But yeah, the whole thing
Speaker 2: takes place on a skating rink. You can watch Charlie
Speaker 2: Chaplin and the supporting characters skate about and you know,
Speaker 2: it's entirely possible. There was some other, you know, very
Speaker 2: short silent film project that involves someone skating in the
Speaker 2: same way that there are various old silent films of
Speaker 2: people doing.
Speaker 3: Other things, you know, running around, riding.
Speaker 2: A horse and so forth. But as far as I know,
Speaker 2: it was lost, such a thing existed.
Speaker 4: Lots of earlier films were lost.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's also a nineteen nineteen silent film titled Don't Shove,
Speaker 2: starring Harry Lloyd. And this one, this one was likely
Speaker 2: inspired by the rink.
Speaker 3: I'm to understand.
Speaker 4: Is it like a public service announcement or is this
Speaker 4: just what it's called.
Speaker 2: It's just another funny, that's all it is. It's just
Speaker 2: another comedy. I think don't Shove because there is some
Speaker 2: shoving that occurs, and this was probably a rule, you know,
Speaker 2: when you went to the rink, rinkers don't shove each other.
Speaker 2: Not sure if they were still calling each other rankers
Speaker 2: at that point, and then, according to Turner Classic Movies,
Speaker 2: a couple of other key moments in the history of
Speaker 2: roller skates cinema include Modern Times from nineteen thirty six
Speaker 2: and Shall We Dance from thirty seven and I think
Speaker 2: it's kind of potentially telling here because even in these
Speaker 2: just just few cinematic examples here, we maybe get an
Speaker 2: idea of some of the ups and downs of roller
Speaker 2: skating popularity. You know, we see there's like a for
Speaker 2: instas another example, nineteen thirty eight black and white popeye
Speaker 2: short titled A Date to Skate. And at this point
Speaker 2: we're very much into the period of the Second World War,
Speaker 2: during which skating experienced i yet another boom period as
Speaker 2: people in the US looked for distractions from global events.
Speaker 2: And so we see and also I found it interesting
Speaker 2: that we see some of the early roots of roller
Speaker 2: derby during this time. Roller Derby of course would have
Speaker 2: to be its own episode, but this kind of apparently
Speaker 2: kicked off as sort of a dance a thon on
Speaker 2: skates that had no real competitive contact sport aspects to it.
Speaker 2: But the roots of roller derby are there.
Speaker 4: How do we get from that to roller ball?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's probably a whole lot you could
Speaker 2: you could dissect culturally about the different boom periods of
Speaker 2: skating because yeah, even just very roughly looking at what
Speaker 2: we've looked at here, and we're looking at the late
Speaker 2: nineteenth century. We're looking at the nineteen thirties. We can
Speaker 2: easily look at skating in the fifties, and then again
Speaker 2: in the seventies, to some degree in the nineties, and
Speaker 2: then once again, you know, really booming more recently during
Speaker 2: the pandemic.
Speaker 4: Well, it hasn't made its way back into my life yet,
Speaker 4: but I say bully to it. Let the rinking live on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess one of the key things is to
Speaker 2: be a rinker, you have to go to a rink,
Speaker 2: And a lot of skaters don't go to a skating
Speaker 2: rink or don't exclusively go to a skating rink, so
Speaker 2: they couldn't really own that terminology.
Speaker 4: I guess they call that D ranking, D ranking, D
Speaker 4: rank your mind so you can go outside the rank.
Speaker 2: We don't need any division in the roller skating community.
Speaker 2: We don't need like rinkers versus wilders or something. I
Speaker 2: don't know what the terminology would be, because ultimately, I
Speaker 2: think the message that we that I've gotten from all
Speaker 2: this is that the roller skating is and should be
Speaker 2: liberating here here as long as you can retard your
Speaker 2: velocity and not crash through a mirror at a fancy.
Speaker 4: Ball I mean, if anything, the Merlin Store, he has
Speaker 4: got to be a warning against distracted driving of all sorts.
Speaker 4: Trying to play the violin wild skating not a good idea,
Speaker 4: regardless of the skate design having breaks or not. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's just not a good idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, like the proper environment for testing out your prototype.
Speaker 2: Is it a maskball or is it maybe like a
Speaker 2: padded warehouse somewhere.
Speaker 3: I think maybe the latter.
Speaker 4: Sorry in my mind that the masquerade that he's skating
Speaker 4: through now is eyes wide shut. I'm sure it wasn't
Speaker 4: like that. I'm sure it was one of the regular.
Speaker 2: That's one of the regular. All Right, we're gonna go
Speaker 2: and close out this episode here, but again, we'd love
Speaker 2: to hear from all the skaters out there if you
Speaker 2: have some added inside to throw in here. Just a
Speaker 2: reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast, with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 4: Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer jj Posway.
Speaker 4: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 4: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 4: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 4: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 4: your Mind dot com.
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