May 23, 2026 • 49 mins
In this classic invention-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the origins and physics of skating on ice. (originally published 5/29/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. It is Saturday. We have a vault episode
for you. This is going to be the Invention of
ice Skating. It originally published five twenty nine, twenty twenty five.
It's a standalone, but it is also the first of
two episodes, with the second episode exploring roller skates. But
we had to do ice skating first. So if you
(00:26):
finished this episode and you absolutely have to have roller
skating right away, well just you know, go back look
around this time last year and you'll find that older episode. Otherwise,
just wait a few weeks and we'll put out the
other episode as well as a vault. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
And we're back with another Invention themed episode. Some of
you may notice Joe and I were just chatting about this.
We were doing an episode here on ice skating. It is,
of course the very beginning of summer.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
Most of the articles you find about this come out
in December, so actually you might be much more familiar
with the seasonal mismatch if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.
But yeah, I guess for the majority of readers in
the Northern hemisphere reading, I guess they're only going to
click on an article about ice skating in December.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
I'm against that kind of thing. I believe in anti
seasonal topicality.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, I mean, plus people are ice skating somewhere year round.
There are of course indoor ice skating rinks. And I
should also mention that the way we're getting to ice
skating is because my initial inspiration here was to do
an episode on roller skating. This is, of course, the
past time that initially boomed during the so called Golden
Age of roller skating, this is roughly nineteen thirty seven
(02:00):
through nineteen fifty nine. I think there's a lot of
you know, escaping from the darkness of the world in
that period and finding a little lightheartedness on the roller
skates in the skating rink. But you know, it's something
that's never completely gone out of fashion either, and it's
experienced sustained popularity in various parts of the world and
(02:20):
saw a major boost during the global pandemic.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
Can I ask a question to older listeners. If you
watch movies about the fifties, you often see people roller
skating down the hallway in high school or in another
setting that's not a dedicated roller skating environment like a
rink or something, and people just roller skating on the
sidewalk at school going from class to class.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Is that a thing people actually did?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I don't know they're doing it now, because roller skating
is not only going strong, but it's I think it's
getting stronger. We may get into this in another episode,
but there are a lot of like financial I saw
some financial papers talking about how the road skating industry
is just going to continue to grow over the next
decade or so.
Speaker 5 (03:05):
I do think we should bring back the roller skate
mounted server at the drive in restaurants, because that's interesting.
It adds an element of danger and theatrical athleticism to
the dining out experience that you don't usually get.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Well.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I mean, I don't know how dangerous it is, but
yes it is. There is kind of a neat charm
to it. But yeah, I've been seeing a lot of
roller skaters recently. My kid is involved in a local
vibrant skating club. And it really made me reconsider what
I thought I knew about skating and skating culture. So
I figured, hey, well let's let's do a nice summer
episode about roller skating. But the thing is, before you
(03:43):
can even begin to cover the invention of roller skates,
you have to explore their cold weather predecessor. You have
to talk about ice skates.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
I assume there's no disputing this at all, which came first.
The ice skate is definitely older than the roller.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Skate, definitely, definitely by by a considerable margin. Yeah, nobody's
even making the case, even if you were getting into
potential possible examples of somebody designing something like a roller
skate that just wasn't usable anywhere because maybe you lacked
the places for I've I've seen no arguments that this
(04:18):
is the case. If anyone out there is aware of
even any just unhinged theories about the roller skate coming
before the ice skate, send it our way and we
will evaluate. But as far as I can tell, nobody's
making this case. So we're going to stick to what
seems to be the established lawyer here. We're going to
talk about ice skating now, and then I think maybe
(04:40):
an episode later in June, we'll come back and discuss
roller skating in more detail. Fair enough, okay, So, as
is generally the case when we're talking about an invention,
we like to talk about what comes before, so we
can appreciate the invention. What came before skating on the
(05:01):
ice using some sort of an ice skate. Well, to
properly consider ice skates. Oh wait, you already have an answer,
Let's have it.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
No, I was going to slipping on the ice slipping
and falling game first.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, it always does in ice skating, doesn't it. You could,
and you could make an argument that skating on the
ice one way or another is slipping in style.
Speaker 5 (05:22):
It is a controlled slip, exactly controlled slipping.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I think the most important thing that I quickly realized
looking at the history of the ice skate is we
think of ice skating more as novelty, or perhaps you
think of it as part of sport, But we really
have to view ice skates not as an item of recreation,
but as a means of conveyance of moving the human
body from one point to another. And so before humans
(05:50):
skated across ice as a means of conserving energy and
maximizing speed. They did a few different varied things on ice,
including slipping and falling down. Of course, walking across the
ice is of course the oldest fore runner, obviously requiring
no technology, but certainly benefiting from a variety of innovations
that would occur over human history, including the leather shoe.
(06:11):
I believe, the oldest surviving example being a some five
five hundred year old arny one shoe from Armenia or
what is now Armenia. But obviously such footwear was biodegradable
by its very nature, so who knows what we lost though?
Speaker 5 (06:28):
Of course, when we think about ice skates, these are
obviously tools designed to decrease friction on the ice and
allow you to glide more easily, I would tend to
think that the earliest ice traversal technologies were exactly the opposite.
They would be things designed to help you better grip
the ice to avoid slipping and falling while you walked.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, which brings our mind to things like spiked cleats.
I was looking around. Let's say there's some examples that
survive from the first and second millennium CE, But again
there's no telling what was lost as well in our
ability to figure out how to make grippier footwear for
walking around on the ice. And then on top of this,
(07:09):
we should also point out that a certain understanding of
the different types of ice and how it responds to
your weight would also have been important for moving across
the ice. The examples of the oldest surviving cleats that
I was finding my research were things from the Viking era,
so it's very possible there are older examples of this
that didn't survive, and possibly something that didn't come up
(07:32):
with my research. So as always, if anyone knows of
an earlier example of some sort of grippy footwear technology,
send it our way. Furthermore, before humans turned to ice
skating proper, they made use of sleds, a variation of
the sledge, which itself is a predecessor to the cart.
And these of course are ancient and widespread innovations which,
depending on the environment and where they were constructed, they
(07:55):
might have entailed bone, ivory, or wood. You can easily
imagine that the idea for the ice skate perhaps comes
together from ruminations on existing sled technology, you know, like
what if ice strapped a sled to my foot? As
well as experiences walking, sliding, slipping on ice covered lakes, rivers,
(08:17):
and so forth. Couple that with a need for such
skates for a conveyance such as areas where human communities
are separated by expansive frozen over bodies of water, and
it's only a matter of time till someone tries to
miniaturize the whole affair and place it on a boot.
Those will discuss the physicality and indeed physics of ice
(08:37):
skating differs significantly from either of these pre existing technologies.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
M H.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So here in a bit, we're going to go back
and look at the most ancient known examples of ice skates,
how they worked and didn't work, and how they evolved.
But let's go ahead and move towards our current understanding
of the ice skate and just talk about how it works.
Speaker 5 (08:59):
As in, what physics principles does the ice skate take
advantage of?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, because we can all sort of have innate understanding
of out works.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
But yeah, let's get into the physics.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
So this is one of those things that seems like
a question that would have a fairly simple, well understood,
well agreed upon answer, but surprisingly no, the physics of
ice skating are quite complicated. The issue is still being investigated.
Some explanations that you see all over the place and appearing,
I think even in fairly recent physics textbooks are actually
(09:34):
disputed by experts, and from what I can see, new
papers on the physics of ice skating still appear regularly
in scientific journals, even at least as of a couple
of years ago.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
That's crazy. It's not settled science yet.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, there is a lot we do know now, but
a lot of that was established rather recently. And then
there are still a bunch of questions that we don't
have answers to yet.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
But I always I think.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
It's interesting when you come across something like this, one
of those things that you assume would have a short, simple,
non controversial, one paragraph answer in the physics textbook, and
actually it's like a super complicated, unsolved question. But anyway,
so the main thing that we need to explain when
looking at the physics of ice skating is why can
(10:21):
an ice skater glide with such low friction? That's the
main physics question. To illustrate this, you can quite well
imagine the scenario. You don't really need to do the experiment.
We know well enough from walking on various surfaces how
this would work. Imagine you put on a pair of
ice skates, you stand on a flat stretch of parking lot,
(10:41):
and you get somebody to stand behind you and give
you a push.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Is that gonna work? Are you gonna glide? That's a right.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
The blades will not glide smoothly over the surface of
the pavement the way they would over the ice. They will,
you know, I wrote here on my notes that they will.
I was gonna say grind to a stop, but they
probably won't even grind to a stop. They're just not
going to move at all. They will be clamped to
the ground where you are standing, and any forward momentum
you had from the push somebody gave you will cause
(11:10):
you to fall in your face because the blades.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
Are not going to go anywhere. They will grip the
ground and.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
The top half of your body will go forward. The
friction defeats the momentum. So the friction is the problem.
The physical principles that make low friction skating possible on
ice are still under investigation. That said, the best and
most up to date core research that I could find
on this was summarized in a December twenty nineteen there's
(11:37):
December again, December twenty nineteen review article in the journal
Nature by Daniel Bond, called the Physics of ice Skating
and a bit of background on the author here. Daniel
Bond is a physicist affiliated with the Institute of Physics
at the University of Amsterdam. Bond specializes in fluid mechanics,
(11:57):
among other things, so you'll see him writing article on
these kinds of topics, sometimes aimed at a more popular audience.
But a couple of notable achievements that I wanted to
mention of his because they're kind of indirectly connected.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
To this topic.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
This will take us a little bit of field, but
I think it's an interesting parallel. Bond was involved in
research you might remember from roughly a decade ago, building
on some earlier research about how the massive stone blocks
that were used to build the Pyramids were probably transported
across the ground to the building site. Of course, this
(12:32):
was a serious question because each stone piece is enormous.
You know the amount of force required to move it
across the ground. It's hard to imagine you would have
had tons and tons of workers pulling They were probably
mounted on these sledges and moved along with great difficulty.
But Bond and colleagues discovered that you could greatly decrease
(12:52):
the friction between the sandy ground and a sledge used
to transport a stone block by slight wetting the sand
in front of the sledge. They found that you want
to add something like two to five percent water per
unit of sand by volume, and this can reduce roughly
by half the amount of force and thus the number
(13:14):
of workers needed to pull the stone along the ground.
Now why would the water do that? Essentially, the water
here helps the sand grains stick together rather than flow,
so the sand functions more like a solid flat surface
when you wet it this way dry sand, when you're
pushing something really heavy through it, it tends to get
(13:35):
kind of pushed out in front of the load, forming
this mound that then takes more force to pull past.
You can kind of imagine this. It's like as you're dragging,
you're constantly like building a little mountain in front of
where you're trying to go.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
But when you.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
Wet the sand, it doesn't do that as much. It
forms more of a solid flat surface, and you can
drag it over the top more easily bond compared the
benefits of wet sand. Here to the reason that you
want to use wet sand to build a sand castle.
It sticks together and holds its shape better. Another cool
a side about that discovery about the wet sand is
that this process of pouring out water on the sand
(14:13):
in front of a stone work during transport was actually
depicted in ancient Egyptian art, So this is not really
even a hypothetical process. It was instead investigating the physics
principles of a process that ancient Egyptians depicted themselves doing.
So there's like one example here is there's a tomb
(14:34):
from the Middle Kingdom twelfth dynasty about nineteen hundred BCE,
belonging to a governor called Jehudi Hotap that shows teams
of workers transporting this big statue and they're pulling it
with ropes as it's mounted on a sledge, and then
it shows workers pouring water out of jars on the
ground right in front of the load. This was previously
(14:56):
interpreted as a libation like a ceremonial pouring out of
liquid as an offering to the gods, but this discovery
completely reframes that pouring out of liquid as something that
was very likely functional in nature, whether or not it
had ritual significance, which it might also have had.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, you can very well imagine it having both. And yeah,
then it makes the ritual even more potent by knowing
that you can see the results right away.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
Yes, so Bond was involved in that research. But one
more funny thing about him. He was part of the
team that won the twenty twenty four ignobl Prize for chemistry.
We didn't talk about the chemistry prize in our in
our last episodes, did we? But this was quote for
using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms. I feel
(15:43):
kind of sad we didn't cover this anyway. I looked
it up to figure out what this was about. The
issue is it was not really about worms. Instead, the
worms were being used as a model to test different methods,
different methods of sorting different kinds of polymers. So the
sober worms represented what are called active polymers that can
move around, and the drunk worms were non active polymers
(16:06):
because they just kind of chill. Anyway, all that was
in aside on Bond's previous work. Here, Bond is writing
an article reviewing recent ice skating research. It's a short
(16:27):
review in the journal Nature, summarizing both the previous state
of research on ice skating as well as especially a
new paper published in the journal Physical Review X by
Canali at All from that same year, from twenty nineteen.
So Bond begins by talking about the explanation that has
(16:50):
long been given sort of the older textbook explanation for
why ice skating works, and that is that at the
interface between the blade and the surface of the ice
there is a thin layer not of ice, but of
liquid water, and this thin layer of water lubricates the
contact between the two solid objects, between the blade and
(17:13):
the ice.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Now, why would that happen.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Why would that liquid water be there? There are several
different explanations that have been offered throughout the years. One
is the idea of surface melting. This is the concept
that there's sort of a quasi liquid layer of water
that exists on the surface of ice, generally primarily at
higher temperatures, though still below freezing, and this is sometimes
(17:38):
called pre melt. Another idea, this is commonly sighted but
now disputed by Bond and by many others. And I'll
get to the reason why in a second. But this
idea is pressure melting at the contact point. So under
this hypothesis, like the weight of a human body distributed
(18:00):
over the small surface area of the bottom edge of
a skate blade creates so much pressure at that contact
point that it causes the ice crystals to melt and
become water. And thus you get your lubricating layer of water.
And then the final possible explanation for that layer is
frictional heating. So we know what frictional heating is. When
(18:23):
you rub things together, the friction generates heat. This idea
here says that this kind of frictional heating happens between
the skate and the ice. The heat melts the ice,
and the thin layer of slippery melt water is formed.
I've come across sources, especially older ones, that favor the
explanation based on pressure melting, but Bond says this is
(18:45):
now widely thought to be incorrect because apparently this would
not work at temperatures below negative twenty degrees celsius. And
we can see that ice skating regularly works well at
temperatures lower than that. Just the observation of ice skating
does not match that explanation. So then maybe is it
(19:05):
surface melting that pre melt the quasi liquid layer on
the outside, or is it frictional melting leading to a
liquid layer on top of the ice. Strangely, Bond says,
neither of those seem to fully explain what's going on either,
especially not in the idea that they.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Could just create a.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Layer of liquid water, because, for one thing, these mechanisms
would be equally present at the surface of other various
solids that you cannot skate on, So there must be
something else at play, something special about water ice compared
to other solids. Another interesting question, what exactly are the
(19:44):
mechanical properties of this lubricating layer of water. Bond points
out some things that are not really consistent with the
idea that water lubricates the interface between the skate and
the solid surface. For one thing, you can't scale on
a flat, solid surface covered in water. You think about
this like, imagine a flat basketball cort or something. You
(20:08):
drench the floor with a thin layer of water, put
on some ice skates and try to skate on it.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
That does not work.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Your only hope is if the heat the floor that
is being covered by the water is ice.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, so there's something special about ice. It's not
enough to just have liquid water underneath your skate blade.
Another interesting thing, he mentions, water is generally not a
great lubricant, in part because it is too thin. When
it gets pressed between two solids, water is easily squeezed
(20:42):
out of the space between them like a grippier. Stickier
fluid like oil or grease, makes a better lubricant because
it clings to the space between the solids and doesn't
get pressed out as easily. So curious questions confounding observations here.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So you would see oil scate would be more likely
to take off than this water skating.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
I mean, I would imagine if you coat a floor
with oil, you can probably do some good slipping and
sliding on it. I don't know exactly what the skate
blade but maybe, but anyway, so whatever the mechanism, the
idea has long been that ice skating is possible because
instead of skating on solid ice crystals, you are actually
gliding over a microscopic, invisible layer of liquid. What Kanali
(21:28):
and co authors found in their paper is that this
is half true. When you skate over the ice, there
is a lubricating layer of something. But it's not simply
liquid water. It's actually a unique water based substance that
has some properties of liquid water and some properties of
solid ice. So to show this, the authors of this paper,
(21:51):
Canali and co authors created an experiment where they were
able to measure the coefficient of friction of both the
ice and the lubricating layer on top of the ice
at the same time. And they did this with a
device that Bond compares to a tuning fork. Here I'm
going to quote from Bond's description of their experiment.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Quote.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
The fork was made to vibrate so that a millimeter
scale glass bead attached to one of its prongs oscillated
across an ice surface. The bead thus functioned as a
tiny ice skate, gliding for distances of the order of
tens of micrometers across the same region of ice. An
accelerometer attached to the same prong of the fork as
the bead measured the amplitude of the bead's oscillations parallel
(22:37):
to the surface and compared them with the amplitude of
the driving force. Canali et al. Used the difference in
amplitude to calculate the friction force between the bead and
the ice, So they did that, and then at the
same time also they were measuring the oscillation of the
bead perpendicular to the ice surface. Essentially that would be
(22:59):
sort of how how it was bouncing up and down
to learn things about the lubricating layer underneath the bead.
And then by comparing these two different measurements based on
the parallel oscillations and the perpendicular oscillations, the authors could
figure out the friction coefficient between the bead and the
ice and could figure out flow properties of the lubricating
(23:20):
layer in between them. And what they found was weird
and interesting. The lubricating layer has some viscous properties, so
like a thicker, stickier fluid compared to regular water, and
it also had elastic behavior, meaning it can have its
shape squeezed or stretched and then bounce back to its
(23:40):
original shape like a rubber ball. It behaved neither like
water nor like ice, but like a hybrid of the two.
Quote the author suggests that repeated sliding over the same
spot generates a mixture of ice and water, which displays
both elastic behavior from the ice and viscous behavior from
the water. In response to a load, the resulting layer
(24:03):
of material would be more difficult to squeeze out of
gaps than ordinary water. This could at least in part
explain the layer's excellent lubrication properties. So it has something
to do with the special characteristics of the outer layers
of water. Ice in particular. Other melting solids would not
(24:24):
necessarily behave this way, and as we observe, many other
melting solids do not behave this way. There's something special
about H two zero, Bond writes, quote few materials can
form a viscoelastic liquid solid third body in response to
friction and wear. That's something that makes water special. Also,
(24:45):
Bond mentions at the end of this review that there
are plenty of questions about the physics of ice skating
that remain. The lots of things we still don't know.
For example, why does the ideal temperature for reduced friction
on the ice seem to be like negative so degrees celsius.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
That that's a.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
Finding, but we don't know why that temperature. And another
thing he points out which I hadn't quite considered, but
I think is worth the certainly worth understanding. Having a
complete science of lubrication is not just trivia. This is
not just like you know, somebody goes ice skating and
wonder how does this work. It's not just to satisfy
our curiosity. Understanding lubrication is hugely important to human economics
(25:27):
and technology. Bond Site's an estimate that something like twenty
percent of the world's total energy consumption is lost to friction,
meaning it's turned into heat and wear on components from
things rubbing together. Generally, that is not useful to us
as a type of energy. Thus, better lubrication technologies could
(25:48):
represent big improvements in energy efficiency and in the performance
and durability of our machines.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
I thought so too. So let no one. Let no
one snicker at the idea of lubrication science. It is
serious business. But anyway to bring it back around, I
would summarize what I've read on this subject by saying
that it seems ice skating works because the surface of
regular ice, regular hexagonal crystalin ice can and usually does,
(26:21):
become coated in a quasi liquid layer of H two
oz made of some interesting mixture of liquid melt and
tiny ice crystals, and this quasi liquid layer does not
act like regular liquid water, but instead has a sticky
bouncy quality or what are called in the paper visco
(26:44):
elastic qualities, and these qualities make it an amazing lubricant
between solids. This lubricating layer is not primarily created by
pressure from the skater's body weight as of physics, as
people used to say, especially a long long time ago,
though pressure could play some small role, it seems frictional
(27:04):
heating between the blade and the ice probably does play
some role, maybe a major one, though some of this
quasi liquid layer is already naturally there on the ice
within the normal temperature range for ice skating.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
And then beyond that, of.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Course, you have to think about the physical characteristics of
the blades themselves. The smooth blades of the skates allow
the skater to further decrease friction, more so than say
the relatively rough and grippy soles of choes or of
the bottoms of your bare feet, and the blades also
allow the skater to control movement. There's greater control because
(27:43):
they allow you to both do a pushing motion when
applied to the ice one way, and a gliding motion
when applied in a different way.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Which of course is the great that's part of the
great fun of ice skating, this gliding sensation, the pumping
your legs side to side. I don't get out in
ice skate all that often. Generally, like once a year,
I'll go ice skating. Oh and it's cold enough here
in Atlanta, and they have some outdoor ice skating rinks.
But generally I spend at least half the time I'm
(28:12):
there relearning how to ice skate and getting my balance,
and then it gets pretty fun.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
You know.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
I haven't done it since I was a kid. There
was an ice skating rink in town when I was
a kid, and we would go a number of times.
It's one of those things where I think I only
ever did it enough to just get to the edge
of not being terrible at it, and then never proceeded
to go into like being able to do it.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, I mean, like I say, I always have to relearn.
At least half the time, I'm just getting my balance
right and figuring out how I'm supposed to do this,
allowing my confidence to build up enough, and then I'm
finally in a place where I can dodge all the
children out there on the rink and make a few.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Laps that feel pretty satisfied.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
This is a tangent, but this makes me think I
don't know if there's a name for this phenomenon, but
I would be interested in doing something on the show
about these kinds of endeavors where you get stuck in
the perpetual beginner zone, where you're always just like re
treading or reviewing the beginner material and you never break
out into actual competence of it.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Yeah, and there are probably a lot of things like
that though.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Of course, one of the great things about hobbies is
you don't actually have to be good or even competent
at them.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
They are your hobbies after all.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
But yeah, I think there are a lot of things
like this where we can look to our own experiences
and say, well, I almost did that, I almost served once.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Well, I feel like there are some hobbies that are
more fun to spend time in the beginner zone in
than others. Like with ice skating, you know, you can
imagine that you'd be having more fun once you were
able to feel some amount of mastery over it, whereas
other things you can just be messing around in the
you know, total beginner zone and it's already pretty fun.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
To be right there.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
All right, Well, let's get back into the history of
ice skating, and again we'll stress the caveat that the
earliest examples of any given technology don't always survive or
have yet to be found, especially of their biodegradable materials
bound up in their production. But the oldest ice skates
that I think we know of date back to roughly
(30:34):
eighteen hundred BCE in Scandinavia, where the ancient Scandinavians seemingly
invented the technology. Some three thousand years ago, I was
reading a paper by Frederico Formenti and Alberto E.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Minetti.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Formenti in particular has written numerous papers dealing with recreating
old examples of ice skates and comparing them to other models.
This particular two thousand and seven paper was titled Human
Locomotion on ice and it was published in the Journal
of Experimental Biology, and he mentioned that there's also a
(31:10):
case to be made for Bronze age invention of skates
in what is now Northern Russia. And I also am
going to come back around to some arguments here in
a bit that also point to parts of modern day
China where we have some evidence of ice skating, and
then also some things like ice skating.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
I'll get into, but.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It seems like universally, the earliest skates that we know of,
they were not made of metal. They were not even
made of wood entirely. They were made of bone, which
makes a lot of sense. Bone is a dense, dependable
construction material for human tool use. And yeah, you can
look up some images of this. In particular, I would
(31:53):
say that Science Friday has a really good article about
the paper in question here that I'm referencing, and it
has some nice color images of for Minty's reconstructed ancient
skates that you can look at. They're the same images
in the original paper, except in this case they're in color.
And so I included one here for you, Joe, of
reconstruction of an ancient bone ice skate. And it's pretty simple.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
It looks like a bone with two belts looped through it.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, this would be a bone from a horse or
a cow. Generally the metatarsal bone strapped to a boot
via leather straps that are worked through slits in the bone. Oh,
I meant to mention that Formenti also notes that the
ancient Scandinavian sagas suggest that the first ice skates were
made of wood, but this is something that is present
(32:44):
in textual evidence, but there's no archaeological findings to support
this currently, so as far as we can tell, it
was bone all the way back.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
This reminds me of our bone Punk episodes where we
were talking about those ice age dwellings with the hut.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Made out of mammoth bones.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
Yeah, I believe part of the idea there was that
those were in places where wood was actually in quite
short supply or would have been precious for other reasons,
and thus the bone was like it made sense economic
sense to use mammoth bones as a building material. I
don't know if there was a similar thing in here.
It might just be that the bone had properties that
(33:22):
you would prefer for skating.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
I think a lot of it comes down to those properties. Yeah.
So it's thought that these would have been the first
variety of ice skates that humans used, And the crazy
thing is these remained in use up into the eighteenth
century CE, so until fairly recently folks were still known
to strap some bones to their feet and hit the ice. Now,
(33:47):
the authors here note that these ice skates lacked the
edge that you find on modern metal skates, so you
couldn't just pump along on these with your legs. That
kind of that sliding and gliding motion that we were
talking about being so fulfilling. You would not be doing
that on these ice skates. You wouldn't be doing a
lot of tricks I'm guessing either, and whirls and whirls
(34:09):
and so forth, because your locomotion depended pretty much entirely
on your upper limbs working a pair of poles to
push you along.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Oh interesting, okay, So.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
In that it has more in common I would imagine
with skiing, which we're not really getting into today. It's
going to be a separate episode at some point.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Now.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
From and his co author point out that skates such
as these would have been used for accompanying animal driven
sleds or sledges. They would have been used in ice
fishing or fishing from positions further out on the ice,
but especially among the Dutch people, the technology soon became
essential for winter transportation via frozen rivers, lakes, and eventually canals.
(34:52):
So think of a region where you know where you
have a bunch of frozen over rivers, and or canals
that are ultimate connecting different human populations, or situations where
you have a completely frozen lake and you have human
populations at different points across from each other across said lake.
It's ultimately faster and more energy efficient to use some
(35:15):
sort of skating technology. And yeah, for Menty stresses that
it was highly efficient. This was no mere novelty. They
weren't doing this. You know, maybe it was fun, but
they weren't doing it because it was fun, he writes,
quote from its very conception, skating on ice was a
form of human powered locomotion that was simple and effective,
(35:36):
very cheap, and thus accessible to a large part of
the population, and allowed people to reach more distant destinations
than they could do by walking or running. In fact,
unless more expensive means of transport such as horses or
later trains were used, ice skates were probably the most
convenient locomotion tool until bicycles were built. That would have
(35:57):
been the nineteenth century, the latter not being very safe
on slippery roads in winter.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
That's interesting, Well, I would not have thought about it
that way.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, So not everywhere and certainly not year round, but
that there would be places where this was just highly efficient.
It was just the most the most sensible way to
move from point A to point B if conditions were
just right. Now, while again bone skates were ultimately a
(36:26):
long lasting technology against superior to mere wood, it would
seem by the thirteenth century CE in the Netherlands, skaters
returned to wood to make use of metal in their skating,
constructing wooden skates that had metal blades. Now, these were
still things that you would strap to the bottom of
your shoes, and I included an image of one of
(36:46):
these for you here, Joe. It is also not very fancy.
If you didn't know you were looking at an ice skate,
you might not know you were looking at an ice skate.
It's like a imagine a wooden skate, but with a
thin metal blade, and then it is strapped or tied
to your shoes.
Speaker 5 (37:02):
Yeah, yeah, it looks It looks like the wooden bottom
of a boat, or like a boat keel with a
tiny little strip of metal blades sticking out of the bottom.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
And so for Mantiene's co author point out that the
wood here would have been easy to work. The metal
that they use was very durable. An interesting thing here
is that these skates would apparently, according to their reconstructions
and their tests, would have suffered from greater friction compared
to bone skates. But their big advantage was that they
(37:30):
allowed the user to finally propel themselves with their lower limbs,
so you could seemingly throw away the poles, free up
your arms, and depend almost entirely on leg power. And
as such, this is really when we begin to see
skating as we know it today entering the world, because
if you go to any ice skating rink, and certainly
(37:51):
if you go to a roller skating rink, you're not
going to see people pushing around on poles. I mean,
maybe there's some sort of scenario where you use poles
to get your feet underneath you, but I've never seen
anything like that.
Speaker 5 (38:03):
Right, So I imagine it's like the thinness of the
blade that allows you to just use your legs because
of the way that you can angle the foot to
push versus gliding, and you can't really do that with
the more rounded edge of a bone.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yes, that's my understanding. So at this point, yeah, we're
kind of off to the races. We're really not purely
inventing something new, but we've innovated to a very interesting
place in the development of the ice skate. And during
the fifteenth and eighteenth century ice skates, they retained their
metal wood construction, but they became about thirty percent lighter.
(38:38):
According for Mente, Dutch skates of the time were shorter
compared to modern skates and therefore more difficult to balance
on compared to what we have today, but they would
have proven especially useful to them during the little ice
Age of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, during which the
system of rivers and canals would have proven ideal skate routes,
(39:00):
connecting different populations and different you know, different destinations. And
then during the eighteenth century, skates on the whole became
longer and enabled easier balance and resulted in lower resistance
the weight spread out across longer blades. And I've included
another photo Formenti's work here reconstruction. This is still something
(39:23):
you strapped your existing footwear, but it is even more
identifiable I think as an ice skate.
Speaker 4 (39:29):
Oh yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And then during the nineteenth century we finally ended up
with specialized ice skates, with the skates permanently affixed to
a boot of some sort screwed into place an ice
skate that has shoelaces so forth, like you would identify
now when you go in like rent ice skates to
go ice skating, and the blades were even longer, apparently
(39:53):
up to twice the length of the old thirteenth century skates,
enabling even greater balance and maneuverability. And then a whole
host of additional innovations have been made and continue to
be made, producing skates that are ever more ergonomic, speedy,
and effective. Different breaking mechanics were added, blades that ultimately
(40:16):
like have a mechanical aspect to them and can shift
and so forth. I saw a Fermente quoted in an
article I believe it's the Science Friday, where he basically
says that we probably haven't seen as long of a
skate as is ideal, Like, skates are probably going to
keep They're going to keep evolving. They're still evolving, they're
(40:37):
becoming more and more efficient, and they may get longer.
We have not reached peak ice skate length yet.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
Wait, does he have a specific peak length in mind?
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Now he's just saying that we're still like fine tuning everything.
And I guess the other interesting thing here is that
there's not just one purpose for ice skates. There are
a lot of highly specialized purposes for ice skates. So
you know, we have a whole host of skate based
sporting activities and they range from figure skating to ice hockey.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (41:07):
I was reading about that too, And an interesting thing
there is that apparently different ice temperatures are preferred for
the different sports. I think the way I was reading
it is that usually they want the temperature a little
bit higher for figure skating because figure skaters, I think
a softer ice gives them more control over precise movements,
(41:29):
whereas with ice hockey, I think they like a slightly
colder ice because that allows them to achieve like a
higher top speed.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Okay, interesting, Okay, So with hockey it's more about speed,
and with figure skating it's maneuverability, which makes sense now.
Formenti and his co author in the aforementioned paper, they
compare the effectiveness of the four main eras of ice skates,
and the results illustrate this continual improvement process that we're
looking at here. I'm not going to roll through the
entire chart you can find it in the original paper,
(42:00):
but you can see here he breaks things out by speed,
stride frequency, stride length, and so forth, and for Minty
points out that with the same metabolic power, skaters today
have a speed four times that of our ancestors, and
again it's only increasing as we fine tune our skate design.
Speaker 5 (42:21):
This might not actually be an issue, but I just
had the thought, do skaters on rink ice have higher
speeds as well, just because they can feel safe to
go at higher speeds, whereas if you're on a natural
body of water, you might be more I don't know,
cautious about like straying into an area of thin ice
(42:41):
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Hmm, that's a good point. I mean, I guess the
other number of factors that might come into play, right
if you're dealing with like natural ice versus zambonid ice, right.
Speaker 5 (42:52):
Yeah, And I know that the zambonid ice, like the
rink ice, is laid down one layer at a time
to give it special properties kind of make it perfect
for skating, whereas, of course natural ice on a body
of water, I mean, it might be great for skating,
but it doesn't have whatever refined quality they're looking for
on that rink ice.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Now I want to come back to ice skating in China,
because as I was hitting the core data year, I
kept finding various references to Chinese ice skating, and I'd
read that ice skating in China might date back to
the Song dynasty, so nine sixty to twelve seventy nine.
See that is, of course in addition to possibly connected
(43:33):
or independent developments in the north of Russia, as I
referenced earlier, but certainly I looked into this a little
bit more, and you have these ice festivals, the Bingshi,
which I think means ice amusement festivals that seem to
date back to the Song dynasty in China and consisted
of various winter sports and performances. Among the many festivities,
(43:56):
there was a downhill skating event that involved kind of
a leather ice skate. I wasn't able to find any
images of reproduction of this, but I found some various
modern illustrations of what these might have consisted of. And
these these are kind of like curved leather shoes that
seem to have been made expressly for sliding across the
(44:21):
ice and or snow.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
If this is what's depicted in the illustration you put
in our outline. They're kind of curled up at the
toe like elf shoes.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yes, yes, think like leather elf shoes designed for sliding
around on ice. It's not skating in the sense that
we've been talking about skating, I think from the physics standpoint.
But these would have been things that would have been
you would have worn for like this downhill skating competition
or something that I've seen translated as ice football, in
(44:49):
which people were skating around on the ice and these
leather shoes throwing some sort of a ball back and forth.
The illustration here that I found is from the Beijing
based World of the World of Chinese website, So my
understanding is like these are similar but a little bit different.
These would have also the examples we're looking at here
would have definitely been novelty based skates. These were not
(45:13):
about locomotion. These were about amusement. However, in other parts
of modern China you do find ancient examples of bone skates.
I was reading that in twenty twenty three, Chinese archaeologists
found an example of a bone ice skate in a
Bronze Age tomb from roughly three thy five hundred years ago,
(45:35):
possibly of the Andronova culture of cattle herders that lived
in China's western Shixiang Weaker Autonomous Region. These would have
been very much akin to what we were talking about,
like the bones scrapped to a boot or to a
shoe that enabled one to move across naturally frozen bodies
(45:57):
of water. Again, and it does seem to come back
to bones. It comes back to horse and cow bones
strap to the bottom of your feet, enabling you to
at least push yourself across the ice with a big
with a pair of poles or sticks.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Well, Rob, you've talked me into it.
Speaker 5 (46:14):
If I if I take my child ice skating this year,
I'm gonna I'm gonna have to get.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
Some bone skating to try out. See how they do.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
You know I could. I don't think it would be
a good idea. I think this would not in the
long run, This would be a failure. But I could
imagine someone trying to market this. You know, why settle
for ice skating when this year when you could do
primal ice skating bone ice skating, and people would be like, yeah,
you know, I'm kind of a little overthrowing axes at
(46:43):
the local axe throwing range. I want to try something
else that has this kind of like, you know, ancient
vibe to it. Let's strap on some bones and see
how it goes. I think you would find it.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Would it would? It would be harder.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
It sounds like every everything I've read about it, it
would have been a much harder and clumsier thing to do.
We're much better off with modern ice skates.
Speaker 4 (47:03):
But for the metal of it, maybe you use the
non metal.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yes, both ice skates are very metal. We'll definitely say that.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
All right. Should we wrap up.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
There, Yeah, We're going to go ahead and close out
this episode. However, again, definitely tune in later in June
when we come back and talk about roller skating on
its own, again directly connected to the invention of ice skating,
but very much its own thing as well. In the meantime,
we'd of course love to hear from everyone out there.
Do you have experiences or thoughts related to ice skating.
(47:36):
Is there anyone out there who has tried a more
archaic version of the ice skate? If so, definitely right
into us because we would love to have your feedback.
As always, we'd like to remind you that the stuff
to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays, we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can find us
(47:57):
wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to
be some stars and a nice rating that always helps
us out. And on top of that, you'll also find
us on various social media platforms, not all of them
because they keep adding new ones and we just can't
keep up, but hey, we're on Instagram. At least you
can find us there as st b y M podcast.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
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, if you
would like to suggest a topic for the future, or
if you just want to say hi, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 4 (49:04):
For part
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. It is Saturday. We have a vault episode
for you. This is going to be the Invention of
ice Skating. It originally published five twenty nine, twenty twenty five.
It's a standalone, but it is also the first of
two episodes, with the second episode exploring roller skates. But
we had to do ice skating first. So if you
(00:26):
finished this episode and you absolutely have to have roller
skating right away, well just you know, go back look
around this time last year and you'll find that older episode. Otherwise,
just wait a few weeks and we'll put out the
other episode as well as a vault. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
And we're back with another Invention themed episode. Some of
you may notice Joe and I were just chatting about this.
We were doing an episode here on ice skating. It is,
of course the very beginning of summer.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
Most of the articles you find about this come out
in December, so actually you might be much more familiar
with the seasonal mismatch if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.
But yeah, I guess for the majority of readers in
the Northern hemisphere reading, I guess they're only going to
click on an article about ice skating in December.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
I'm against that kind of thing. I believe in anti
seasonal topicality.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, I mean, plus people are ice skating somewhere year round.
There are of course indoor ice skating rinks. And I
should also mention that the way we're getting to ice
skating is because my initial inspiration here was to do
an episode on roller skating. This is, of course, the
past time that initially boomed during the so called Golden
Age of roller skating, this is roughly nineteen thirty seven
(02:00):
through nineteen fifty nine. I think there's a lot of
you know, escaping from the darkness of the world in
that period and finding a little lightheartedness on the roller
skates in the skating rink. But you know, it's something
that's never completely gone out of fashion either, and it's
experienced sustained popularity in various parts of the world and
(02:20):
saw a major boost during the global pandemic.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
Can I ask a question to older listeners. If you
watch movies about the fifties, you often see people roller
skating down the hallway in high school or in another
setting that's not a dedicated roller skating environment like a
rink or something, and people just roller skating on the
sidewalk at school going from class to class.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Is that a thing people actually did?
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I don't know they're doing it now, because roller skating
is not only going strong, but it's I think it's
getting stronger. We may get into this in another episode,
but there are a lot of like financial I saw
some financial papers talking about how the road skating industry
is just going to continue to grow over the next
decade or so.
Speaker 5 (03:05):
I do think we should bring back the roller skate
mounted server at the drive in restaurants, because that's interesting.
It adds an element of danger and theatrical athleticism to
the dining out experience that you don't usually get.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Well.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I mean, I don't know how dangerous it is, but
yes it is. There is kind of a neat charm
to it. But yeah, I've been seeing a lot of
roller skaters recently. My kid is involved in a local
vibrant skating club. And it really made me reconsider what
I thought I knew about skating and skating culture. So
I figured, hey, well let's let's do a nice summer
episode about roller skating. But the thing is, before you
(03:43):
can even begin to cover the invention of roller skates,
you have to explore their cold weather predecessor. You have
to talk about ice skates.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
I assume there's no disputing this at all, which came first.
The ice skate is definitely older than the roller.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Skate, definitely, definitely by by a considerable margin. Yeah, nobody's
even making the case, even if you were getting into
potential possible examples of somebody designing something like a roller
skate that just wasn't usable anywhere because maybe you lacked
the places for I've I've seen no arguments that this
(04:18):
is the case. If anyone out there is aware of
even any just unhinged theories about the roller skate coming
before the ice skate, send it our way and we
will evaluate. But as far as I can tell, nobody's
making this case. So we're going to stick to what
seems to be the established lawyer here. We're going to
talk about ice skating now, and then I think maybe
(04:40):
an episode later in June, we'll come back and discuss
roller skating in more detail. Fair enough, okay, So, as
is generally the case when we're talking about an invention,
we like to talk about what comes before, so we
can appreciate the invention. What came before skating on the
(05:01):
ice using some sort of an ice skate. Well, to
properly consider ice skates. Oh wait, you already have an answer,
Let's have it.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
No, I was going to slipping on the ice slipping
and falling game first.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, it always does in ice skating, doesn't it. You could,
and you could make an argument that skating on the
ice one way or another is slipping in style.
Speaker 5 (05:22):
It is a controlled slip, exactly controlled slipping.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I think the most important thing that I quickly realized
looking at the history of the ice skate is we
think of ice skating more as novelty, or perhaps you
think of it as part of sport, But we really
have to view ice skates not as an item of recreation,
but as a means of conveyance of moving the human
body from one point to another. And so before humans
(05:50):
skated across ice as a means of conserving energy and
maximizing speed. They did a few different varied things on ice,
including slipping and falling down. Of course, walking across the
ice is of course the oldest fore runner, obviously requiring
no technology, but certainly benefiting from a variety of innovations
that would occur over human history, including the leather shoe.
(06:11):
I believe, the oldest surviving example being a some five
five hundred year old arny one shoe from Armenia or
what is now Armenia. But obviously such footwear was biodegradable
by its very nature, so who knows what we lost though?
Speaker 5 (06:28):
Of course, when we think about ice skates, these are
obviously tools designed to decrease friction on the ice and
allow you to glide more easily, I would tend to
think that the earliest ice traversal technologies were exactly the opposite.
They would be things designed to help you better grip
the ice to avoid slipping and falling while you walked.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, which brings our mind to things like spiked cleats.
I was looking around. Let's say there's some examples that
survive from the first and second millennium CE, But again
there's no telling what was lost as well in our
ability to figure out how to make grippier footwear for
walking around on the ice. And then on top of this,
(07:09):
we should also point out that a certain understanding of
the different types of ice and how it responds to
your weight would also have been important for moving across
the ice. The examples of the oldest surviving cleats that
I was finding my research were things from the Viking era,
so it's very possible there are older examples of this
that didn't survive, and possibly something that didn't come up
(07:32):
with my research. So as always, if anyone knows of
an earlier example of some sort of grippy footwear technology,
send it our way. Furthermore, before humans turned to ice
skating proper, they made use of sleds, a variation of
the sledge, which itself is a predecessor to the cart.
And these of course are ancient and widespread innovations which,
depending on the environment and where they were constructed, they
(07:55):
might have entailed bone, ivory, or wood. You can easily
imagine that the idea for the ice skate perhaps comes
together from ruminations on existing sled technology, you know, like
what if ice strapped a sled to my foot? As
well as experiences walking, sliding, slipping on ice covered lakes, rivers,
(08:17):
and so forth. Couple that with a need for such
skates for a conveyance such as areas where human communities
are separated by expansive frozen over bodies of water, and
it's only a matter of time till someone tries to
miniaturize the whole affair and place it on a boot.
Those will discuss the physicality and indeed physics of ice
(08:37):
skating differs significantly from either of these pre existing technologies.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
M H.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So here in a bit, we're going to go back
and look at the most ancient known examples of ice skates,
how they worked and didn't work, and how they evolved.
But let's go ahead and move towards our current understanding
of the ice skate and just talk about how it works.
Speaker 5 (08:59):
As in, what physics principles does the ice skate take
advantage of?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, because we can all sort of have innate understanding
of out works.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
But yeah, let's get into the physics.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (09:10):
So this is one of those things that seems like
a question that would have a fairly simple, well understood,
well agreed upon answer, but surprisingly no, the physics of
ice skating are quite complicated. The issue is still being investigated.
Some explanations that you see all over the place and appearing,
I think even in fairly recent physics textbooks are actually
(09:34):
disputed by experts, and from what I can see, new
papers on the physics of ice skating still appear regularly
in scientific journals, even at least as of a couple
of years ago.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
That's crazy. It's not settled science yet.
Speaker 5 (09:48):
Yeah, there is a lot we do know now, but
a lot of that was established rather recently. And then
there are still a bunch of questions that we don't
have answers to yet.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
But I always I think.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
It's interesting when you come across something like this, one
of those things that you assume would have a short, simple,
non controversial, one paragraph answer in the physics textbook, and
actually it's like a super complicated, unsolved question. But anyway,
so the main thing that we need to explain when
looking at the physics of ice skating is why can
(10:21):
an ice skater glide with such low friction? That's the
main physics question. To illustrate this, you can quite well
imagine the scenario. You don't really need to do the experiment.
We know well enough from walking on various surfaces how
this would work. Imagine you put on a pair of
ice skates, you stand on a flat stretch of parking lot,
(10:41):
and you get somebody to stand behind you and give
you a push.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Is that gonna work? Are you gonna glide? That's a right.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
The blades will not glide smoothly over the surface of
the pavement the way they would over the ice. They will,
you know, I wrote here on my notes that they will.
I was gonna say grind to a stop, but they
probably won't even grind to a stop. They're just not
going to move at all. They will be clamped to
the ground where you are standing, and any forward momentum
you had from the push somebody gave you will cause
(11:10):
you to fall in your face because the blades.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
Are not going to go anywhere. They will grip the
ground and.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
The top half of your body will go forward. The
friction defeats the momentum. So the friction is the problem.
The physical principles that make low friction skating possible on
ice are still under investigation. That said, the best and
most up to date core research that I could find
on this was summarized in a December twenty nineteen there's
(11:37):
December again, December twenty nineteen review article in the journal
Nature by Daniel Bond, called the Physics of ice Skating
and a bit of background on the author here. Daniel
Bond is a physicist affiliated with the Institute of Physics
at the University of Amsterdam. Bond specializes in fluid mechanics,
(11:57):
among other things, so you'll see him writing article on
these kinds of topics, sometimes aimed at a more popular audience.
But a couple of notable achievements that I wanted to
mention of his because they're kind of indirectly connected.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
To this topic.
Speaker 5 (12:11):
This will take us a little bit of field, but
I think it's an interesting parallel. Bond was involved in
research you might remember from roughly a decade ago, building
on some earlier research about how the massive stone blocks
that were used to build the Pyramids were probably transported
across the ground to the building site. Of course, this
(12:32):
was a serious question because each stone piece is enormous.
You know the amount of force required to move it
across the ground. It's hard to imagine you would have
had tons and tons of workers pulling They were probably
mounted on these sledges and moved along with great difficulty.
But Bond and colleagues discovered that you could greatly decrease
(12:52):
the friction between the sandy ground and a sledge used
to transport a stone block by slight wetting the sand
in front of the sledge. They found that you want
to add something like two to five percent water per
unit of sand by volume, and this can reduce roughly
by half the amount of force and thus the number
(13:14):
of workers needed to pull the stone along the ground.
Now why would the water do that? Essentially, the water
here helps the sand grains stick together rather than flow,
so the sand functions more like a solid flat surface
when you wet it this way dry sand, when you're
pushing something really heavy through it, it tends to get
(13:35):
kind of pushed out in front of the load, forming
this mound that then takes more force to pull past.
You can kind of imagine this. It's like as you're dragging,
you're constantly like building a little mountain in front of
where you're trying to go.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
But when you.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
Wet the sand, it doesn't do that as much. It
forms more of a solid flat surface, and you can
drag it over the top more easily bond compared the
benefits of wet sand. Here to the reason that you
want to use wet sand to build a sand castle.
It sticks together and holds its shape better. Another cool
a side about that discovery about the wet sand is
that this process of pouring out water on the sand
(14:13):
in front of a stone work during transport was actually
depicted in ancient Egyptian art, So this is not really
even a hypothetical process. It was instead investigating the physics
principles of a process that ancient Egyptians depicted themselves doing.
So there's like one example here is there's a tomb
(14:34):
from the Middle Kingdom twelfth dynasty about nineteen hundred BCE,
belonging to a governor called Jehudi Hotap that shows teams
of workers transporting this big statue and they're pulling it
with ropes as it's mounted on a sledge, and then
it shows workers pouring water out of jars on the
ground right in front of the load. This was previously
(14:56):
interpreted as a libation like a ceremonial pouring out of
liquid as an offering to the gods, but this discovery
completely reframes that pouring out of liquid as something that
was very likely functional in nature, whether or not it
had ritual significance, which it might also have had.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, you can very well imagine it having both. And yeah,
then it makes the ritual even more potent by knowing
that you can see the results right away.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
Yes, so Bond was involved in that research. But one
more funny thing about him. He was part of the
team that won the twenty twenty four ignobl Prize for chemistry.
We didn't talk about the chemistry prize in our in
our last episodes, did we? But this was quote for
using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms. I feel
(15:43):
kind of sad we didn't cover this anyway. I looked
it up to figure out what this was about. The
issue is it was not really about worms. Instead, the
worms were being used as a model to test different methods,
different methods of sorting different kinds of polymers. So the
sober worms represented what are called active polymers that can
move around, and the drunk worms were non active polymers
(16:06):
because they just kind of chill. Anyway, all that was
in aside on Bond's previous work. Here, Bond is writing
an article reviewing recent ice skating research. It's a short
(16:27):
review in the journal Nature, summarizing both the previous state
of research on ice skating as well as especially a
new paper published in the journal Physical Review X by
Canali at All from that same year, from twenty nineteen.
So Bond begins by talking about the explanation that has
(16:50):
long been given sort of the older textbook explanation for
why ice skating works, and that is that at the
interface between the blade and the surface of the ice
there is a thin layer not of ice, but of
liquid water, and this thin layer of water lubricates the
contact between the two solid objects, between the blade and
(17:13):
the ice.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Now, why would that happen.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
Why would that liquid water be there? There are several
different explanations that have been offered throughout the years. One
is the idea of surface melting. This is the concept
that there's sort of a quasi liquid layer of water
that exists on the surface of ice, generally primarily at
higher temperatures, though still below freezing, and this is sometimes
(17:38):
called pre melt. Another idea, this is commonly sighted but
now disputed by Bond and by many others. And I'll
get to the reason why in a second. But this
idea is pressure melting at the contact point. So under
this hypothesis, like the weight of a human body distributed
(18:00):
over the small surface area of the bottom edge of
a skate blade creates so much pressure at that contact
point that it causes the ice crystals to melt and
become water. And thus you get your lubricating layer of water.
And then the final possible explanation for that layer is
frictional heating. So we know what frictional heating is. When
(18:23):
you rub things together, the friction generates heat. This idea
here says that this kind of frictional heating happens between
the skate and the ice. The heat melts the ice,
and the thin layer of slippery melt water is formed.
I've come across sources, especially older ones, that favor the
explanation based on pressure melting, but Bond says this is
(18:45):
now widely thought to be incorrect because apparently this would
not work at temperatures below negative twenty degrees celsius. And
we can see that ice skating regularly works well at
temperatures lower than that. Just the observation of ice skating
does not match that explanation. So then maybe is it
(19:05):
surface melting that pre melt the quasi liquid layer on
the outside, or is it frictional melting leading to a
liquid layer on top of the ice. Strangely, Bond says,
neither of those seem to fully explain what's going on either,
especially not in the idea that they.
Speaker 4 (19:20):
Could just create a.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Layer of liquid water, because, for one thing, these mechanisms
would be equally present at the surface of other various
solids that you cannot skate on, So there must be
something else at play, something special about water ice compared
to other solids. Another interesting question, what exactly are the
(19:44):
mechanical properties of this lubricating layer of water. Bond points
out some things that are not really consistent with the
idea that water lubricates the interface between the skate and
the solid surface. For one thing, you can't scale on
a flat, solid surface covered in water. You think about
this like, imagine a flat basketball cort or something. You
(20:08):
drench the floor with a thin layer of water, put
on some ice skates and try to skate on it.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
That does not work.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Your only hope is if the heat the floor that
is being covered by the water is ice.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, so there's something special about ice. It's not
enough to just have liquid water underneath your skate blade.
Another interesting thing, he mentions, water is generally not a
great lubricant, in part because it is too thin. When
it gets pressed between two solids, water is easily squeezed
(20:42):
out of the space between them like a grippier. Stickier
fluid like oil or grease, makes a better lubricant because
it clings to the space between the solids and doesn't
get pressed out as easily. So curious questions confounding observations here.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So you would see oil scate would be more likely
to take off than this water skating.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
I mean, I would imagine if you coat a floor
with oil, you can probably do some good slipping and
sliding on it. I don't know exactly what the skate
blade but maybe, but anyway, so whatever the mechanism, the
idea has long been that ice skating is possible because
instead of skating on solid ice crystals, you are actually
gliding over a microscopic, invisible layer of liquid. What Kanali
(21:28):
and co authors found in their paper is that this
is half true. When you skate over the ice, there
is a lubricating layer of something. But it's not simply
liquid water. It's actually a unique water based substance that
has some properties of liquid water and some properties of
solid ice. So to show this, the authors of this paper,
(21:51):
Canali and co authors created an experiment where they were
able to measure the coefficient of friction of both the
ice and the lubricating layer on top of the ice
at the same time. And they did this with a
device that Bond compares to a tuning fork. Here I'm
going to quote from Bond's description of their experiment.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Quote.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
The fork was made to vibrate so that a millimeter
scale glass bead attached to one of its prongs oscillated
across an ice surface. The bead thus functioned as a
tiny ice skate, gliding for distances of the order of
tens of micrometers across the same region of ice. An
accelerometer attached to the same prong of the fork as
the bead measured the amplitude of the bead's oscillations parallel
(22:37):
to the surface and compared them with the amplitude of
the driving force. Canali et al. Used the difference in
amplitude to calculate the friction force between the bead and
the ice, So they did that, and then at the
same time also they were measuring the oscillation of the
bead perpendicular to the ice surface. Essentially that would be
(22:59):
sort of how how it was bouncing up and down
to learn things about the lubricating layer underneath the bead.
And then by comparing these two different measurements based on
the parallel oscillations and the perpendicular oscillations, the authors could
figure out the friction coefficient between the bead and the
ice and could figure out flow properties of the lubricating
(23:20):
layer in between them. And what they found was weird
and interesting. The lubricating layer has some viscous properties, so
like a thicker, stickier fluid compared to regular water, and
it also had elastic behavior, meaning it can have its
shape squeezed or stretched and then bounce back to its
(23:40):
original shape like a rubber ball. It behaved neither like
water nor like ice, but like a hybrid of the two.
Quote the author suggests that repeated sliding over the same
spot generates a mixture of ice and water, which displays
both elastic behavior from the ice and viscous behavior from
the water. In response to a load, the resulting layer
(24:03):
of material would be more difficult to squeeze out of
gaps than ordinary water. This could at least in part
explain the layer's excellent lubrication properties. So it has something
to do with the special characteristics of the outer layers
of water. Ice in particular. Other melting solids would not
(24:24):
necessarily behave this way, and as we observe, many other
melting solids do not behave this way. There's something special
about H two zero, Bond writes, quote few materials can
form a viscoelastic liquid solid third body in response to
friction and wear. That's something that makes water special. Also,
(24:45):
Bond mentions at the end of this review that there
are plenty of questions about the physics of ice skating
that remain. The lots of things we still don't know.
For example, why does the ideal temperature for reduced friction
on the ice seem to be like negative so degrees celsius.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
That that's a.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
Finding, but we don't know why that temperature. And another
thing he points out which I hadn't quite considered, but
I think is worth the certainly worth understanding. Having a
complete science of lubrication is not just trivia. This is
not just like you know, somebody goes ice skating and
wonder how does this work. It's not just to satisfy
our curiosity. Understanding lubrication is hugely important to human economics
(25:27):
and technology. Bond Site's an estimate that something like twenty
percent of the world's total energy consumption is lost to friction,
meaning it's turned into heat and wear on components from
things rubbing together. Generally, that is not useful to us
as a type of energy. Thus, better lubrication technologies could
(25:48):
represent big improvements in energy efficiency and in the performance
and durability of our machines.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
I thought so too. So let no one. Let no
one snicker at the idea of lubrication science. It is
serious business. But anyway to bring it back around, I
would summarize what I've read on this subject by saying
that it seems ice skating works because the surface of
regular ice, regular hexagonal crystalin ice can and usually does,
(26:21):
become coated in a quasi liquid layer of H two
oz made of some interesting mixture of liquid melt and
tiny ice crystals, and this quasi liquid layer does not
act like regular liquid water, but instead has a sticky
bouncy quality or what are called in the paper visco
(26:44):
elastic qualities, and these qualities make it an amazing lubricant
between solids. This lubricating layer is not primarily created by
pressure from the skater's body weight as of physics, as
people used to say, especially a long long time ago,
though pressure could play some small role, it seems frictional
(27:04):
heating between the blade and the ice probably does play
some role, maybe a major one, though some of this
quasi liquid layer is already naturally there on the ice
within the normal temperature range for ice skating.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
And then beyond that, of.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Course, you have to think about the physical characteristics of
the blades themselves. The smooth blades of the skates allow
the skater to further decrease friction, more so than say
the relatively rough and grippy soles of choes or of
the bottoms of your bare feet, and the blades also
allow the skater to control movement. There's greater control because
(27:43):
they allow you to both do a pushing motion when
applied to the ice one way, and a gliding motion
when applied in a different way.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Which of course is the great that's part of the
great fun of ice skating, this gliding sensation, the pumping
your legs side to side. I don't get out in
ice skate all that often. Generally, like once a year,
I'll go ice skating. Oh and it's cold enough here
in Atlanta, and they have some outdoor ice skating rinks.
But generally I spend at least half the time I'm
(28:12):
there relearning how to ice skate and getting my balance,
and then it gets pretty fun.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
You know.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
I haven't done it since I was a kid. There
was an ice skating rink in town when I was
a kid, and we would go a number of times.
It's one of those things where I think I only
ever did it enough to just get to the edge
of not being terrible at it, and then never proceeded
to go into like being able to do it.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, I mean, like I say, I always have to relearn.
At least half the time, I'm just getting my balance
right and figuring out how I'm supposed to do this,
allowing my confidence to build up enough, and then I'm
finally in a place where I can dodge all the
children out there on the rink and make a few.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Laps that feel pretty satisfied.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
This is a tangent, but this makes me think I
don't know if there's a name for this phenomenon, but
I would be interested in doing something on the show
about these kinds of endeavors where you get stuck in
the perpetual beginner zone, where you're always just like re
treading or reviewing the beginner material and you never break
out into actual competence of it.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Yeah, and there are probably a lot of things like
that though.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Of course, one of the great things about hobbies is
you don't actually have to be good or even competent
at them.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
They are your hobbies after all.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
But yeah, I think there are a lot of things
like this where we can look to our own experiences
and say, well, I almost did that, I almost served once.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
Well, I feel like there are some hobbies that are
more fun to spend time in the beginner zone in
than others. Like with ice skating, you know, you can
imagine that you'd be having more fun once you were
able to feel some amount of mastery over it, whereas
other things you can just be messing around in the
you know, total beginner zone and it's already pretty fun.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
To be right there.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
All right, Well, let's get back into the history of
ice skating, and again we'll stress the caveat that the
earliest examples of any given technology don't always survive or
have yet to be found, especially of their biodegradable materials
bound up in their production. But the oldest ice skates
that I think we know of date back to roughly
(30:34):
eighteen hundred BCE in Scandinavia, where the ancient Scandinavians seemingly
invented the technology. Some three thousand years ago, I was
reading a paper by Frederico Formenti and Alberto E.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
Minetti.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Formenti in particular has written numerous papers dealing with recreating
old examples of ice skates and comparing them to other models.
This particular two thousand and seven paper was titled Human
Locomotion on ice and it was published in the Journal
of Experimental Biology, and he mentioned that there's also a
(31:10):
case to be made for Bronze age invention of skates
in what is now Northern Russia. And I also am
going to come back around to some arguments here in
a bit that also point to parts of modern day
China where we have some evidence of ice skating, and
then also some things like ice skating.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
I'll get into, but.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It seems like universally, the earliest skates that we know of,
they were not made of metal. They were not even
made of wood entirely. They were made of bone, which
makes a lot of sense. Bone is a dense, dependable
construction material for human tool use. And yeah, you can
look up some images of this. In particular, I would
(31:53):
say that Science Friday has a really good article about
the paper in question here that I'm referencing, and it
has some nice color images of for Minty's reconstructed ancient
skates that you can look at. They're the same images
in the original paper, except in this case they're in color.
And so I included one here for you, Joe, of
reconstruction of an ancient bone ice skate. And it's pretty simple.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
It looks like a bone with two belts looped through it.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, this would be a bone from a horse or
a cow. Generally the metatarsal bone strapped to a boot
via leather straps that are worked through slits in the bone. Oh,
I meant to mention that Formenti also notes that the
ancient Scandinavian sagas suggest that the first ice skates were
made of wood, but this is something that is present
(32:44):
in textual evidence, but there's no archaeological findings to support
this currently, so as far as we can tell, it
was bone all the way back.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
This reminds me of our bone Punk episodes where we
were talking about those ice age dwellings with the hut.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Made out of mammoth bones.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
Yeah, I believe part of the idea there was that
those were in places where wood was actually in quite
short supply or would have been precious for other reasons,
and thus the bone was like it made sense economic
sense to use mammoth bones as a building material. I
don't know if there was a similar thing in here.
It might just be that the bone had properties that
(33:22):
you would prefer for skating.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
I think a lot of it comes down to those properties. Yeah.
So it's thought that these would have been the first
variety of ice skates that humans used, And the crazy
thing is these remained in use up into the eighteenth
century CE, so until fairly recently folks were still known
to strap some bones to their feet and hit the ice. Now,
(33:47):
the authors here note that these ice skates lacked the
edge that you find on modern metal skates, so you
couldn't just pump along on these with your legs. That
kind of that sliding and gliding motion that we were
talking about being so fulfilling. You would not be doing
that on these ice skates. You wouldn't be doing a
lot of tricks I'm guessing either, and whirls and whirls
(34:09):
and so forth, because your locomotion depended pretty much entirely
on your upper limbs working a pair of poles to
push you along.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Oh interesting, okay, So.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
In that it has more in common I would imagine
with skiing, which we're not really getting into today. It's
going to be a separate episode at some point.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Now.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
From and his co author point out that skates such
as these would have been used for accompanying animal driven
sleds or sledges. They would have been used in ice
fishing or fishing from positions further out on the ice,
but especially among the Dutch people, the technology soon became
essential for winter transportation via frozen rivers, lakes, and eventually canals.
(34:52):
So think of a region where you know where you
have a bunch of frozen over rivers, and or canals
that are ultimate connecting different human populations, or situations where
you have a completely frozen lake and you have human
populations at different points across from each other across said lake.
It's ultimately faster and more energy efficient to use some
(35:15):
sort of skating technology. And yeah, for Menty stresses that
it was highly efficient. This was no mere novelty. They
weren't doing this. You know, maybe it was fun, but
they weren't doing it because it was fun, he writes,
quote from its very conception, skating on ice was a
form of human powered locomotion that was simple and effective,
(35:36):
very cheap, and thus accessible to a large part of
the population, and allowed people to reach more distant destinations
than they could do by walking or running. In fact,
unless more expensive means of transport such as horses or
later trains were used, ice skates were probably the most
convenient locomotion tool until bicycles were built. That would have
(35:57):
been the nineteenth century, the latter not being very safe
on slippery roads in winter.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
That's interesting, Well, I would not have thought about it
that way.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, So not everywhere and certainly not year round, but
that there would be places where this was just highly efficient.
It was just the most the most sensible way to
move from point A to point B if conditions were
just right. Now, while again bone skates were ultimately a
(36:26):
long lasting technology against superior to mere wood, it would
seem by the thirteenth century CE in the Netherlands, skaters
returned to wood to make use of metal in their skating,
constructing wooden skates that had metal blades. Now, these were
still things that you would strap to the bottom of
your shoes, and I included an image of one of
(36:46):
these for you here, Joe. It is also not very fancy.
If you didn't know you were looking at an ice skate,
you might not know you were looking at an ice skate.
It's like a imagine a wooden skate, but with a
thin metal blade, and then it is strapped or tied
to your shoes.
Speaker 5 (37:02):
Yeah, yeah, it looks It looks like the wooden bottom
of a boat, or like a boat keel with a
tiny little strip of metal blades sticking out of the bottom.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
And so for Mantiene's co author point out that the
wood here would have been easy to work. The metal
that they use was very durable. An interesting thing here
is that these skates would apparently, according to their reconstructions
and their tests, would have suffered from greater friction compared
to bone skates. But their big advantage was that they
(37:30):
allowed the user to finally propel themselves with their lower limbs,
so you could seemingly throw away the poles, free up
your arms, and depend almost entirely on leg power. And
as such, this is really when we begin to see
skating as we know it today entering the world, because
if you go to any ice skating rink, and certainly
(37:51):
if you go to a roller skating rink, you're not
going to see people pushing around on poles. I mean,
maybe there's some sort of scenario where you use poles
to get your feet underneath you, but I've never seen
anything like that.
Speaker 5 (38:03):
Right, So I imagine it's like the thinness of the
blade that allows you to just use your legs because
of the way that you can angle the foot to
push versus gliding, and you can't really do that with
the more rounded edge of a bone.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yes, that's my understanding. So at this point, yeah, we're
kind of off to the races. We're really not purely
inventing something new, but we've innovated to a very interesting
place in the development of the ice skate. And during
the fifteenth and eighteenth century ice skates, they retained their
metal wood construction, but they became about thirty percent lighter.
(38:38):
According for Mente, Dutch skates of the time were shorter
compared to modern skates and therefore more difficult to balance
on compared to what we have today, but they would
have proven especially useful to them during the little ice
Age of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, during which the
system of rivers and canals would have proven ideal skate routes,
(39:00):
connecting different populations and different you know, different destinations. And
then during the eighteenth century, skates on the whole became
longer and enabled easier balance and resulted in lower resistance
the weight spread out across longer blades. And I've included
another photo Formenti's work here reconstruction. This is still something
(39:23):
you strapped your existing footwear, but it is even more
identifiable I think as an ice skate.
Speaker 4 (39:29):
Oh yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And then during the nineteenth century we finally ended up
with specialized ice skates, with the skates permanently affixed to
a boot of some sort screwed into place an ice
skate that has shoelaces so forth, like you would identify
now when you go in like rent ice skates to
go ice skating, and the blades were even longer, apparently
(39:53):
up to twice the length of the old thirteenth century skates,
enabling even greater balance and maneuverability. And then a whole
host of additional innovations have been made and continue to
be made, producing skates that are ever more ergonomic, speedy,
and effective. Different breaking mechanics were added, blades that ultimately
(40:16):
like have a mechanical aspect to them and can shift
and so forth. I saw a Fermente quoted in an
article I believe it's the Science Friday, where he basically
says that we probably haven't seen as long of a
skate as is ideal, Like, skates are probably going to
keep They're going to keep evolving. They're still evolving, they're
(40:37):
becoming more and more efficient, and they may get longer.
We have not reached peak ice skate length yet.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
Wait, does he have a specific peak length in mind?
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Now he's just saying that we're still like fine tuning everything.
And I guess the other interesting thing here is that
there's not just one purpose for ice skates. There are
a lot of highly specialized purposes for ice skates. So
you know, we have a whole host of skate based
sporting activities and they range from figure skating to ice hockey.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (41:07):
I was reading about that too, And an interesting thing
there is that apparently different ice temperatures are preferred for
the different sports. I think the way I was reading
it is that usually they want the temperature a little
bit higher for figure skating because figure skaters, I think
a softer ice gives them more control over precise movements,
(41:29):
whereas with ice hockey, I think they like a slightly
colder ice because that allows them to achieve like a
higher top speed.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Okay, interesting, Okay, So with hockey it's more about speed,
and with figure skating it's maneuverability, which makes sense now.
Formenti and his co author in the aforementioned paper, they
compare the effectiveness of the four main eras of ice skates,
and the results illustrate this continual improvement process that we're
looking at here. I'm not going to roll through the
entire chart you can find it in the original paper,
(42:00):
but you can see here he breaks things out by speed,
stride frequency, stride length, and so forth, and for Minty
points out that with the same metabolic power, skaters today
have a speed four times that of our ancestors, and
again it's only increasing as we fine tune our skate design.
Speaker 5 (42:21):
This might not actually be an issue, but I just
had the thought, do skaters on rink ice have higher
speeds as well, just because they can feel safe to
go at higher speeds, whereas if you're on a natural
body of water, you might be more I don't know,
cautious about like straying into an area of thin ice
(42:41):
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Hmm, that's a good point. I mean, I guess the
other number of factors that might come into play, right
if you're dealing with like natural ice versus zambonid ice, right.
Speaker 5 (42:52):
Yeah, And I know that the zambonid ice, like the
rink ice, is laid down one layer at a time
to give it special properties kind of make it perfect
for skating, whereas, of course natural ice on a body
of water, I mean, it might be great for skating,
but it doesn't have whatever refined quality they're looking for
on that rink ice.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Now I want to come back to ice skating in China,
because as I was hitting the core data year, I
kept finding various references to Chinese ice skating, and I'd
read that ice skating in China might date back to
the Song dynasty, so nine sixty to twelve seventy nine.
See that is, of course in addition to possibly connected
(43:33):
or independent developments in the north of Russia, as I
referenced earlier, but certainly I looked into this a little
bit more, and you have these ice festivals, the Bingshi,
which I think means ice amusement festivals that seem to
date back to the Song dynasty in China and consisted
of various winter sports and performances. Among the many festivities,
(43:56):
there was a downhill skating event that involved kind of
a leather ice skate. I wasn't able to find any
images of reproduction of this, but I found some various
modern illustrations of what these might have consisted of. And
these these are kind of like curved leather shoes that
seem to have been made expressly for sliding across the
(44:21):
ice and or snow.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
If this is what's depicted in the illustration you put
in our outline. They're kind of curled up at the
toe like elf shoes.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yes, yes, think like leather elf shoes designed for sliding
around on ice. It's not skating in the sense that
we've been talking about skating, I think from the physics standpoint.
But these would have been things that would have been
you would have worn for like this downhill skating competition
or something that I've seen translated as ice football, in
(44:49):
which people were skating around on the ice and these
leather shoes throwing some sort of a ball back and forth.
The illustration here that I found is from the Beijing
based World of the World of Chinese website, So my
understanding is like these are similar but a little bit different.
These would have also the examples we're looking at here
would have definitely been novelty based skates. These were not
(45:13):
about locomotion. These were about amusement. However, in other parts
of modern China you do find ancient examples of bone skates.
I was reading that in twenty twenty three, Chinese archaeologists
found an example of a bone ice skate in a
Bronze Age tomb from roughly three thy five hundred years ago,
(45:35):
possibly of the Andronova culture of cattle herders that lived
in China's western Shixiang Weaker Autonomous Region. These would have
been very much akin to what we were talking about,
like the bones scrapped to a boot or to a
shoe that enabled one to move across naturally frozen bodies
(45:57):
of water. Again, and it does seem to come back
to bones. It comes back to horse and cow bones
strap to the bottom of your feet, enabling you to
at least push yourself across the ice with a big
with a pair of poles or sticks.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Well, Rob, you've talked me into it.
Speaker 5 (46:14):
If I if I take my child ice skating this year,
I'm gonna I'm gonna have to get.
Speaker 4 (46:18):
Some bone skating to try out. See how they do.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
You know I could. I don't think it would be
a good idea. I think this would not in the
long run, This would be a failure. But I could
imagine someone trying to market this. You know, why settle
for ice skating when this year when you could do
primal ice skating bone ice skating, and people would be like, yeah,
you know, I'm kind of a little overthrowing axes at
(46:43):
the local axe throwing range. I want to try something
else that has this kind of like, you know, ancient
vibe to it. Let's strap on some bones and see
how it goes. I think you would find it.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Would it would? It would be harder.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
It sounds like every everything I've read about it, it
would have been a much harder and clumsier thing to do.
We're much better off with modern ice skates.
Speaker 4 (47:03):
But for the metal of it, maybe you use the
non metal.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yes, both ice skates are very metal. We'll definitely say that.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
All right. Should we wrap up.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
There, Yeah, We're going to go ahead and close out
this episode. However, again, definitely tune in later in June
when we come back and talk about roller skating on
its own, again directly connected to the invention of ice skating,
but very much its own thing as well. In the meantime,
we'd of course love to hear from everyone out there.
Do you have experiences or thoughts related to ice skating.
(47:36):
Is there anyone out there who has tried a more
archaic version of the ice skate? If so, definitely right
into us because we would love to have your feedback.
As always, we'd like to remind you that the stuff
to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays, we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can find us
(47:57):
wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to
be some stars and a nice rating that always helps
us out. And on top of that, you'll also find
us on various social media platforms, not all of them
because they keep adding new ones and we just can't
keep up, but hey, we're on Instagram. At least you
can find us there as st b y M podcast.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
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, if you
would like to suggest a topic for the future, or
if you just want to say hi, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 4 (49:04):
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