June 24, 2025 • 56 mins
In this invention-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe build on last month's episode on ice skates with a discussion of their wheelbase spin off: the rollerskate!
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 4 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be
doing one of our invention episodes, and the subject is
roller skates. I was going to say this is kind
of a sequel to an episode we did a few
weeks ago about the invention of ice skates, but it
might be more accurate to say that episode was a
prequel to this one, because from what I recall, Rob,
(00:37):
you wanted to look at skating as a subject because
your family has gotten into roller skating or blading lately.
Is that the case.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, yeah, and not a huge story really, But essentially,
I have some friends who got into roller skating during
the pandemic, which you know, increased my awareness of this
individual's involvement in various local skating meetups and so forth.
And my now thirteen year old also recently got into
the roller skating scene as well, and so I've just
(01:07):
been really impressed by, first of all, the fact that
roller skating is back. I remember, as a kid in
the nineties seeing various bits of media about roller blades,
and I was just like, oh, well, this is the future,
rollerblades of the future. Roller skating is just done.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Oh that's funny. I feel like when I was a
kid in the nineties, like I considered both roller skating
and blading to be in but blading was the more
extreme version. In a very nineties television commercial, coded kind
of way, it's the code red flavor of skating.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean definitely. I mean, there were,
of course plenty of roller skating rinks around, so I
didn't think it was it was actually dead, but the
thing I would see on MTV and so forth, it
was the roller blading, and so it seemed like the future.
So it's nice to see that it's the roller skating
itself is back with such gusto. And then the other
(02:02):
part of the equation is that I've just really impressed
by the culture of many of these rollers blading groups.
You know, there's a lot of progressive and inviting aspects.
There's more than a little disco culture still thrown in there.
And so I was, yeah, I was interested in the
invention of the roller skate. And we quickly realized, well,
you can't talk about roller skates without talking about ice skates,
(02:24):
And so we ended up doing that whole episode just
on ice skates.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Right, because it just so happens that ice skating is
an earlier invention, so we had to talk about it first.
But here we are, sure, yeah, much earlier, but here
we are with roller skates today.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, And I imagine we have a number of
skaters out there. I myself am not a roller skater.
Oh okay, I can't remember the last time I was
on skates. I'm not saying I won't pick it up
at some point in the future, but as of right now,
I just ice skate. Maybe once a year, though I
did not in the past year, so maybe it's every
two years I ice skate. But it is indeed a
(02:58):
big deal. I was not just basing it on my
own observations here. I looked up an article from twenty
twenty two who was published on NPR titled roller skating
feels a lot like love, and following is just part
of the process. This was by Kia Miyaka Ntez And Yeah,
this article points out that there was this huge boom
(03:20):
in popularity during the pandemic after having fallen sharply in
popularity during the late twentieth century. Maybe, and I'm just
guessing here lining up with my nineties kid observations.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Of the rise of the roller blade.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
This is funny because you're you're making this distinction between
roller skating and roller blading, which I considered really the
same thing, is just like different different forms of the shoe.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
It may be an artificial distinction that I'm really harping
on here, because again I'm not a skater, So people
who are actually skaters can probably like chie in and
they may say, well, yeah, I sometimes aware these sometimes
were the others, or maybe there is some are there
are there differences between roller skaters and rollerbladers. I guess
some of the events that I've I've been to and
(04:05):
not participated in, I have seen people using both types
of skates. But this author here also aligns the popularity
of roller skating during the nineteen seventies with disco, and
again that's probably a strong reason why you see some
disco vibes to some of the current skating culture.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I think even in the nineties, one of the skating
rinks I went to in like Tennessee had a disco
ball in it.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, but so you might be forgiven just you know,
via the consumption of media into thinking that okay, disco
is dead, it's not really dead and didn't die. You
might you might likewise think, well, skating also fell off
in popularity and it's never coming back. But then it
did come back and it's still holding on to that
popularity as well. It you know, survived in various groups,
(04:53):
maybe just under the radar of a lot of the mainstream,
and it's apparently big business today. According to Busines Research
insights from earlier this year, the roller skating market size
is quote valued it approximately USD four point eight billion
in twenty twenty four and is expected to reach USD
seven point nine billion by twenty thirty two. So, whether
you're you're hip or square, whether you're concerned with the
(05:15):
culture or with just the raw numbers involved in it,
I think there's no denying the power of roller skating today.
I mean, it's it's great exercise by most accounts, and
it's also a form of social expression, so I think
that's great.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I also have not tried it since I was a kid,
so I have no idea how hard it would be.
Like I literally I could put them on and just
pick it right up, or maybe it would be a
grueling discovery that I just can't do this anymore. I
really don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I think you'd be comfortable, either of us would be
comfortable in like an hour or so.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
That's encouraging. I was going to say I'd like to
pick it up, but that I was just now remembering
another reason that it was always kind of difficult when
I was a kid, because I did have a pair
of skates when I was a kid, but it was
that my neighborhood is like my house is on a hill,
so it was like I always felt like I don't
know if I can, like if I go down the hill,
(06:11):
can I get back up or I have to take
my skates off? Or am I going to careene into something?
So I don't know. Maybe maybe skating is easier if
you live in a very flat place.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Wait are you saying that you were trepidacious about skating
to the skating rink because there were.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Hills skating around my house, like around on the sidewalks
and streets around my house and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Oh okay, yes, I see. Yeah, Because to be clear,
for anyone that's not familiar, like there are different modes
of skating, Like you just go and skate in a rink,
but then there are plenty of people who go out
and skate, you know, on various designated streets and so forth.
You know, and there are different types of wheels that
correspond with exactly what you're skating on.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
So one surprising thing that I remember we discovered when
we were preparing for the ice skating episode is that
the core physics question of how and why ice skating works,
in effect, why is ice so slippery? Why can you
achieve such low friction motion over the top of it?
That question is not fully solved. We have much better
(07:15):
ideas than we used to about the answer to that,
but as of the past few years, it has still
been an active area of research. I do not believe
any such mysteries exist with regards to roller skating. It's
not like a baffling scientific question. Roller skating does not
rely on any strange, low friction quasi liquid layers at
(07:35):
the surface of ice. Instead, it's the principle of the
wheel and axle, which, at the risk of sounding hubristic,
I think we've got that one pretty well figured out. Yes,
but despite the fact that there's less scientific mystery involved
in how roller skating works doesn't mean that the history
is uninteresting. And there are a lot of twists and
turns here.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, more so than I was expecting. But you know,
then again, and then you get into inventions from this
time period, and it often does end up a.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Little more complex, with.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Parallel discoveries, parallel breakthroughs, different independent creations of the same thing,
and then of course folks trying to make money off
of those inventions.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
That's right. So I think one thing we can definitely
say about the invention of roller skates is that there
is no clear moment in history that can be pinpointed
as the earliest roller skate. There was a from what
I can tell, very economically and historically important roller skate
model created in the eighteen sixties by an American businessman
(08:42):
named James Plimpton, and I think we'll come back and
discuss the success of that model in a bit, and
then other models around it. But it's worth identifying first
that we know for certain Plimpton was not the first
person to put wheels on shoes. We have many well
documented earlier examples. And then beyond that, I'd say because
of how obvious the concept is, like applying the wheel
(09:05):
and axle principle to the bottom of a shoe, we
can just guess that there were almost certainly even older
examples than the earliest ones we know about, probably going
back hundreds or even thousands of years. But we simply
don't have any evidence of those models, no written records
and no physical remains. But it would be it would
be foolish, in my opinion, to assume that they had
(09:28):
Nobody had ever done this.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Right right, And this ties ties in with our past
discussions on the wheel itself, because the wheel and the
wheel wheeled vehicle as concepts can be found in various
cultures in different times, even among people who did not
make use of the wheel for practical labor or conveyance.
A wheeled vehicle's usefulness, as we discussed, depends on the
underlying state of roads, and there's a similar situation in
(09:53):
play with roller skates to a large degree, though I
was surprised to find out that that off road roller
skating does seem to be a thing today. You can
find videos of it, you can buy these skates, but
for the most part, it was.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Not a thing like roller skating in the mud is like, I.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Guess people are going out there and getting it, so
more power to them. But yeah, I can only imagine
just as at various points in the past, probably lost
to the mists of history, you know, various people made
little toys on wheels. Some of those toys were stepped upon,
some of those toys were intentionally placed under feet, and
(10:35):
someone was a joker at a party somewhere.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Sorry, when we're done here, I got to look up
these off road skating and see what it's about. I'm
imagining people with like monster truck tires on their feet.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I can think that's kind of the vibe that. As
with all of this listeners right in, we want to
hear from rollerbladers, roller skaters, and any off road roller
skaters out there as well.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
So I mentioned that we know very well about some
earlier roller skate models than the ones that achieved commercial
success in the nineteenth century. So what were some of
these earlier roller skate models for which we do have
solid evidence. There is a commonly cited book length work
on this which does get into the history out. Unfortunately,
(11:26):
I was not able to get a copy of this
book it's called The History of Roller Skating by James
Turner with Michael Zaidman, published by the National Museum of
Roller Skating. I think this is in Nebraska. Seems to
be out of print. You can get a used copy
on Amazon for only three hundred and sixty dollars. Should
we go in on that?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
How we could have with more time, I guess so.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Anyway, wasn't able to get a copy of this book myself.
But Michael Pollock, the author of a short twenty fifteen
article in The New York Times called The History of
Roller Skates, apparently was able to get a copy somehow,
and he says that Turner and Zaidman, the authors of
this book, right that the earliest recorded inventor of roller
skates was an eccentric eighteenth century Flemish inventor and instrument
(12:11):
maker named John Joseph Merlin, aka the Ingenious Mechanic. And
that's mechanic with a C K at the end, so
you know it's legit. So John Joseph Merlin lived from
seventeen thirty five to eighteen oh three. I looked this
guy up and it turns out he was a real character.
So I would like to just sort of go into
(12:32):
his biography for a bit.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I mean, with a name like that, yeah, it's got
to be good.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
So I want to mention a couple of nice accessible
sources on Merlin. One is a blog post hosted by
the Internet Cello Society, because he was also an instrument maker,
called Magical Merlin. This was written by an American cellist
and music professor named Sarah Freiberg. Also, I found a
good twenty eighteen post on a historical blog known as
London Historians by an author named Mike Rindell a bit
(13:01):
of basic biography. John Joseph Merlin was born in seventeen
thirty five in the city of Hui, which is today
in the country of Belgium. I think at the time
it was in a principality that doesn't exist anymore, and
I don't remember the name of But when he was
a young man, Merlin studied for six years at the
Academy of Sciences in Paris, where he learned a lot
(13:24):
of what would become useful in his career as a
mechanical inventor and engineer. In the year seventeen sixty, at
the age of twenty five, he moved to London first,
I think as part of a diplomatic group, shortly after
which he made friends with a bunch of fashionable and
influential people in london intellectual and artistic circles. Merlin was
(13:47):
a man of many talents. Most notably he invented a
bunch of beautiful and dazzling mechanical automata rob We've done
episodes on automatave from the period in the past. These
were sort of eighteenth century clockwork robots. So the word
robot could be a little misleading because that might imply
(14:10):
some level of decision making or agency. These machines did
not in any way exercise decision making, action, independence, agency,
anything like that. They were more like ingenious, complex wind
up toys that would go through a series of predetermined motions,
but still remarkable engineering achievements.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, as I recall, it kind of varies from creator
to create, or from one creation to another, But there
was sometimes a vibe of something more like pure novelty,
and then other times there was this kind of.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Aspect to it.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
You know, sometimes you were supposed to really think about
what you were looking at other times it was maybe
like just a little more for humor sike.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I thought
you were going in a different direction though, but you're
exactly right. Some of these I think were meant to
illustrate there were kind of works of art in a
wayment to illustrate philosophical principles, to connect to different theories
about the origin of movements and even theology and cosmology
and what it meant for things to be alive and so, yeah,
(15:20):
we've talked about that in the past, how these works
connected to those different schools of philosophy at the time.
But the other distinction I was making was the ones
that are like, here's something interesting to look at and
you know, being very clear about how it works, versus
the ones where it was like, this is actually alive
and it's really making decisions and stuff, yeah, which was
(15:42):
not true.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, and then sometimes there was kind of a little
trickery in the degree to which things were automated. Go
back into the archives, I believe we have episodes on
the pooping duck. Yes, this being like a key focal
point of some of these issues.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
But like I said, despite the fact that they were
not actually like in dependent agentic robots in any way,
they were more like very intricate, complex wind up toys.
Still remarkable engineering achievements. And if you want to see
one of one of Merlin's co creations that he made
actually with the help of a bunch of other people,
(16:18):
I think, in a project that was helmed by a
guy named James Cox, who I'll get to in a minute,
you can look up the silver Swan automaton, which still
exists and you can see today, or at least could
as of recently I think, probably still today at the
Bows Museum in northern England. So just to describe it quickly,
(16:38):
this is a life sized swan made out of silver.
Apparently a huge mass of silver went into its creation,
and it's sitting on a tray a platform that represents
a stream where the water is made out of these long,
thin glass rods, and so this thing still works today.
(16:59):
You can wind it up and see it move and
when you do that, the glass rods move back and
forth and resemble running water, and the stream part is
surrounded by silver leaves. Again, you can look up video
of this. It's kind of amazing how graceful and smooth
and life like the movements of the swan itself are
(17:19):
the swan kind of swivels its neck and it does
that thing swans do where they turn around and they
like stick their head back under their wing or toward
their back. It does that, and then it dips its
head into the water and catches a fish althile. This
very mysterious little tune plays on hidden bells. Part of
the automaton is just a giant music box that plays
(17:40):
a selection of several different tunes. So it is an
amazing thing to watch in action, especially realizing that this
thing was completed in like the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yes, I'm looking at a video that you sent me
of this swan in action, and yeah, these are very
fluid movements here. I was expecting something a lot clunkier.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yeah, something more kind of start and stop jerking up
and you know that sort of thing. But no, it's
very graceful. And people at the time commented on this
like how graceful and lifelike it was. But John Joseph
Merlin was not on Sorry what.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I was just I was just thinking, like, was he
still a diplomat at the time, was there anything to do?
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I don't know if he was. I don't know how
long he stayed in Diplomat, so.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Because a lot of work evidently went into this.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Yeah, huge amount.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
But Merlin was not only a clock punk silver swancrafter.
He was also just an all purpose inventor and designer,
both of functional items things like medical devices and measuring instruments,
and also bizarre novelties like a like a real life
size mechanical chariot with an automatic horse whip that he
(18:54):
would ride around in Hyde Park.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
In addition, he was a renown instrument maker. One of
the sources I mentioned that post by cellis name Sarah Freiberg.
Her introduction to Merlin in writing this piece is actually
that she happened to acquire a Baroque cello that he
himself made in London in seventeen eighty four. So Merlin
was originally probably trained in the art of clockmaking, and
(19:19):
he would end up working for some time beginning in
seventeen sixty six for this British inventor and jeweler named
James Cox. Cox was one of the co creators of
the Silver Swan. Cox was also sort of a showman,
and he operated a museum or actually I think multiple
sort of arcades and museums, one of which was this
(19:41):
showroom for mechanical marvels at a street called Spring Gardens
in Westminster, and Merlin was Cox's chief mechanic. Merlin went
into business for himself in the seventeen seventies. He filed
his first patent in seventeen seventy three for a type
of Dutch oven that had a built in jack for
rotating meat. I've seen this described in some sources as
(20:04):
like the first rotisseriy. I don't know that, because I
feel like we've talked about earlier rotisseries. I don't know.
Maybe it's the first of some kind of rotisseriy.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, I would venture that it's something like that. And
there's no dog involved in here, now.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
No, that's what we talked about. Yes, animal operated belt,
the turn belt dog. Yes, the turnspit dog. That's what
it was. And Merlin also patented improvements to musical instrument designs.
He did some variations on the harpsichord. He also created
all new instruments, which, as far as I can tell,
none of these really caught on. One example that Freiberg
(20:40):
mentions as an instrument called a pentachord, which she describes
as a quote small five string cello which is tuned
C G D A D. At some point, James Cox
is the guy he was working for. James Cox's finances
kind of went south, and so Merlin decided to set
up his own museum. So in seventeen eighty three he
(21:01):
acquired a property at Prince's Street. This is also in Westminster,
and he called it Merlin's Mechanical Museum. I am exerting
extreme self control to not accidentally call this Merlin's Shop
of Mystical Wonders, but I would start typing that in
the note It's over. But no, it was Merlin's Mechanical Museum.
(21:22):
I also have heard it said. I think this was
by a museum tour guide who was showing off the
Silver Swan. I think said that it was sometimes called
Merlin's Cave. But anyway, this place was crammed with dazzling automata,
weird furniture, and other inventions and collectors pieces. Rendell and
(21:43):
his blog post mentions a bunch of other inventions by Merlin.
I just want to highlight a few of them. I
already alluded to the mechanical chariot complete with a whip.
This was interesting because it also had a type of
odometer to measure a distance measuring device distance traveled, which
that ties into another invention episode we've done in the past.
(22:04):
We did the odometer at some point, tracing that all
the way back to inventions in the ancient world. But
this had a version of an odometer, and Merlin called
that odometer the way Wise and he would apparently ride
this chariot around through Hyde Park to kind of advertise
his magnificent works. He has something else that he created
called the gouty chair. This was a form of wheelchair,
(22:28):
not with large wheels on the sides like you would
see on modern devices, but it had a set of
four smaller wheels near the floor. I was looking at.
You can actually look up pictures of this that exist today,
and so you can see sort of how it was
put together. But I couldn't figure out by looking at
these or reading descriptions exactly how it works. It looks
like it's operated by a pair of hand turned cranks
(22:52):
on the arm rests, and I'm not sure how these
would both steer and propel the chair at the same time.
Maybe there's some mechanism missing here.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Likewise, I can't tell what's going on with like the
foot pad down there, if it's just for resting your
feet on, or if there's some sort of pressure applied there.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Could it be like a pedal that maybe propels. Maybe Yeah,
but there is kind of a footrest below the chair,
But otherwise it looks like a regular piece of furniture.
It's just affixed with like all these wheels and cranks
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, designed for individuals suffering from the gout.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
I'm assume that's what I assume based on it being
called the gouty chair, though I assume it could work for,
you know, anybody who has mobility issues. And Merlin apparently
did design a number of devices, like medical devices and
devices to help people with various physical disabilities. He designed
a some kind of prosthetic gripping devices for people without arms,
(23:47):
and a set of playing cards which could be read
by the blind. This was presumably some kind of precursor
to Braille notation this would have been before braille, but
had I guess some kind of bumps or something that
could be felt. And he also invented a bunch of
types of mechanical moving furniture, or what was sometimes called
transforming furniture, and this ranged from relatively mundane creations like
(24:12):
you had, like you know, a rotating tea table, Okay,
it's not hard to imagine you might see things like
that today to something that Freiberg includes in her ride
up that was advertised as quote the Quarteto music cabinet.
It contains flutes, violins, and music books and by touching
a spring key it will rise to a proper height
(24:32):
and form music desks for four performers and thin.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
It sounds very futuristic really.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Kind of like adjustable standing desk sort of but for musicians,
and includes like a complex opening and closing cabinet with
different compartments. He also, i think, put together a lot
of different kind of weights and measuring machines and then
also clocks, including he was he was a co creator
of a so called perpetual motion claw. This was again
(25:01):
with James Cox. Dubious about this one because obviously perpetual
motion machines that doesn't exist in reality. Cox i think
claimed this really was a perpetual motion machine, but from
what I've read, it was powered by a mercury barometer
responding to changes in atmospheric pressure in order to contract
(25:22):
the spring. And of course this would not be a
true perpetual motion machine. It would be requiring this external play.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Otherwise it would be like saying that a windmill is
perpetual motion machine.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
So Merlin was active in the London social scene of
his time, and he was known as kind of weird
and flamboyant, and he liked to party. I came across
comments written by the English novelist Fanny Bernie about Merlin.
She spent time with him because her father, the musicologist
Charles Bernie, was good friends with Merlin, so she knew
(25:58):
him well, and she wrote about him as follows. He
is a great favorite in our house. He is very diverting.
Also in conversation. There is a singular simplicity in his manners.
He speaks his opinions upon all subjects and about all persons,
with the most undisguised freedom. He does, not, though a foreigner,
want words. I mean he does not lack words. He
(26:18):
had a big vocabulary. He does not want words, but
he arranges and pronounces them very comically. He is humbly
grateful for all civilities that are shown him but is
warmly and honestly resentful for the least slight.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
You know, this is exactly the sort of sort of
dude that you don't want to slight because I feel
like you run a great risk of being reduced in
size and forced to play around with the nutcrackers.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
And the rap cans.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah he Septimus Prtorious or something. No, Yeah, so he
was like fun and weird, but apparently also maybe kind
of a big mouth and quick to take offense. And
I've also read in other sources them are people mentioning
this thing. She says that he was known for having
a robust vocabulary, for not a native English speaker, but
(27:07):
for putting words in a weird order when speaking English.
So I'm kind of imagining him as Yoda.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah. Yeah, it's also weird the way it's his phrase,
because they're like, oh, he's basically sounds like they're making
fun of his accent while still crediting his vocabulary and
grasps with the English language.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
This is so funny because he's conforming to what I
would think of as a later storytelling archetype, like the
eccentric foreign professor with a strange accent who is like
an inventor of curiosities. But this has got to be
before I thought such an archetype existed, So I don't know.
(27:47):
Maybe it's just a coincidence, or could it be based
on this guy in anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I mean, it would not surprise me. We've seen other
examples of various historical individuals having a great deal of
influence over how various stereotypes are interpreted.
Speaker 4 (28:04):
But yeah, so anyway, he connected to a bunch of
famous people in his time. Johann Christian Bach, the son
of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach, apparently performed instruments
performed on instruments made by Merlin. And another very important
historical connection this is mentioned in that blog post by Rendell,
is that there's a first hand account of a visit
(28:26):
to Merlin's museum by a young Charles Babbage, who would
go on years later to invent the very historically important
mechanical computing device known as the difference engine. Babbage's mechanical
computer designs and concepts laid the groundwork for the electronic
computers that would come to be the basis of you know,
(28:47):
most or maybe all of today's digital technology. So Babbage
wrote about this experience of going to Merlin's cave. He
says that Merlin took him on a tour of like
a private gallery to show him like the special projects,
and Babbage says, quote, there were two uncovered female figures
of silver, about twelve inches high, and he describes one
(29:09):
of the figures as an admirable dan Seuss, meaning a
female ballerina, and says she had a silver bird perched
on a forefinger of her right hand, and then the
bird would move, it would shake its tail and flap
its wings and also opening close its little beak. And
then of the silver ballerina herself, he said, quote, the
lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were
(29:32):
full of imagination and irresistible. And Babbage was so struck
by these little mechanical objects, these sort of precursors to robots,
that he would come back and buy the exhibits in
eighteen thirty four, after Merlin's death.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
What fascinating individual so very much part of like a
very crucial technological ecosystem of the day. And to be clear,
like you pointed out, not just creating sheer novelties, seemingly
constantly innovating, and like I can only imagine like following
every idea, good or bad, useful or just entertaining that
(30:10):
seems to enter into his head.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Yes, yeah, you get the idea of just phrenetic energy,
constant moving about and doing different things, and being a
perhaps touchy but also beloved weirdo of the time.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
So anyway, onto Merlin's roller skates episode. This is back
back to the main event here. So one of John
Joseph Merlin's now most famous inventions was actually one of
the simplest, especially when you compare it to like the
intricate you know, clockwork ballet dancers and the silver Avians
and all that. And that was the roller skate. Now again,
(30:46):
was Merlin the first person ever to put wheels on
a show on a shoe? Very doubtful. In her article,
Freiberg mentions that Merlin quote probably improved skates which first
appeared in Holland in around seventeen hundred, but there is
no credited inventor or further detail of those earlier models.
(31:07):
It's just like some things like this probably existed and
he improved them. But again, Turner and Zeidman say, he's
the earliest recorded inventor of a roller skate. So one
of the things that makes Merlin's model historically interesting is that,
ever the showman Merlin staged a wild public demonstration of
(31:28):
his invention at a fancy masquerade ball around seventeen sixty,
and it went extremely badly. An account of this incident
appears in a book called concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes
written by Thomas Busby in eighteen five, and Buzzby tells
the story as follows, speaking about Merlin, quote, one of
(31:50):
his ingenious novelties was a pair of skates. This is
spelled skaies.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
That's sounds about right, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
A pair of skates contrived to run on wheels. Supplied
with these and a violin he mixed in the motley
group of one of Missus Cowley's masquerades at Carlisle House.
When not having provided the means of retarding his velocity
or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror
(32:21):
of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to adams,
broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely.
Oh my goodness, don't you hate when that happens. So
He's like, I have invented wheels for feet. I have
made wheels for feet. Everybody's got to see this, So
I'm gonna roll around the masquerade. Everybody's got their little
their masks and their fancy costumes. I'm gonna play the
(32:43):
violin while riding on these things. But he forgot to
put brakes in them, and so he crashes into a mirror,
shatters it to pieces, or to adams in the words
of Busby and h and everybody's I guess, I don't know.
Were they laughing at him? Were they mad? Were they
sorry for him? I doesn't say what the crowd's reaction.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
I mean, given that he's also bleeding, perhaps severely at
this point, I can only imagine the stun silence.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
So to note Merlin's designed for these skates. It sounds
like it was a The wheels are an inline orientation,
so not side by side, and two wheels each two
wheels per foot. I don't I'm not a skater myself,
so I don't know. Sounds like that wouldn't be enough.
It sounds like you want more wheels. Maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, and some of the the innovations that would come
after Merlin, but before proper what we would think of
as you know, more contemporary roller skates tended to have
I think at least three wheels.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Yeah, but again this is important. Merlin's roller skate design
did not include brakes, and no toe brakes and no back,
no heel breks, so there was no built in ability
to slow down or stop or really change direction as
it says, So yeah, it was it was more This
strikes me as more of like an idea than something
(34:04):
really like honed in and made practical.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah, very much a novelty that he was willing
and excited to pursue there in front of everybody. Again,
seems like the kind of individual who would just follow
any mechanical fantasy that seemed to enter his head.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
So that is the John Joseph Merlin roller skating experience.
His model obviously would not be the last one, and
there were many innovations that would come along in the
following decades. People would keep making different kinds of little
roller skates, and roller skating did sort of seem to
catch on going into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, like Merlin's roller skating story is clearly the best,
it's the most entertaining. I think the basic reality is
that a lot of the subsequent and probably previous roller
skating invention stories were pretty boring in or lost to history.
Somebody made this novelty device that you strap under your
feet so you can skate around sort of like an
(35:15):
ice skater, but with nowhere near as much speed, power
or control, and then people just forgot that these inventions existed,
or they forgot about the inventor. But yeah, they were available.
And this is where we come back around to James Plimpton,
who of nineteen twenty eight through nineteen eleven, an American
(35:36):
inventor who This is one of those invention stories or
innovator stories that is also not that exciting, because it's
somebody like seeing a way that can improve upon something,
making that improvement and then being able to own it
and sell it and also litigate it. Those are the
(35:57):
I mean, those are also it's part of that, since
you've touched on stories related to that before on the show.
But I mean it's it's less magical when it's about
just suing people for infringing on your copyright.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
That's a lot of history. There's yeah, pursuing intellectual property things,
or just figuring out a way to market something so
that it catches on, or finding a way to make
something to make a design profitable. That's a big thing too.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, but still, I mean still, the story of Plimpton
is interesting in its own right. He had at least
one prior invention, because you know, to call yourself an inventor,
you need at least one or two in the in
the portfolio. He invented the eighteen fifty three Plimpton cabinet bed, which,
according to the Massachusetts Historical Society's Beehive blog, was seemingly
(36:47):
something he invented due to a practical need in his
own home, probably due to his own marriage the year earlier.
I think like at this point maybe they had a
kid on the way. It was his first major invention,
and this is another case where he did not invent
the cabinet bed a bed that folds up into a cabinet,
but he came up with a variation on it that
I'm to understand was aimed at requiring like a little
(37:09):
less effort to fold and unfold, and so kind of
like Merlin, you know, Plimpton seems like he was one
of these individuals who was, you know, always thinking about
ways to improve on a given device, though perhaps I
mean more than perhaps I think, certainly with more of
an entrepreneurial spirit to things as opposed to just a
(37:29):
more of a sheer exuberance for it, for invention and mechanisms.
And so basically, around eighteen sixty, according to the Beehive,
Plimpton takes ill, goes to the doctor, and the doctor says,
I think you should take up some physical activity. I
think you should take up ice skating. And Plimpton, being
(37:50):
a Northerner, would have would have been familiar with ice
skating and you know, maybe even had some history with it,
and maybe it was you know, falling back on something
he did as a kid. I'm not sure. We don't
have all the details, but what happens when summer rolls
around is you may find yourself unable to ice skate anymore,
and so keen to continue his wellness exercises, he bought
himself a pair of roller skates or what was passing
(38:15):
for roller skates at the time, and proceeded to think
about ways to improve upon them. Because much like we
were talking about with Merlin's roller skates. These would have
been very fixed, strapped onto your boots or your shoes.
They allowed you to go forwards or backwards, but not
take any turns. And also I think there may have
(38:35):
been some challenges with stopping when you needed to stop.
But yeah, there were various versions of this. I read
that there are some early roller skates attributed to a
Dutchman by the name of Hans Brinner from the same century,
but these are largely considered not true roller skates because
you could not turn in them. I mean, think about
(38:56):
a roller skating rink. Part of the whole field of
going to the old roller skating rink is going to
go round in a circle over and over again, or
at least in an oval.
Speaker 4 (39:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
So, at this point, again to be clear, commercially available
roller skates were very much around, and we've already I
think firmly established some early examples of things like roller skates,
and we speculated on even the ancient existence of things
like roller skates. But I know you and I kept
(39:27):
both both of us kept coming across mentions of a
seventeen forty three London theater production in which actors had
roller skates on simulating ice skating for theatrical purposes.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
Yeah. I came across mention of this use in a
theater production in seventeen forty three in a j Store
Daily article that I think you and I both read.
But I had some questions about that. Did you say
you were able to dig into like what this claim
was about the play?
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I dug into it more with no real satisfying answers.
So I would say, first and foremost kind of falling
along with things we've been discussing already, the idea that
in the year seventeen forty three, or even earlier or
certainly later, the idea that somebody staging a production of
some sort in London or elsewhere could have said, Hey,
(40:20):
what if in order to create the theatrical illusion of
ice skating, what if we used wheely skates instead? What
if we did that? Could we pull that off? It
seems perfectly reasonable to assume folks at least tried this out,
if not, you know, perfected to some degree, and you know,
did an entire series of performances.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
Yeah, but what is the origin of this claim? I
think that was the thing I was having a hard
time figuring out.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, as far as I can tell. Looking at various
sources that mentioned this, I just can't find any like
concrete details, and the details kind of vary too, Like,
for instance, the Jay Store Daily article mentions something about
how it might have been a production of a Tom
Lockwood play, and then I try and research that, and like,
who's Tom Lockwood? No evidence of such a playwright as
(41:11):
far as I could tell, Or maybe it's a really
obscure playwright or lost playwright, or it could be an
error of record keeping in history. I found another reference
to this idea in a nineteen ninety nine article by
Gilbert Nordon Passing Fashions but no Sustainable market A history
of roller skating in Austria before nineteen fourteen. Oh okay,
(41:33):
And it states that this was a performance at the
old Drury Lane Theater, which is still there in London's
West End. And this article states that it was a
play by Thomas Hood, or I should state, they should
stress at least a Thomas Hood, but certainly not the
Thomas Hood who lives seventeen ninety nine through eighteen forty five,
(41:55):
Nor could it possibly be his son Tom Hood, who
lived eighteen thirty five through eighteen seventy four. So we
run into a similar situation here like this, there's some
sort of error here. If it was a Tom or
Thomas Hood play, it had to be later, or if
it was in this given year of seventeen forty three,
it had to be a different playwright or a different theater,
(42:17):
and so forth.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
I don't want to presume, because I was never able
to wrap my head around what the source of the
confusion was here. But I wonder if the error is
just that this was not actually a play in the
eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century. If it was
the eighteen forties.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That would streamline things a lot, because then it could
be a Tom or Thomas Hood play, and even more importantly,
it would place it alongside a more well documented case
of roller skates being used to create the theatrical illusion
of ice skates, that being an eighteen forty nine French
(42:52):
opera production of Meyer Beers the Prophet, which featured performers
on roller skates.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Okay, yeah, that would make it. But again we can't,
so we can't adjudicate this question. But this seems possible
to me.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, but the reality is, at some point in history, yes,
roller skates were used for perhaps the first time on
the stage to create the illusion of ice skating.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
But okay, so back to the domain of business.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yes, yes, so Plimpton comes around, he's trying these out.
The skates that he's trying are going to be crude,
they're going to be awkward. Apparently you but apparently some
of these you could make turns in, but with difficulty,
so nothing close to the maneuverability of ice skating. So
especially if you were hoping to trade in your ice
skates for roller skates during the summer and have anything
(43:44):
like the same experience, you were in for a great
deal of disappointment. I was reading about some of these
earlier commercially available skates, and according to the Birth rollers
of the roller skate by John Exell twenty eleven, on
the engineer an eighteen nineteen patented roller skate, the work
(44:04):
of French and Ventner m Petebled, had metal wheels and
were I don't know if this criticism holds true, but
there were arguments that you could barely lift your foot
with these on, and that on top of it, they
were so ugly that the quote fairer Sex would never
wear them Joe included an image here of this particular skate.
(44:28):
I think you'll agree it neither looks tremendously ugly or
really all that heavy. But maybe it was actually heavy.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Yeah, maybe it's made of tungsten.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
I did. The wheels are supposedly metal. I can't tell
to what extent.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
They are in this image, but solid metal, like not
even hollow.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah yeah maybe so.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
Well yeah, so this would have been a design that
comes well after Merlin, but well before Plimpton, kind of
in between, in the middle between them.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Another example would be the three wheel juvenile inline skate
that was The dates of these are found like eighteen
sixty through eighteen sixty three, including an image here for you, Joe,
and basically it is what it sounds like. Instead of
two wheels inline strapped beneath a shoe or boot like
we were referencing earlier, this would.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Be three yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
So this is what Plimpton was working with, and his
main adjustments to the skates of his time were just
largely related to the exact layout of the wheels. He
went with a quad wheel or rocker arrangement that was
more comfortable to wear and far easier to turn and
for the most part, this is the same design you
(45:40):
find on roller skates today. There have been all sorts
of minor adjustments to this, but essentially it is accurate
to say that Plympton Innovates Slash invents the modern roller
skate with his patent, and it largely remains the way
people were skating off of the ice until around nineteen
seven nine, and that's when there's an attempt to sort
(46:02):
of redo the ice to roller transfer, generating a modern
roller skate based on modern ice skates, and this becomes
the inline skate or roller blade.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Okay, so the history of roller skates really does start.
The early designs are pretty much all inline. They're the
roller blade, and then we get the innovation of the
quad design, the two axles each with two wheels in
the orientation like a car. This solves a lot of
problems with roller skates, and then we find ways to
(46:33):
go back to the inline design and make it more
comfortable and desirable.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah, this really got me to thinking about the way
that we might think about inventions based on our own
sort of vocabulary of technology. Like, growing up, I kind
of thought of a roller skate as a car or
a toy car that is on the bottom of your foot.
But as we've been discussing, the roller skate was invented
as a playoff of the ice skate, and for the
(46:59):
most part, is not created with the idea of strapping
small carriages to the bottom of your feet. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
Yeah, A lot of times when we're thinking about the
history of technology, we like retrospectively, we don't have access
to the same chain of a visual analogies that people
were using when they were working prospectively. Does that make sense.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, And this is all fascinating when you think. Like again,
I think back to being a kid in the nineties
seeing roller blades and thinking, well, that's brilliant. They're making
a roller skate like an ice skate. But of course
this was always part of the equation.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
In the box looks like as lasers on it.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
I love this quote, by the way, from The Beehive.
That kind of sums up what happened next for Plimpton.
Quote James Plimpton spent the rest of his life selling,
improving and litigating his patent. So I mean no shame,
you know, he is a businessman. But I was reading
various accounts of it, you know, in the language of
the day, talking about cotecting the roller skaters in Europe
(48:03):
by litigating various patents, you know, like we're looking after you.
We want to make sure that when you roller skate,
you're using real Plimpton skates.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
I don't know why, but this is made funnier by
I looked him up earlier, and I know what James
Plimpton looks like, and he's not exactly what I expected.
He looks kind of like he's like Garth Hudson of
the band, like a big beard and somehow kind of
looks like an artist.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, hard to imagine him on roller skates just looking
at some of these images, but I mean, that's awesome.
So roller skating becomes quite the hit, obviously, and you
end up with these various phases where things really pick up.
They including the eighteen eighties. Oh man, I was. I
was looking around at some, you know, contemporary writings from
this time about about roller skating, and I ran across
(48:54):
an eighteen seventy six book titled Rinks and Rollers by J. A. Harwood,
And I want to you just a bit from this
because it's it touches on what on some thoughts at
that point regarding the future.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Of roller skating.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Okay, how long will this rage for rinking last? Everyone
is asking, to which the reply generally is except from
rink owners, Oh, it will soon wear itself out. For
my part, I doubt that it will die away so rapidly,
and think that rinking is destined to take a permanent
place among the institutions of civilized society. Rinking drinking. Yeah,
(49:32):
and the name rinking did not stick, thankfully, but I
think that the idea that it's becomes a part of
civilized society absolutely does stick, he continues. But probably there
will be some abatement in the present fever in a
short time, and proprietors will find it expedient to reduce
their prices of admission. These violent beginnings have violent ends.
(49:56):
People skate too much now, both for their purses and constitution,
and rink proprietors grow too rich. If prices were reduced,
there would not be such a desire on the part
of the public to have its money was worth, even
at the cost of excessive bodily fatigue.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Oh man, it's not good for your bodies to skate
this much.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
And so basically, as he continued to explain that the
rinks were not open long enough and so people were
just really getting it during the two hours that they
could skate. And he was like, this is not healthy.
We need skating rinks to be open longer. It needs
to be cheaper because people cannot physically or monetarily.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Keep up with their desire to go. Ranking.
Speaker 4 (50:38):
I love. That doesn't make sense in like three ways, but.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
You know, a little snapshot into roller skating fads and
enthusiasm of the time.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
I also was looking into this a little bit. I
thought it was interesting to think about roller skating in
combination with another major invention of this time period, that
being the moving picture, and the earliest depiction of roller
skating on film is generally considered to be nineteen sixteen's
The Rink starring the one and only Charlie Chaplin.
Speaker 4 (51:21):
Okay, so not incidental. This is about This is about skating.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Right, Yeah, the whole thing is. And you can find
examples of this. They have it on YouTube, probably on Wikipedia,
certainly on archive dot org. But yeah, the whole thing
takes place on a skating rink. You can watch Charlie
Chaplin and the supporting characters skate about and you know,
it's entirely possible. There was some other, you know, very
(51:46):
short silent film project that involves someone skating in the
same way that there are various old silent films of
people doing.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
Other things, you know, running around, riding.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
A horse and so forth. But as far as I know,
it was lost, such a thing existed.
Speaker 4 (52:01):
Lots of earlier films were lost.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah, there's also a nineteen nineteen silent film titled Don't Shove,
starring Harry Lloyd. And this one, this one was likely
inspired by the rink.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
I'm to understand.
Speaker 4 (52:13):
Is it like a public service announcement or is this
just what it's called.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
It's just another funny, that's all it is. It's just
another comedy. I think don't Shove because there is some
shoving that occurs, and this was probably a rule, you know,
when you went to the rink, rinkers don't shove each other.
Not sure if they were still calling each other rankers
at that point, and then, according to Turner Classic Movies,
a couple of other key moments in the history of
(52:37):
roller skates cinema include Modern Times from nineteen thirty six
and Shall We Dance from thirty seven and I think
it's kind of potentially telling here because even in these
just just few cinematic examples here, we maybe get an
idea of some of the ups and downs of roller
skating popularity. You know, we see there's like a for
(52:59):
instas another example, nineteen thirty eight black and white popeye
short titled A Date to Skate. And at this point
we're very much into the period of the Second World War,
during which skating experienced i yet another boom period as
people in the US looked for distractions from global events.
And so we see and also I found it interesting
(53:19):
that we see some of the early roots of roller
derby during this time. Roller Derby of course would have
to be its own episode, but this kind of apparently
kicked off as sort of a dance a thon on
skates that had no real competitive contact sport aspects to it.
But the roots of roller derby are there.
Speaker 4 (53:39):
How do we get from that to roller ball?
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, I mean there's probably a whole lot you could
you could dissect culturally about the different boom periods of
skating because yeah, even just very roughly looking at what
we've looked at here, and we're looking at the late
nineteenth century. We're looking at the nineteen thirties. We can
easily look at skating in the fifties, and then again
in the seventies, to some degree in the nineties, and
(54:05):
then once again, you know, really booming more recently during
the pandemic.
Speaker 4 (54:10):
Well, it hasn't made its way back into my life yet,
but I say bully to it. Let the rinking live on.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
Yeah, I guess one of the key things is to
be a rinker, you have to go to a rink,
And a lot of skaters don't go to a skating
rink or don't exclusively go to a skating rink, so
they couldn't really own that terminology.
Speaker 4 (54:28):
I guess they call that D ranking, D ranking, D
rank your mind so you can go outside the rank.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
We don't need any division in the roller skating community.
We don't need like rinkers versus wilders or something. I
don't know what the terminology would be, because ultimately, I
think the message that we that I've gotten from all
this is that the roller skating is and should be
liberating here here as long as you can retard your
velocity and not crash through a mirror at a fancy.
Speaker 4 (54:56):
Ball I mean, if anything, the Merlin Store, he has
got to be a warning against distracted driving of all sorts.
Trying to play the violin wild skating not a good idea,
regardless of the skate design having breaks or not. I mean,
that's just not a good idea.
Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Also, like the proper environment for testing out your prototype.
Is it a maskball or is it maybe like a
padded warehouse somewhere.
Speaker 3 (55:22):
I think maybe the latter.
Speaker 4 (55:23):
Sorry in my mind that the masquerade that he's skating
through now is eyes wide shut. I'm sure it wasn't
like that. I'm sure it was one of the regular.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
That's one of the regular. All Right, we're gonna go
and close out this episode here, but again, we'd love
to hear from all the skaters out there if you
have some added inside to throw in here. Just a
reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast, with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
(55:54):
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 4 (55:56):
Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer jj Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 4 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be
doing one of our invention episodes, and the subject is
roller skates. I was going to say this is kind
of a sequel to an episode we did a few
weeks ago about the invention of ice skates, but it
might be more accurate to say that episode was a
prequel to this one, because from what I recall, Rob,
(00:37):
you wanted to look at skating as a subject because
your family has gotten into roller skating or blading lately.
Is that the case.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, yeah, and not a huge story really, But essentially,
I have some friends who got into roller skating during
the pandemic, which you know, increased my awareness of this
individual's involvement in various local skating meetups and so forth.
And my now thirteen year old also recently got into
the roller skating scene as well, and so I've just
(01:07):
been really impressed by, first of all, the fact that
roller skating is back. I remember, as a kid in
the nineties seeing various bits of media about roller blades,
and I was just like, oh, well, this is the future,
rollerblades of the future. Roller skating is just done.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Oh that's funny. I feel like when I was a
kid in the nineties, like I considered both roller skating
and blading to be in but blading was the more
extreme version. In a very nineties television commercial, coded kind
of way, it's the code red flavor of skating.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean definitely. I mean, there were,
of course plenty of roller skating rinks around, so I
didn't think it was it was actually dead, but the
thing I would see on MTV and so forth, it
was the roller blading, and so it seemed like the future.
So it's nice to see that it's the roller skating
itself is back with such gusto. And then the other
(02:02):
part of the equation is that I've just really impressed
by the culture of many of these rollers blading groups.
You know, there's a lot of progressive and inviting aspects.
There's more than a little disco culture still thrown in there.
And so I was, yeah, I was interested in the
invention of the roller skate. And we quickly realized, well,
you can't talk about roller skates without talking about ice skates,
(02:24):
And so we ended up doing that whole episode just
on ice skates.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Right, because it just so happens that ice skating is
an earlier invention, so we had to talk about it first.
But here we are, sure, yeah, much earlier, but here
we are with roller skates today.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's right, And I imagine we have a number of
skaters out there. I myself am not a roller skater.
Oh okay, I can't remember the last time I was
on skates. I'm not saying I won't pick it up
at some point in the future, but as of right now,
I just ice skate. Maybe once a year, though I
did not in the past year, so maybe it's every
two years I ice skate. But it is indeed a
(02:58):
big deal. I was not just basing it on my
own observations here. I looked up an article from twenty
twenty two who was published on NPR titled roller skating
feels a lot like love, and following is just part
of the process. This was by Kia Miyaka Ntez And Yeah,
this article points out that there was this huge boom
(03:20):
in popularity during the pandemic after having fallen sharply in
popularity during the late twentieth century. Maybe, and I'm just
guessing here lining up with my nineties kid observations.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Of the rise of the roller blade.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
This is funny because you're you're making this distinction between
roller skating and roller blading, which I considered really the
same thing, is just like different different forms of the shoe.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
It may be an artificial distinction that I'm really harping
on here, because again I'm not a skater, So people
who are actually skaters can probably like chie in and
they may say, well, yeah, I sometimes aware these sometimes
were the others, or maybe there is some are there
are there differences between roller skaters and rollerbladers. I guess
some of the events that I've I've been to and
(04:05):
not participated in, I have seen people using both types
of skates. But this author here also aligns the popularity
of roller skating during the nineteen seventies with disco, and
again that's probably a strong reason why you see some
disco vibes to some of the current skating culture.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I think even in the nineties, one of the skating
rinks I went to in like Tennessee had a disco
ball in it.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, but so you might be forgiven just you know,
via the consumption of media into thinking that okay, disco
is dead, it's not really dead and didn't die. You
might you might likewise think, well, skating also fell off
in popularity and it's never coming back. But then it
did come back and it's still holding on to that
popularity as well. It you know, survived in various groups,
(04:53):
maybe just under the radar of a lot of the mainstream,
and it's apparently big business today. According to Busines Research
insights from earlier this year, the roller skating market size
is quote valued it approximately USD four point eight billion
in twenty twenty four and is expected to reach USD
seven point nine billion by twenty thirty two. So, whether
you're you're hip or square, whether you're concerned with the
(05:15):
culture or with just the raw numbers involved in it,
I think there's no denying the power of roller skating today.
I mean, it's it's great exercise by most accounts, and
it's also a form of social expression, so I think
that's great.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I also have not tried it since I was a kid,
so I have no idea how hard it would be.
Like I literally I could put them on and just
pick it right up, or maybe it would be a
grueling discovery that I just can't do this anymore. I
really don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I think you'd be comfortable, either of us would be
comfortable in like an hour or so.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
That's encouraging. I was going to say I'd like to
pick it up, but that I was just now remembering
another reason that it was always kind of difficult when
I was a kid, because I did have a pair
of skates when I was a kid, but it was
that my neighborhood is like my house is on a hill,
so it was like I always felt like I don't
know if I can, like if I go down the hill,
(06:11):
can I get back up or I have to take
my skates off? Or am I going to careene into something?
So I don't know. Maybe maybe skating is easier if
you live in a very flat place.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Wait are you saying that you were trepidacious about skating
to the skating rink because there were.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Hills skating around my house, like around on the sidewalks
and streets around my house and stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Oh okay, yes, I see. Yeah, Because to be clear,
for anyone that's not familiar, like there are different modes
of skating, Like you just go and skate in a rink,
but then there are plenty of people who go out
and skate, you know, on various designated streets and so forth.
You know, and there are different types of wheels that
correspond with exactly what you're skating on.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
So one surprising thing that I remember we discovered when
we were preparing for the ice skating episode is that
the core physics question of how and why ice skating works,
in effect, why is ice so slippery? Why can you
achieve such low friction motion over the top of it?
That question is not fully solved. We have much better
(07:15):
ideas than we used to about the answer to that,
but as of the past few years, it has still
been an active area of research. I do not believe
any such mysteries exist with regards to roller skating. It's
not like a baffling scientific question. Roller skating does not
rely on any strange, low friction quasi liquid layers at
(07:35):
the surface of ice. Instead, it's the principle of the
wheel and axle, which, at the risk of sounding hubristic,
I think we've got that one pretty well figured out. Yes,
but despite the fact that there's less scientific mystery involved
in how roller skating works doesn't mean that the history
is uninteresting. And there are a lot of twists and
turns here.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, more so than I was expecting. But you know,
then again, and then you get into inventions from this
time period, and it often does end up a.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Little more complex, with.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Parallel discoveries, parallel breakthroughs, different independent creations of the same thing,
and then of course folks trying to make money off
of those inventions.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
That's right. So I think one thing we can definitely
say about the invention of roller skates is that there
is no clear moment in history that can be pinpointed
as the earliest roller skate. There was a from what
I can tell, very economically and historically important roller skate
model created in the eighteen sixties by an American businessman
(08:42):
named James Plimpton, and I think we'll come back and
discuss the success of that model in a bit, and
then other models around it. But it's worth identifying first
that we know for certain Plimpton was not the first
person to put wheels on shoes. We have many well
documented earlier examples. And then beyond that, I'd say because
of how obvious the concept is, like applying the wheel
(09:05):
and axle principle to the bottom of a shoe, we
can just guess that there were almost certainly even older
examples than the earliest ones we know about, probably going
back hundreds or even thousands of years. But we simply
don't have any evidence of those models, no written records
and no physical remains. But it would be it would
be foolish, in my opinion, to assume that they had
(09:28):
Nobody had ever done this.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Right right, And this ties ties in with our past
discussions on the wheel itself, because the wheel and the
wheel wheeled vehicle as concepts can be found in various
cultures in different times, even among people who did not
make use of the wheel for practical labor or conveyance.
A wheeled vehicle's usefulness, as we discussed, depends on the
underlying state of roads, and there's a similar situation in
(09:53):
play with roller skates to a large degree, though I
was surprised to find out that that off road roller
skating does seem to be a thing today. You can
find videos of it, you can buy these skates, but
for the most part, it was.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Not a thing like roller skating in the mud is like, I.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Guess people are going out there and getting it, so
more power to them. But yeah, I can only imagine
just as at various points in the past, probably lost
to the mists of history, you know, various people made
little toys on wheels. Some of those toys were stepped upon,
some of those toys were intentionally placed under feet, and
(10:35):
someone was a joker at a party somewhere.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Sorry, when we're done here, I got to look up
these off road skating and see what it's about. I'm
imagining people with like monster truck tires on their feet.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I can think that's kind of the vibe that. As
with all of this listeners right in, we want to
hear from rollerbladers, roller skaters, and any off road roller
skaters out there as well.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
So I mentioned that we know very well about some
earlier roller skate models than the ones that achieved commercial
success in the nineteenth century. So what were some of
these earlier roller skate models for which we do have
solid evidence. There is a commonly cited book length work
on this which does get into the history out. Unfortunately,
(11:26):
I was not able to get a copy of this
book it's called The History of Roller Skating by James
Turner with Michael Zaidman, published by the National Museum of
Roller Skating. I think this is in Nebraska. Seems to
be out of print. You can get a used copy
on Amazon for only three hundred and sixty dollars. Should
we go in on that?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
How we could have with more time, I guess so.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Anyway, wasn't able to get a copy of this book myself.
But Michael Pollock, the author of a short twenty fifteen
article in The New York Times called The History of
Roller Skates, apparently was able to get a copy somehow,
and he says that Turner and Zaidman, the authors of
this book, right that the earliest recorded inventor of roller
skates was an eccentric eighteenth century Flemish inventor and instrument
(12:11):
maker named John Joseph Merlin, aka the Ingenious Mechanic. And
that's mechanic with a C K at the end, so
you know it's legit. So John Joseph Merlin lived from
seventeen thirty five to eighteen oh three. I looked this
guy up and it turns out he was a real character.
So I would like to just sort of go into
(12:32):
his biography for a bit.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
I mean, with a name like that, yeah, it's got
to be good.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
So I want to mention a couple of nice accessible
sources on Merlin. One is a blog post hosted by
the Internet Cello Society, because he was also an instrument maker,
called Magical Merlin. This was written by an American cellist
and music professor named Sarah Freiberg. Also, I found a
good twenty eighteen post on a historical blog known as
London Historians by an author named Mike Rindell a bit
(13:01):
of basic biography. John Joseph Merlin was born in seventeen
thirty five in the city of Hui, which is today
in the country of Belgium. I think at the time
it was in a principality that doesn't exist anymore, and
I don't remember the name of But when he was
a young man, Merlin studied for six years at the
Academy of Sciences in Paris, where he learned a lot
(13:24):
of what would become useful in his career as a
mechanical inventor and engineer. In the year seventeen sixty, at
the age of twenty five, he moved to London first,
I think as part of a diplomatic group, shortly after
which he made friends with a bunch of fashionable and
influential people in london intellectual and artistic circles. Merlin was
(13:47):
a man of many talents. Most notably he invented a
bunch of beautiful and dazzling mechanical automata rob We've done
episodes on automatave from the period in the past. These
were sort of eighteenth century clockwork robots. So the word
robot could be a little misleading because that might imply
(14:10):
some level of decision making or agency. These machines did
not in any way exercise decision making, action, independence, agency,
anything like that. They were more like ingenious, complex wind
up toys that would go through a series of predetermined motions,
but still remarkable engineering achievements.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, as I recall, it kind of varies from creator
to create, or from one creation to another, But there
was sometimes a vibe of something more like pure novelty,
and then other times there was this kind of.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Aspect to it.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
You know, sometimes you were supposed to really think about
what you were looking at other times it was maybe
like just a little more for humor sike.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I thought
you were going in a different direction though, but you're
exactly right. Some of these I think were meant to
illustrate there were kind of works of art in a
wayment to illustrate philosophical principles, to connect to different theories
about the origin of movements and even theology and cosmology
and what it meant for things to be alive and so, yeah,
(15:20):
we've talked about that in the past, how these works
connected to those different schools of philosophy at the time.
But the other distinction I was making was the ones
that are like, here's something interesting to look at and
you know, being very clear about how it works, versus
the ones where it was like, this is actually alive
and it's really making decisions and stuff, yeah, which was
(15:42):
not true.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, and then sometimes there was kind of a little
trickery in the degree to which things were automated. Go
back into the archives, I believe we have episodes on
the pooping duck. Yes, this being like a key focal
point of some of these issues.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
But like I said, despite the fact that they were
not actually like in dependent agentic robots in any way,
they were more like very intricate, complex wind up toys.
Still remarkable engineering achievements. And if you want to see
one of one of Merlin's co creations that he made
actually with the help of a bunch of other people,
(16:18):
I think, in a project that was helmed by a
guy named James Cox, who I'll get to in a minute,
you can look up the silver Swan automaton, which still
exists and you can see today, or at least could
as of recently I think, probably still today at the
Bows Museum in northern England. So just to describe it quickly,
(16:38):
this is a life sized swan made out of silver.
Apparently a huge mass of silver went into its creation,
and it's sitting on a tray a platform that represents
a stream where the water is made out of these long,
thin glass rods, and so this thing still works today.
(16:59):
You can wind it up and see it move and
when you do that, the glass rods move back and
forth and resemble running water, and the stream part is
surrounded by silver leaves. Again, you can look up video
of this. It's kind of amazing how graceful and smooth
and life like the movements of the swan itself are
(17:19):
the swan kind of swivels its neck and it does
that thing swans do where they turn around and they
like stick their head back under their wing or toward
their back. It does that, and then it dips its
head into the water and catches a fish althile. This
very mysterious little tune plays on hidden bells. Part of
the automaton is just a giant music box that plays
(17:40):
a selection of several different tunes. So it is an
amazing thing to watch in action, especially realizing that this
thing was completed in like the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yes, I'm looking at a video that you sent me
of this swan in action, and yeah, these are very
fluid movements here. I was expecting something a lot clunkier.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
Yeah, something more kind of start and stop jerking up
and you know that sort of thing. But no, it's
very graceful. And people at the time commented on this
like how graceful and lifelike it was. But John Joseph
Merlin was not on Sorry what.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I was just I was just thinking, like, was he
still a diplomat at the time, was there anything to do?
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I don't know if he was. I don't know how
long he stayed in Diplomat, so.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Because a lot of work evidently went into this.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Yeah, huge amount.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
But Merlin was not only a clock punk silver swancrafter.
He was also just an all purpose inventor and designer,
both of functional items things like medical devices and measuring instruments,
and also bizarre novelties like a like a real life
size mechanical chariot with an automatic horse whip that he
(18:54):
would ride around in Hyde Park.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
In addition, he was a renown instrument maker. One of
the sources I mentioned that post by cellis name Sarah Freiberg.
Her introduction to Merlin in writing this piece is actually
that she happened to acquire a Baroque cello that he
himself made in London in seventeen eighty four. So Merlin
was originally probably trained in the art of clockmaking, and
(19:19):
he would end up working for some time beginning in
seventeen sixty six for this British inventor and jeweler named
James Cox. Cox was one of the co creators of
the Silver Swan. Cox was also sort of a showman,
and he operated a museum or actually I think multiple
sort of arcades and museums, one of which was this
(19:41):
showroom for mechanical marvels at a street called Spring Gardens
in Westminster, and Merlin was Cox's chief mechanic. Merlin went
into business for himself in the seventeen seventies. He filed
his first patent in seventeen seventy three for a type
of Dutch oven that had a built in jack for
rotating meat. I've seen this described in some sources as
(20:04):
like the first rotisseriy. I don't know that, because I
feel like we've talked about earlier rotisseries. I don't know.
Maybe it's the first of some kind of rotisseriy.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, I would venture that it's something like that. And
there's no dog involved in here, now.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
No, that's what we talked about. Yes, animal operated belt,
the turn belt dog. Yes, the turnspit dog. That's what
it was. And Merlin also patented improvements to musical instrument designs.
He did some variations on the harpsichord. He also created
all new instruments, which, as far as I can tell,
none of these really caught on. One example that Freiberg
(20:40):
mentions as an instrument called a pentachord, which she describes
as a quote small five string cello which is tuned
C G D A D. At some point, James Cox
is the guy he was working for. James Cox's finances
kind of went south, and so Merlin decided to set
up his own museum. So in seventeen eighty three he
(21:01):
acquired a property at Prince's Street. This is also in Westminster,
and he called it Merlin's Mechanical Museum. I am exerting
extreme self control to not accidentally call this Merlin's Shop
of Mystical Wonders, but I would start typing that in
the note It's over. But no, it was Merlin's Mechanical Museum.
(21:22):
I also have heard it said. I think this was
by a museum tour guide who was showing off the
Silver Swan. I think said that it was sometimes called
Merlin's Cave. But anyway, this place was crammed with dazzling automata,
weird furniture, and other inventions and collectors pieces. Rendell and
(21:43):
his blog post mentions a bunch of other inventions by Merlin.
I just want to highlight a few of them. I
already alluded to the mechanical chariot complete with a whip.
This was interesting because it also had a type of
odometer to measure a distance measuring device distance traveled, which
that ties into another invention episode we've done in the past.
(22:04):
We did the odometer at some point, tracing that all
the way back to inventions in the ancient world. But
this had a version of an odometer, and Merlin called
that odometer the way Wise and he would apparently ride
this chariot around through Hyde Park to kind of advertise
his magnificent works. He has something else that he created
called the gouty chair. This was a form of wheelchair,
(22:28):
not with large wheels on the sides like you would
see on modern devices, but it had a set of
four smaller wheels near the floor. I was looking at.
You can actually look up pictures of this that exist today,
and so you can see sort of how it was
put together. But I couldn't figure out by looking at
these or reading descriptions exactly how it works. It looks
like it's operated by a pair of hand turned cranks
(22:52):
on the arm rests, and I'm not sure how these
would both steer and propel the chair at the same time.
Maybe there's some mechanism missing here.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Likewise, I can't tell what's going on with like the
foot pad down there, if it's just for resting your
feet on, or if there's some sort of pressure applied there.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
Could it be like a pedal that maybe propels. Maybe Yeah,
but there is kind of a footrest below the chair,
But otherwise it looks like a regular piece of furniture.
It's just affixed with like all these wheels and cranks
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, designed for individuals suffering from the gout.
Speaker 4 (23:24):
I'm assume that's what I assume based on it being
called the gouty chair, though I assume it could work for,
you know, anybody who has mobility issues. And Merlin apparently
did design a number of devices, like medical devices and
devices to help people with various physical disabilities. He designed
a some kind of prosthetic gripping devices for people without arms,
(23:47):
and a set of playing cards which could be read
by the blind. This was presumably some kind of precursor
to Braille notation this would have been before braille, but
had I guess some kind of bumps or something that
could be felt. And he also invented a bunch of
types of mechanical moving furniture, or what was sometimes called
transforming furniture, and this ranged from relatively mundane creations like
(24:12):
you had, like you know, a rotating tea table, Okay,
it's not hard to imagine you might see things like
that today to something that Freiberg includes in her ride
up that was advertised as quote the Quarteto music cabinet.
It contains flutes, violins, and music books and by touching
a spring key it will rise to a proper height
(24:32):
and form music desks for four performers and thin.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
It sounds very futuristic really.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Kind of like adjustable standing desk sort of but for musicians,
and includes like a complex opening and closing cabinet with
different compartments. He also, i think, put together a lot
of different kind of weights and measuring machines and then
also clocks, including he was he was a co creator
of a so called perpetual motion claw. This was again
(25:01):
with James Cox. Dubious about this one because obviously perpetual
motion machines that doesn't exist in reality. Cox i think
claimed this really was a perpetual motion machine, but from
what I've read, it was powered by a mercury barometer
responding to changes in atmospheric pressure in order to contract
(25:22):
the spring. And of course this would not be a
true perpetual motion machine. It would be requiring this external play.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Otherwise it would be like saying that a windmill is
perpetual motion machine.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
So Merlin was active in the London social scene of
his time, and he was known as kind of weird
and flamboyant, and he liked to party. I came across
comments written by the English novelist Fanny Bernie about Merlin.
She spent time with him because her father, the musicologist
Charles Bernie, was good friends with Merlin, so she knew
(25:58):
him well, and she wrote about him as follows. He
is a great favorite in our house. He is very diverting.
Also in conversation. There is a singular simplicity in his manners.
He speaks his opinions upon all subjects and about all persons,
with the most undisguised freedom. He does, not, though a foreigner,
want words. I mean he does not lack words. He
(26:18):
had a big vocabulary. He does not want words, but
he arranges and pronounces them very comically. He is humbly
grateful for all civilities that are shown him but is
warmly and honestly resentful for the least slight.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
You know, this is exactly the sort of sort of
dude that you don't want to slight because I feel
like you run a great risk of being reduced in
size and forced to play around with the nutcrackers.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
And the rap cans.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah he Septimus Prtorious or something. No, Yeah, so he
was like fun and weird, but apparently also maybe kind
of a big mouth and quick to take offense. And
I've also read in other sources them are people mentioning
this thing. She says that he was known for having
a robust vocabulary, for not a native English speaker, but
(27:07):
for putting words in a weird order when speaking English.
So I'm kind of imagining him as Yoda.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah. Yeah, it's also weird the way it's his phrase,
because they're like, oh, he's basically sounds like they're making
fun of his accent while still crediting his vocabulary and
grasps with the English language.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
This is so funny because he's conforming to what I
would think of as a later storytelling archetype, like the
eccentric foreign professor with a strange accent who is like
an inventor of curiosities. But this has got to be
before I thought such an archetype existed, So I don't know.
(27:47):
Maybe it's just a coincidence, or could it be based
on this guy in anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
I mean, it would not surprise me. We've seen other
examples of various historical individuals having a great deal of
influence over how various stereotypes are interpreted.
Speaker 4 (28:04):
But yeah, so anyway, he connected to a bunch of
famous people in his time. Johann Christian Bach, the son
of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach, apparently performed instruments
performed on instruments made by Merlin. And another very important
historical connection this is mentioned in that blog post by Rendell,
is that there's a first hand account of a visit
(28:26):
to Merlin's museum by a young Charles Babbage, who would
go on years later to invent the very historically important
mechanical computing device known as the difference engine. Babbage's mechanical
computer designs and concepts laid the groundwork for the electronic
computers that would come to be the basis of you know,
(28:47):
most or maybe all of today's digital technology. So Babbage
wrote about this experience of going to Merlin's cave. He
says that Merlin took him on a tour of like
a private gallery to show him like the special projects,
and Babbage says, quote, there were two uncovered female figures
of silver, about twelve inches high, and he describes one
(29:09):
of the figures as an admirable dan Seuss, meaning a
female ballerina, and says she had a silver bird perched
on a forefinger of her right hand, and then the
bird would move, it would shake its tail and flap
its wings and also opening close its little beak. And
then of the silver ballerina herself, he said, quote, the
lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were
(29:32):
full of imagination and irresistible. And Babbage was so struck
by these little mechanical objects, these sort of precursors to robots,
that he would come back and buy the exhibits in
eighteen thirty four, after Merlin's death.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
What fascinating individual so very much part of like a
very crucial technological ecosystem of the day. And to be clear,
like you pointed out, not just creating sheer novelties, seemingly
constantly innovating, and like I can only imagine like following
every idea, good or bad, useful or just entertaining that
(30:10):
seems to enter into his head.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
Yes, yeah, you get the idea of just phrenetic energy,
constant moving about and doing different things, and being a
perhaps touchy but also beloved weirdo of the time.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
So anyway, onto Merlin's roller skates episode. This is back
back to the main event here. So one of John
Joseph Merlin's now most famous inventions was actually one of
the simplest, especially when you compare it to like the
intricate you know, clockwork ballet dancers and the silver Avians
and all that. And that was the roller skate. Now again,
(30:46):
was Merlin the first person ever to put wheels on
a show on a shoe? Very doubtful. In her article,
Freiberg mentions that Merlin quote probably improved skates which first
appeared in Holland in around seventeen hundred, but there is
no credited inventor or further detail of those earlier models.
(31:07):
It's just like some things like this probably existed and
he improved them. But again, Turner and Zeidman say, he's
the earliest recorded inventor of a roller skate. So one
of the things that makes Merlin's model historically interesting is that,
ever the showman Merlin staged a wild public demonstration of
(31:28):
his invention at a fancy masquerade ball around seventeen sixty,
and it went extremely badly. An account of this incident
appears in a book called concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes
written by Thomas Busby in eighteen five, and Buzzby tells
the story as follows, speaking about Merlin, quote, one of
(31:50):
his ingenious novelties was a pair of skates. This is
spelled skaies.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
That's sounds about right, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
A pair of skates contrived to run on wheels. Supplied
with these and a violin he mixed in the motley
group of one of Missus Cowley's masquerades at Carlisle House.
When not having provided the means of retarding his velocity
or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror
(32:21):
of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to adams,
broke his instrument to pieces, and wounded himself most severely.
Oh my goodness, don't you hate when that happens. So
He's like, I have invented wheels for feet. I have
made wheels for feet. Everybody's got to see this, So
I'm gonna roll around the masquerade. Everybody's got their little
their masks and their fancy costumes. I'm gonna play the
(32:43):
violin while riding on these things. But he forgot to
put brakes in them, and so he crashes into a mirror,
shatters it to pieces, or to adams in the words
of Busby and h and everybody's I guess, I don't know.
Were they laughing at him? Were they mad? Were they
sorry for him? I doesn't say what the crowd's reaction.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
I mean, given that he's also bleeding, perhaps severely at
this point, I can only imagine the stun silence.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
So to note Merlin's designed for these skates. It sounds
like it was a The wheels are an inline orientation,
so not side by side, and two wheels each two
wheels per foot. I don't I'm not a skater myself,
so I don't know. Sounds like that wouldn't be enough.
It sounds like you want more wheels. Maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, and some of the the innovations that would come
after Merlin, but before proper what we would think of
as you know, more contemporary roller skates tended to have
I think at least three wheels.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
Yeah, but again this is important. Merlin's roller skate design
did not include brakes, and no toe brakes and no back,
no heel breks, so there was no built in ability
to slow down or stop or really change direction as
it says, So yeah, it was it was more This
strikes me as more of like an idea than something
(34:04):
really like honed in and made practical.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah, very much a novelty that he was willing
and excited to pursue there in front of everybody. Again,
seems like the kind of individual who would just follow
any mechanical fantasy that seemed to enter his head.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
So that is the John Joseph Merlin roller skating experience.
His model obviously would not be the last one, and
there were many innovations that would come along in the
following decades. People would keep making different kinds of little
roller skates, and roller skating did sort of seem to
catch on going into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, like Merlin's roller skating story is clearly the best,
it's the most entertaining. I think the basic reality is
that a lot of the subsequent and probably previous roller
skating invention stories were pretty boring in or lost to history.
Somebody made this novelty device that you strap under your
feet so you can skate around sort of like an
(35:15):
ice skater, but with nowhere near as much speed, power
or control, and then people just forgot that these inventions existed,
or they forgot about the inventor. But yeah, they were available.
And this is where we come back around to James Plimpton,
who of nineteen twenty eight through nineteen eleven, an American
(35:36):
inventor who This is one of those invention stories or
innovator stories that is also not that exciting, because it's
somebody like seeing a way that can improve upon something,
making that improvement and then being able to own it
and sell it and also litigate it. Those are the
(35:57):
I mean, those are also it's part of that, since
you've touched on stories related to that before on the show.
But I mean it's it's less magical when it's about
just suing people for infringing on your copyright.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
That's a lot of history. There's yeah, pursuing intellectual property things,
or just figuring out a way to market something so
that it catches on, or finding a way to make
something to make a design profitable. That's a big thing too.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, but still, I mean still, the story of Plimpton
is interesting in its own right. He had at least
one prior invention, because you know, to call yourself an inventor,
you need at least one or two in the in
the portfolio. He invented the eighteen fifty three Plimpton cabinet bed, which,
according to the Massachusetts Historical Society's Beehive blog, was seemingly
(36:47):
something he invented due to a practical need in his
own home, probably due to his own marriage the year earlier.
I think like at this point maybe they had a
kid on the way. It was his first major invention,
and this is another case where he did not invent
the cabinet bed a bed that folds up into a cabinet,
but he came up with a variation on it that
I'm to understand was aimed at requiring like a little
(37:09):
less effort to fold and unfold, and so kind of
like Merlin, you know, Plimpton seems like he was one
of these individuals who was, you know, always thinking about
ways to improve on a given device, though perhaps I
mean more than perhaps I think, certainly with more of
an entrepreneurial spirit to things as opposed to just a
(37:29):
more of a sheer exuberance for it, for invention and mechanisms.
And so basically, around eighteen sixty, according to the Beehive,
Plimpton takes ill, goes to the doctor, and the doctor says,
I think you should take up some physical activity. I
think you should take up ice skating. And Plimpton, being
(37:50):
a Northerner, would have would have been familiar with ice
skating and you know, maybe even had some history with it,
and maybe it was you know, falling back on something
he did as a kid. I'm not sure. We don't
have all the details, but what happens when summer rolls
around is you may find yourself unable to ice skate anymore,
and so keen to continue his wellness exercises, he bought
himself a pair of roller skates or what was passing
(38:15):
for roller skates at the time, and proceeded to think
about ways to improve upon them. Because much like we
were talking about with Merlin's roller skates. These would have
been very fixed, strapped onto your boots or your shoes.
They allowed you to go forwards or backwards, but not
take any turns. And also I think there may have
(38:35):
been some challenges with stopping when you needed to stop.
But yeah, there were various versions of this. I read
that there are some early roller skates attributed to a
Dutchman by the name of Hans Brinner from the same century,
but these are largely considered not true roller skates because
you could not turn in them. I mean, think about
(38:56):
a roller skating rink. Part of the whole field of
going to the old roller skating rink is going to
go round in a circle over and over again, or
at least in an oval.
Speaker 4 (39:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
So, at this point, again to be clear, commercially available
roller skates were very much around, and we've already I
think firmly established some early examples of things like roller skates,
and we speculated on even the ancient existence of things
like roller skates. But I know you and I kept
(39:27):
both both of us kept coming across mentions of a
seventeen forty three London theater production in which actors had
roller skates on simulating ice skating for theatrical purposes.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
Yeah. I came across mention of this use in a
theater production in seventeen forty three in a j Store
Daily article that I think you and I both read.
But I had some questions about that. Did you say
you were able to dig into like what this claim
was about the play?
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I dug into it more with no real satisfying answers.
So I would say, first and foremost kind of falling
along with things we've been discussing already, the idea that
in the year seventeen forty three, or even earlier or
certainly later, the idea that somebody staging a production of
some sort in London or elsewhere could have said, Hey,
(40:20):
what if in order to create the theatrical illusion of
ice skating, what if we used wheely skates instead? What
if we did that? Could we pull that off? It
seems perfectly reasonable to assume folks at least tried this out,
if not, you know, perfected to some degree, and you know,
did an entire series of performances.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
Yeah, but what is the origin of this claim? I
think that was the thing I was having a hard
time figuring out.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, as far as I can tell. Looking at various
sources that mentioned this, I just can't find any like
concrete details, and the details kind of vary too, Like,
for instance, the Jay Store Daily article mentions something about
how it might have been a production of a Tom
Lockwood play, and then I try and research that, and like,
who's Tom Lockwood? No evidence of such a playwright as
(41:11):
far as I could tell, Or maybe it's a really
obscure playwright or lost playwright, or it could be an
error of record keeping in history. I found another reference
to this idea in a nineteen ninety nine article by
Gilbert Nordon Passing Fashions but no Sustainable market A history
of roller skating in Austria before nineteen fourteen. Oh okay,
(41:33):
And it states that this was a performance at the
old Drury Lane Theater, which is still there in London's
West End. And this article states that it was a
play by Thomas Hood, or I should state, they should
stress at least a Thomas Hood, but certainly not the
Thomas Hood who lives seventeen ninety nine through eighteen forty five,
(41:55):
Nor could it possibly be his son Tom Hood, who
lived eighteen thirty five through eighteen seventy four. So we
run into a similar situation here like this, there's some
sort of error here. If it was a Tom or
Thomas Hood play, it had to be later, or if
it was in this given year of seventeen forty three,
it had to be a different playwright or a different theater,
(42:17):
and so forth.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
I don't want to presume, because I was never able
to wrap my head around what the source of the
confusion was here. But I wonder if the error is
just that this was not actually a play in the
eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century. If it was
the eighteen forties.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That would streamline things a lot, because then it could
be a Tom or Thomas Hood play, and even more importantly,
it would place it alongside a more well documented case
of roller skates being used to create the theatrical illusion
of ice skates, that being an eighteen forty nine French
(42:52):
opera production of Meyer Beers the Prophet, which featured performers
on roller skates.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Okay, yeah, that would make it. But again we can't,
so we can't adjudicate this question. But this seems possible
to me.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, but the reality is, at some point in history, yes,
roller skates were used for perhaps the first time on
the stage to create the illusion of ice skating.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
But okay, so back to the domain of business.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yes, yes, so Plimpton comes around, he's trying these out.
The skates that he's trying are going to be crude,
they're going to be awkward. Apparently you but apparently some
of these you could make turns in, but with difficulty,
so nothing close to the maneuverability of ice skating. So
especially if you were hoping to trade in your ice
skates for roller skates during the summer and have anything
(43:44):
like the same experience, you were in for a great
deal of disappointment. I was reading about some of these
earlier commercially available skates, and according to the Birth rollers
of the roller skate by John Exell twenty eleven, on
the engineer an eighteen nineteen patented roller skate, the work
(44:04):
of French and Ventner m Petebled, had metal wheels and
were I don't know if this criticism holds true, but
there were arguments that you could barely lift your foot
with these on, and that on top of it, they
were so ugly that the quote fairer Sex would never
wear them Joe included an image here of this particular skate.
(44:28):
I think you'll agree it neither looks tremendously ugly or
really all that heavy. But maybe it was actually heavy.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Yeah, maybe it's made of tungsten.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
I did. The wheels are supposedly metal. I can't tell
to what extent.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
They are in this image, but solid metal, like not
even hollow.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah yeah maybe so.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
Well yeah, so this would have been a design that
comes well after Merlin, but well before Plimpton, kind of
in between, in the middle between them.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Another example would be the three wheel juvenile inline skate
that was The dates of these are found like eighteen
sixty through eighteen sixty three, including an image here for you, Joe,
and basically it is what it sounds like. Instead of
two wheels inline strapped beneath a shoe or boot like
we were referencing earlier, this would.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Be three yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
So this is what Plimpton was working with, and his
main adjustments to the skates of his time were just
largely related to the exact layout of the wheels. He
went with a quad wheel or rocker arrangement that was
more comfortable to wear and far easier to turn and
for the most part, this is the same design you
(45:40):
find on roller skates today. There have been all sorts
of minor adjustments to this, but essentially it is accurate
to say that Plympton Innovates Slash invents the modern roller
skate with his patent, and it largely remains the way
people were skating off of the ice until around nineteen
seven nine, and that's when there's an attempt to sort
(46:02):
of redo the ice to roller transfer, generating a modern
roller skate based on modern ice skates, and this becomes
the inline skate or roller blade.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
Okay, so the history of roller skates really does start.
The early designs are pretty much all inline. They're the
roller blade, and then we get the innovation of the
quad design, the two axles each with two wheels in
the orientation like a car. This solves a lot of
problems with roller skates, and then we find ways to
(46:33):
go back to the inline design and make it more
comfortable and desirable.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah, this really got me to thinking about the way
that we might think about inventions based on our own
sort of vocabulary of technology. Like, growing up, I kind
of thought of a roller skate as a car or
a toy car that is on the bottom of your foot.
But as we've been discussing, the roller skate was invented
as a playoff of the ice skate, and for the
(46:59):
most part, is not created with the idea of strapping
small carriages to the bottom of your feet. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
Yeah, A lot of times when we're thinking about the
history of technology, we like retrospectively, we don't have access
to the same chain of a visual analogies that people
were using when they were working prospectively. Does that make sense.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, And this is all fascinating when you think. Like again,
I think back to being a kid in the nineties
seeing roller blades and thinking, well, that's brilliant. They're making
a roller skate like an ice skate. But of course
this was always part of the equation.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
In the box looks like as lasers on it.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
I love this quote, by the way, from The Beehive.
That kind of sums up what happened next for Plimpton.
Quote James Plimpton spent the rest of his life selling,
improving and litigating his patent. So I mean no shame,
you know, he is a businessman. But I was reading
various accounts of it, you know, in the language of
the day, talking about cotecting the roller skaters in Europe
(48:03):
by litigating various patents, you know, like we're looking after you.
We want to make sure that when you roller skate,
you're using real Plimpton skates.
Speaker 4 (48:13):
I don't know why, but this is made funnier by
I looked him up earlier, and I know what James
Plimpton looks like, and he's not exactly what I expected.
He looks kind of like he's like Garth Hudson of
the band, like a big beard and somehow kind of
looks like an artist.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah, hard to imagine him on roller skates just looking
at some of these images, but I mean, that's awesome.
So roller skating becomes quite the hit, obviously, and you
end up with these various phases where things really pick up.
They including the eighteen eighties. Oh man, I was. I
was looking around at some, you know, contemporary writings from
this time about about roller skating, and I ran across
(48:54):
an eighteen seventy six book titled Rinks and Rollers by J. A. Harwood,
And I want to you just a bit from this
because it's it touches on what on some thoughts at
that point regarding the future.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Of roller skating.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Okay, how long will this rage for rinking last? Everyone
is asking, to which the reply generally is except from
rink owners, Oh, it will soon wear itself out. For
my part, I doubt that it will die away so rapidly,
and think that rinking is destined to take a permanent
place among the institutions of civilized society. Rinking drinking. Yeah,
(49:32):
and the name rinking did not stick, thankfully, but I
think that the idea that it's becomes a part of
civilized society absolutely does stick, he continues. But probably there
will be some abatement in the present fever in a
short time, and proprietors will find it expedient to reduce
their prices of admission. These violent beginnings have violent ends.
(49:56):
People skate too much now, both for their purses and constitution,
and rink proprietors grow too rich. If prices were reduced,
there would not be such a desire on the part
of the public to have its money was worth, even
at the cost of excessive bodily fatigue.
Speaker 4 (50:13):
Oh man, it's not good for your bodies to skate
this much.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
And so basically, as he continued to explain that the
rinks were not open long enough and so people were
just really getting it during the two hours that they
could skate. And he was like, this is not healthy.
We need skating rinks to be open longer. It needs
to be cheaper because people cannot physically or monetarily.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
Keep up with their desire to go. Ranking.
Speaker 4 (50:38):
I love. That doesn't make sense in like three ways, but.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
You know, a little snapshot into roller skating fads and
enthusiasm of the time.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
I also was looking into this a little bit. I
thought it was interesting to think about roller skating in
combination with another major invention of this time period, that
being the moving picture, and the earliest depiction of roller
skating on film is generally considered to be nineteen sixteen's
The Rink starring the one and only Charlie Chaplin.
Speaker 4 (51:21):
Okay, so not incidental. This is about This is about skating.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Right, Yeah, the whole thing is. And you can find
examples of this. They have it on YouTube, probably on Wikipedia,
certainly on archive dot org. But yeah, the whole thing
takes place on a skating rink. You can watch Charlie
Chaplin and the supporting characters skate about and you know,
it's entirely possible. There was some other, you know, very
(51:46):
short silent film project that involves someone skating in the
same way that there are various old silent films of
people doing.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
Other things, you know, running around, riding.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
A horse and so forth. But as far as I know,
it was lost, such a thing existed.
Speaker 4 (52:01):
Lots of earlier films were lost.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah, there's also a nineteen nineteen silent film titled Don't Shove,
starring Harry Lloyd. And this one, this one was likely
inspired by the rink.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
I'm to understand.
Speaker 4 (52:13):
Is it like a public service announcement or is this
just what it's called.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
It's just another funny, that's all it is. It's just
another comedy. I think don't Shove because there is some
shoving that occurs, and this was probably a rule, you know,
when you went to the rink, rinkers don't shove each other.
Not sure if they were still calling each other rankers
at that point, and then, according to Turner Classic Movies,
a couple of other key moments in the history of
(52:37):
roller skates cinema include Modern Times from nineteen thirty six
and Shall We Dance from thirty seven and I think
it's kind of potentially telling here because even in these
just just few cinematic examples here, we maybe get an
idea of some of the ups and downs of roller
skating popularity. You know, we see there's like a for
(52:59):
instas another example, nineteen thirty eight black and white popeye
short titled A Date to Skate. And at this point
we're very much into the period of the Second World War,
during which skating experienced i yet another boom period as
people in the US looked for distractions from global events.
And so we see and also I found it interesting
(53:19):
that we see some of the early roots of roller
derby during this time. Roller Derby of course would have
to be its own episode, but this kind of apparently
kicked off as sort of a dance a thon on
skates that had no real competitive contact sport aspects to it.
But the roots of roller derby are there.
Speaker 4 (53:39):
How do we get from that to roller ball?
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, I mean there's probably a whole lot you could
you could dissect culturally about the different boom periods of
skating because yeah, even just very roughly looking at what
we've looked at here, and we're looking at the late
nineteenth century. We're looking at the nineteen thirties. We can
easily look at skating in the fifties, and then again
in the seventies, to some degree in the nineties, and
(54:05):
then once again, you know, really booming more recently during
the pandemic.
Speaker 4 (54:10):
Well, it hasn't made its way back into my life yet,
but I say bully to it. Let the rinking live on.
Speaker 2 (54:16):
Yeah, I guess one of the key things is to
be a rinker, you have to go to a rink,
And a lot of skaters don't go to a skating
rink or don't exclusively go to a skating rink, so
they couldn't really own that terminology.
Speaker 4 (54:28):
I guess they call that D ranking, D ranking, D
rank your mind so you can go outside the rank.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
We don't need any division in the roller skating community.
We don't need like rinkers versus wilders or something. I
don't know what the terminology would be, because ultimately, I
think the message that we that I've gotten from all
this is that the roller skating is and should be
liberating here here as long as you can retard your
velocity and not crash through a mirror at a fancy.
Speaker 4 (54:56):
Ball I mean, if anything, the Merlin Store, he has
got to be a warning against distracted driving of all sorts.
Trying to play the violin wild skating not a good idea,
regardless of the skate design having breaks or not. I mean,
that's just not a good idea.
Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Also, like the proper environment for testing out your prototype.
Is it a maskball or is it maybe like a
padded warehouse somewhere.
Speaker 3 (55:22):
I think maybe the latter.
Speaker 4 (55:23):
Sorry in my mind that the masquerade that he's skating
through now is eyes wide shut. I'm sure it wasn't
like that. I'm sure it was one of the regular.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
That's one of the regular. All Right, we're gonna go
and close out this episode here, but again, we'd love
to hear from all the skaters out there if you
have some added inside to throw in here. Just a
reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast, with core episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
(55:54):
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 4 (55:56):
Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer jj Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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