Running Through Sneaker History

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I love shoes.
I know you do. You love them so much. You
have more shoes than anyone I know. Really, yeah, I

(00:24):
mean as far as I know, I probably have more
shoes than anyone else. I know too. I have a
lot of shoes, and I keep forgetting where I have shoes.
I'm just gonna confess a thing. Okay. I converted our
entire guest room into what we call shoe Palace. Uh huh.
It's where all the shoes live. Brian put up a
very nice shelving system in there. I can go visit
my shoes. I go sit in there my shoes. But

(00:49):
then I forget that there are other places I have
stash shoes, and not I fine them. I go, oh,
I forgot about this closet full of shoes. It's an
exciting time anyway. So normally I tell people if they
stay in our guest room, they have to sign a
friend ea where they won't disclose how many shoes they've
seen and what a message is and they're always very
lovely about it. But I just I love shoes and

(01:10):
I really love sneakers. I can talk on Friday about
sneaker head culture, which I do not count myself part of,
and I'll explain why on Friday. But we're going to
talk about sneakers today. And everybody knew this was coming
because I mentioned it in the Charles Goodyear episode and
how that was originally going to be a teeny piece
of this and then it became its own episode. And

(01:32):
here's the thing. In prepping for this, which I've been
doing for a while and kind of dragged my tail
a little bit because I kept thinking there must be
a book after book after book on this subject. I've
seen a bunch. I have a bunch of books about
sneaker history, but really they're all about sort of the
modern era of sneaker history. They kind of pick up

(01:53):
from the point where sneakers have already become established as
a street wear and a style thing, rather than like
their utility purposes that led to their invention. And those
books often talk about things like scarcity and identity and
desirability that are all very important and part of sneaker culture.

(02:15):
It's cool and interesting, but that's not what I was after.
I wanted to talk more about, as I said, the
origin and how we got from most people wearing leather
sold shoes to running around in sneakers almost all the time.
And the thing is that because there isn't a comprehensive
book about the history, there are some that talk about

(02:36):
the history, but all of them, and this show will
as well, kind of have to leave some stuff out
because there was a lot of stuff going on in
different places. The thing that I ran into over and
over is because that's also piecemeal, there is some confusion
and contradictory information and things that are flat out wrong

(02:57):
that have been repeated over the years, even by very
well as established news outlets. So we get to do
a little bit of myth busting in this episode in
a couple of instances, as well as talk about some
mysteries which really have to do with poor or lost documentation.
I also want to mention out of the gate, there

(03:18):
are obviously issues in the sneaker industry today regarding labor,
horrible factory conditions, low pay, forced labor. Those have all
been documented in the shoe industry and in some cases
these are factories that aren't run directly by a shoe brand,
but they supply the brands. Still, I would say it

(03:39):
is on any shoe company to know where their product
comes from. And in recent years, there has been a
push throughout the industry, particularly for big players in the
shoe industry, to really do better, and a lot of
them have created initiatives to improve and to address some
of these problems. But there are still a lot of

(04:00):
opaque points in the supply chain, and a lot of
watchdogs are like, yeah, but what's going on right here?
Do you know? And so that disclosure is not always forthcoming. Listen,
we're not going to get into any of that part
here today, but I wanted to just acknowledge it. It
is a huge, massive subject. It could be its own

(04:22):
whole thing that I would say is not a history
podcast so much as like a consumer report podcast. So
it's outside of our our sphere, but it's worth knowing,
and I just want people to think about where their
stuff comes from. Also, if you want to go all
the way back to the history of athletic foot where
you could in some cases find people referencing things as

(04:43):
far back as the eighth century, BCE. That was when
Greek Olympians first, to the best of our knowledge, went
from running barefoot to wearing very simple leather coverings like
sandals that offered a little bit of protection for their souls.
For this their feet as they were running on things
like rocks and very hot surfaces. But we're not going

(05:07):
that far back, so we are starting this one in
the nineteenth century when people started to apply India rubber
two shoes to create a sole that had a little
bit of grip and a little bit of protection from water.
Right out of the gate. This one has a little
bit of mystery. On May twenty first, eighteen thirty two,
a patent titled for a method of attaching leather soles

(05:30):
to boots and shoes of India Rubber was issued to
Wait Webster of New York City. But this original patent
has been lost. It is what is known as an
ex patent, and that is because in eighteen thirty six
the US Patent Office had a massive and devastating fire
that destroyed the existing patents that were filed from seventeen

(05:51):
ninety all the way to the year of the fire.
The X does not represent that loss. It designates that
those patents don't use the numbering system that we see
in patents today. Patents prior to this fire had as
their designation the inventor's name and the date of the issue.
There's ongoing work to try to recover those patents from

(06:14):
copies and the records of patent holders, and a retroactive
numbering system is attached to those patents which use an
X in their number, so it's clear that they predate
this new numbering system that's used today. Yeah, it's also like,
on the off chance there was a weird instance where

(06:36):
the modern starting after the fire numbering system accidentally duplicated
the number of another patent, the X would show you No,
they're not the same thing. And as Trazy just said,
the weight Webster patent was an X patent, so we
might not know much about it, and mentions of Webster's
patent indicate that it was actually never put into production.

(06:58):
But there is actually a little bit more to the
story than that. The Journal of the Franklin Institute from
December of eighteen thirty two mentions weight Webster's patent with
an abbreviated description of it, and that reads, quote, an
insol of leather is to be put within the shoe
or boot, and a corresponding out sole and heel are

(07:18):
placed on the outside when the hole is to be
attached together by nailing, pegging, or sewing in the ordinary
modes of performing these processes, and there is some evidence
that the patent was used to make shoes for consumer purchase.
The Monmouth Democrat of Freehold, New Jersey, ran an announcement
on March fifth, eighteen thirty five about them, titled Patent

(07:42):
India Rubber or gum Elastic Shoes. It opened with quote,
the subscribers, having purchased of the patent, mister weight Webster
his exclusive patent right for the State of New Jersey
Essex County accepted for attaching soul leather to gum elastics
or India rubber boots and shoes. Hereby warn all persons

(08:04):
that any infringement on their rights will be prosecuted. They
offer for sale the above right for counties on terms
as may best suit purchasers. So this write up goes
on to say they have them ready for people to
come and try on. And from there there's an endorsement
quote to whom it may concern we, the undersigned having

(08:25):
worn mister W. Webster's patent India Rubber Shoes are happy
to state that they find them perfect in keeping dry feet,
are easy to the wearer, and answer fully our expectations
and mister W's recommendations, we most cheerfully recommend them to
the public as a valuable improvement. We think they decidedly

(08:46):
supersede all inventions for keeping dry feet and of course
a great preservation of health. That endorsement is signed by
eight men of the community. There's also a second endorsement
from two other men that reads, in part quote, the
invention of fixing bottoms to the India Rubber no doubt
deserves and will command a universal patronage. As far as

(09:09):
our experience and observation has gone, we can most cheerfully
recommend the shoes to all who prize dry feet, good health,
and long life. It's not clear what happened to this
retail efforts, but this was several years before Charles Goodyear
figured out the process to vulcanized rubber, so it's pretty

(09:30):
likely that these shoes just melted in the heat and
cracked in the cold, and eventually people abandoned them. Yeah,
it's also unclear to me if those models that they're
telling people to come and try on are ones they
could take home, or if those are like prototypes, because
it doesn't seem like there was ever a mass production,

(09:50):
so I don't We still don't know what exactly went
on with websters, but now it's time for our first mythbust.
So most sources, even very reputable ones, as I mentioned
at the top of the show, state that John Boyd
Dunlop founded the Liverpool Rubber Company and started producing rubber
sold shoes in the eighteen thirties. But this appears to

(10:11):
be a jumble of facts that get compressed on the timeline.
John Boyd Dunlop wasn't even born until the eighteen forties,
and while he did innovate with rubber that was more
tire based. He's another one that might be on my list.
We'll see what happens. We're going to come back to
him though in a moment. But the Liverpool Rubber Company,
founded by somebody else, did make rubber sold shoes starting

(10:33):
in the eighteen thirties, and those were sand shoes, and
they were named that because they were intended to make
walking on sand easier and as such, Their target market
was people who were headed to the seaside. Apparently people
loved these shoes and how comfortable they were compared to
leather solt shoes, so much so over the course of

(10:55):
decades that a complaint was lodged in the Brooklyn Eagle
on July twenty, eighteen ninety five, in a column for
the Girls that was a regular column that featured things
that editors thought quote home lovers and pleasure seekers should know.
It reads, quote sand shoes are for wearing on the sand.

(11:15):
They are as bad for the feet as any other
kind of rubbers. You would think it is a great hardship.
Perhaps you would say it was cruel to be compelled
to wear over shoes all day. Then why put on
your sand shoes to wear about the streets. This appeal
is made to girls because parents are not to blame.

(11:35):
It is the children who think it fine to wear
these relics of days at the seashore. Just in case
you thought criticizing girls for their clothing choices was something
new in the world we're living in, it is not. Also,
by this point, as you're about to see, companies were
making rubber soled shoes for street wear not just for

(11:57):
the sand, So the writer of this particular comment may
have it's just been a grabby stick in the mud,
similarly to many people who continued just criticizing the clothing
of young people, especially girls and young women. Yeah, coming up,
we're going to talk about the rapid growth of the
shoe industry in the later half of the nineteenth century,

(12:19):
and we will do that after we take a quick
sponsor break. As we recently discussed in our Charles Goodyear episode,
vulcanization was patented in both the US and Britain in

(12:39):
eighteen thirty nine by two different people, and that development
led to more reliable rubber options for soling shoes, as
vulcanized rubber stands up to heat and cold much better
than natural or India rubber, India just being an alternate
name for natural rubber, and that moved everything that used
rubber forward, and that of course included shoes. So by

(13:02):
the eighteen seventies rubber soled shoes with canvas uppers had
become more common. These transitioned from sand shoes into a
similar shoe, but one that was meant for wearing in
daily life instead of just at the beach. These came
to be known as plimsoles, and they got their name
from something that is not at all connected to shoes,

(13:24):
but from maritime practice. Samuel Plimsol developed a system in
the mid nineteenth century for marking the hulls of ships
with horizontal lines to mark the depth that they could
be submerged to safely. This was used to determine what
the safe load was for their cargo. Samuel Plimsol is
on Holly shortlist because he did a lot of interesting things.

(13:47):
I can say with confidence we'll have that episode not
too long from now, probably not next week, but not
far off. The line where the rubber sole met the
canvas upper on these early shoes reminded people of the
Plumsall line on ships. It indicated that the canvas area
above that line should not be submerged, so they just

(14:09):
started calling them that. It's not clear when shoes started
being called plemsalls, but the Plumsall line wasn't adopted until
eighteen seventy six, so it would have been sometime after that. Yeah,
that's another one where people will say quite definitively, this
started in this decade, and it's like, no, I found
one earlier, or I found one later. By the eighteen eighties,

(14:33):
lawn tennis shoes were very in demand as that sport
became a popular pastime following the publication of Major Clopton
Wingfield's Book of lawn Tennis Rules in England in eighteen
seventy three. Lawn tennis shoes spanned a really wide range
materials and price wise. Models were often made with canvas,

(14:55):
while those that were aimed at a more fashionable and
privileged player would have been made of things like fancy leathers.
A write up in The Times Union of Rochester, New
York in July eighteen eighty two included mention of lawn
tennis shoes in its fashion column, stating quote, the regular
lawn tennis shoe had a rubber sole which ensures the

(15:15):
player of firm footing and is harmless to the court.
The canvas shoe is very desirable. It is faced with cashmere,
a waterproof rubber solutions cements the two materials together, producing
a soft, flexible effect, comfortable and pretty. An ad placed
by the Nickel Plate Shoe Store in the Des Moines

(15:36):
Register in June of eighteen eighty eight red notice tennis
players our tennis shoes are made to assist in playing tennis.
That was all caps, not made only for looks, though
as for looks, fit and price, they surpass all other's
exclamation point. One of the interesting details of lawn tennis
shoes was that they started out unisex, and then companies

(15:58):
started offering different women's and men's versions. The women's versions
from a lot of companies had heels for a while.
By the eighteen nineties, women were given the option of
having healed or non healed tennis shoes, which tickles me
to no end for some reason. In our December twenty

(16:19):
twenty four episode on yon Ernst matts Lagger, we mentioned
that in eighteen eighty two he invented a lasting machine
that enabled the tops of shoes to be joined to
the soles without the need for a person to do
the hand finishing. This machine was designed for leather soled shoes,
but it represented the completion of a mechanized shoe production process.

(16:43):
All of the other parts of the process had already
been mechanized, and it didn't take long for companies manufacturing
athletic shoes to adapt this process for rubber soles, which
were often glued on but also had some stitching. At
least some of them also had some stitching. Matzelager's invention
changed the entire shoe industry, including athletic shoes, and it

(17:06):
made mass production of rubber soled shoes possible. By the
end of the eighteen eighties, less than a decade after
the lasting machine was invented, there were huge warehouses of
lawn tennis shoes dotting Europe and North America. Thomas Turner's
twenty sixteen paper The Production and Consumption of Lawn Tennis
Shoes in Late Victorian Britain quotes an eighteen eighty eight

(17:30):
article in Pastime magazine that complained about how difficult it
was getting for sports reporters to have to make the
rounds of all the tennis shoe showrooms and factories in
the UK each year to see the latest models, because
there were so many shoe companies with new ones starting
up all the time, and they had to get a

(17:52):
look at all those shoes. I don't know why. That
also tickled me, just this idea of it's my job
to go look at every tennis shoe today. There are
people that have that job and they love them. And
here's the thing. The demand was there for this rapidly
expanding production, because tennis shoes quickly made their way into
other activities in sports, including things like walking for sport,

(18:17):
not just strolling, but sport walking, cycling, golf, and boxing,
among others, And soon the term tennis shoe also just
came to be used to refer to almost any shoe
that had a rubber sole, So though they were used
in a lot of sports, the word tennis still stuck
to them. So if you've ever wondered why they're called
tennis shoes, that's why. Then in eighteen ninety one, doctor

(18:39):
James Naismith invented basketball at Springfield College in Massachusetts as
a way to keep the school students' active indoors in
the winter, and soon shoes that looked more or less
the same as tennis shoes were being sold as basketball
shoes to appeal to the players of the new sport,
and players of all of these sorts fell in love

(19:01):
with the grip of the rubber soul, so by the
dawn of the twentieth century, sports and shoes made specifically
for those sports that featured rubber were just deeply intertwined.
A little bit of mythbusting here in a lot of places, books, articles,
online discussions, you'll see that the first use of the

(19:22):
word sneaker describing rubber soled shoes is attributed to a
marketing man named Henry Nelson McKenny around nineteen seventeen, but
there are also sources that state that it came into
use in the eighteen eighties. Holly really quickly found earlier
uses of the word when not even looking for earlier

(19:43):
uses at first. There was an article in the New
Orleans b from November nineteen oh four with the headline
Sneakers the things. It opens with quote, sneakers said the
man back from the woods. That's what you want, sneakers.
This whole write up is about how if you're going
for a trail walk, you want rubber soled sneakers, not

(20:06):
leather sold shoes. That lays out the reasons why sneakers
are the superior option, noting that the flexible sole and
canvas tops quote permit the foot the freest play and
permit it to settle and grip on whatever you step.
That article incidentally ran in newspapers around the US that autumn,
so that is obviously before nineteen seventeen, but mentions of

(20:30):
sneakers also go farther back than that. The sneaker was
in fact so popular and so popularly known by that
name in the early eighteen nineties that on August twenty
third of eighteen ninety four, the Boston Globe ran a
sad fictional tale worthy of a Pixar short, about a
baseball shoe that was cast aside by its owner. It read,

(20:51):
in part quote, early one spring, when the air was
salubrious and the small boy was out with his marbles,
the sneaker, that hybrid of rubber and cloth, the hated
rival of the baseball shoe, came along to wheedle the
small boy and the youth for sugared favors. My touch
is like velvet, said the sneaker. I alight like the snowflake,

(21:12):
and when laced to your foot, I cling like the vine.
Unlike the dirty red coated baseball shoe. I never grow
flabby with age. I bag not at the knee like
old trousers, but hold close to the foot while yielding
to its every caprice. Is so sad this baseball shoe
is just going through it. But that baseball shoe does

(21:34):
make peace with its fate. Recognizing eventually in the story
that it once supplanted another shoe. But that is again,
and even earlier, you said the word sneaker. The Record
Journal of Meriden, Connecticut ran an article in eighteen ninety
eight indicating that the writer at least believed the term
sneakers in relation to shoes was a new development that

(21:57):
ride up started. Quote sneakers a new word. It has
been coined by the children of a New York family
whose mother was made their unconscious accomplice in passing the
counterfeit word upon the public. All soft sold shoes in
which a child of an inquiring nature can noiselessly perambulate
the house in search of raisins, lump sugar, and such

(22:20):
lawful prey, are by these children given the euphonious and
suggestive designation of sneakers, snake, sneaker, sneakers. The origin is
too obvious to need any further explanation. The story than
relais how a mother went to an apartment store asking
for sneakers, only to be embarrassed when she realized that

(22:42):
she was after tennis shoes or another version of this
origin is similar, but it suggests that the term sneakers
was applied to rubber soled shoes because adult criminals like
thieves could noiselessly move around in them. Regardless of when
and why people start and using the term sneakers, it
was obviously in use by the eighteen nineties, so sneaker

(23:06):
and tennis shoe were both in common use by the
late nineteenth century. Yeah, if you go looking at a
lot of you know how newspapers would do, like serialized
fiction during this time, A lot of them start to
include a clue that like they are sneaker prints. Clearly
someone very sneaky is flying. They get around it cannot

(23:29):
be heard. I started giggling so much at how many
of those I ran into you. We are about to
talk about a lot of familiar names because many sneaker
companies that really mark the beginning of the industry are
still around. We will get into it after we hear
from the sponsors that keep the show going. In nineteen

(23:59):
oh six, New Balance Arch Support Company was founded in Boston, Massachusetts,
but it was not initially a shoe company, as that
name indicates. It made arch supports that fit inside of shoes,
and those supports were a new invention of the company's
founder William J. Riley, who, according to the company and

(24:19):
the lore that it shares, got the idea for a
three point insol after watching chickens walk around in his yard,
noting the way that they balanced on their splayed out toes.
By nineteen thirty eight, the company was making shoes that
were designed for track and field sports. The Brown Bag
Harriers Sports Club commissioned Riley to design and make them

(24:41):
shoes that year, which he did. Those first models for
the Harriers were famously made of kangaroo leather, and the
company remained primarily an arch support manufacturer for decades even
after they made those shoes, and they didn't introduce the
first true sneaker in their line, the Trackster, until nineteen sixteen,
and that happened after the company had been through a

(25:02):
few ownership changes. In nineteen oh eight, Marquee Mills Converse
founded the Converse Rubber Shoe Company, and this was a
significant moment, not just because Converse would grow into a huge,
multinational brand, but also because this is one of the
first instances where a rubber company was formed to make shoes.

(25:24):
Up until this, rubber sold shoes were being made by
companies that were rubber generalists. They were also making things
like tires and other non apparel rubber products, but even
though the company made shoes, it wasn't making sneakers. Initially,
the first products were water resistant boots. The limited offerings

(25:44):
of doing just water resistant boots created a seasonality problem
when there was a dip in sales in the warmer months,
when things like snow and rain were not quite as prevalent,
so the first Converse tennis shoe designed came out in
nineteen ten. Eventually, to take advantage of the growing popularity
of basketball, Converse introduced a basketball specific shoe in nineteen

(26:08):
seventeen called the Non Skid, and the Non Skid became
the All Star in nineteen nineteen. The All Star model
was developed after the company got feedback from coaches on
how to improve the original, and at this point throughout
pretty much all of shoe marketing, coaches were really the
target market for athletic shoes because they would select the

(26:31):
models that their entire team would wear throughout the season.
A few years later, in nineteen twenty three, Converse made
its deal with basketball star Charles Hollis Taylor, better known
as Chuck Taylor. Taylor had been a professional player, but
that was very different in the early nineteen twenties from
how it is today. He played a few semi pro

(26:51):
games before being hired at Converse, and when he was
brought onto the company, he was a salesman and a
coach for the Covers All Stars basketball team. Part of
Taylor's job was touring the US selling the All Star
shoe model. He promoted basketball as he traveled, giving clinics
to teach about basketball. It was really this work promoting

(27:14):
the sport and the shoe that led Converse to officially
rename the All Star as Chuck Taylor's All Star in
nineteen thirty four. Two years later, the company made the
shoes for the US Olympic basketball team's appearance at the
nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. That was the debut of
the red and blue stripes on the foxing band around

(27:35):
the outside edge of the shoe. The Olympics were a
good advertisement for Converse internationally, and soon other countries wanted
to place order for their teams as well. Yeah. I
think sometimes people think that Chucks are named for Chuck
Taylor because he was like an amazing, high achieving pro
basketball player and that's that's not really what's up now.

(27:57):
He was an amazing, high achieving staff member for Converse. Listen,
we love our Chucks. In nineteen sixteen, a new shoe
brand entered the market and it was made by US Rubber.
They had made a boot before this, but then they
got into making more athletic style shoes and those were Keds.

(28:19):
At the time, US Rubber, which had formed when several
smaller companies joined together in the late nineteenth century, dominated
the US rubber market, but they didn't have a shoe
at market at that point. The first plan was to
call the shoes Peds, pulling from the Latin word petitas,
which means foot, but that name was already in use
by another company, so Keds was eventually chosen. Apparently there

(28:42):
were a few other things that they considered that switched
out that first letter as well. In the nineteen twenties,
a Keds model that was made for women's tennis was
named the Champion because a lot of players who won
tournaments wore them, and that kind of bolstered their image
and they took off from there. The J. W. Foster
and Sons Shoe Company was established in eighteen ninety five

(29:04):
by Joseph William Foster. Over the years, Foster had spent
a lot of time repairing the spiked shoes that cricket
players used, and it occurred to him that shoe spikes
might be beneficial for other sports as well. Foster liked
to run that he added spikes to his running shoes
and found that he really liked the extra grab and

(29:25):
stability that he could get from them. This invention gained
worldwide attention in nineteen twenty four when athletes Harold Abrams
and Eric Liddell won medals running in the Paris Olympics
wearing custom spiked running shoes made for them by Foster.
The model was then mass produced as Olympian track shoes.

(29:45):
The Foster family is going to come up again shortly.
In nineteen twenty four, two German brothers, Adolph and Rudolph
Dossler started a company called Grebruda Dossler that literally translates
to Dossler Brothers, and they started this to make shoes
in their hometown of Herzegenaure. The company went by Getta
for short, and the two brothers handstitched their sneakers in

(30:08):
the home that they lived in with their parents, and
for the first several years, although their company grew, it
was pretty slow. But then everything changed when they made
shoes for several athletes in the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games,
including US track star Jesse Owens. Just as Ghetto was
gaining some notoriety, World War II ramped up. World War two,

(30:31):
of course, impacted the progression of the growing sneaker industry
globally because rubber became an important material for military applications.
A lot of shoe factories transitioned temporarily to producing military items.
The Dassler factory was one of them, although that didn't
happen until nineteen forty three. This also starts a complicated

(30:51):
part of the brother's history, since they both joined the
Nazi Party, although some historians have come to believe that
this was a move to ensure that their business survived,
rather than being a matter of ideology for the two
of them, particularly given their ties to sports, the company
would have been very valuable to the Nazi Party. Adolf,

(31:12):
who went by Addie, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in
nineteen forty but was discharged the following year, having been
deemed necessary for the running of the factory. When his
brother Rudolph, who went by Rudy, was called up in
nineteen forty three, he had to go, and it seems
that there was already a good bit of tension between
the brothers, but being forced to go to war when

(31:35):
his younger brother had been released from service in part
due to Rudy's campaigning for him to be released so
that he could come and handle the family business. This
whole thing really tore open a rift that continued to
grow between the two of them due to additional other factors.
By nineteen forty eight, the two brothers had reached a
point where reconciliation was just not going to be possible.

(31:58):
Their company closed and each of them open their own
shoe company on either side of the River Auruk that
separates the city of Herzegenarak. Rudy formed the company Ruda,
and Addi started Adidas. We're going to talk about that
name in just a second. And a year later he
started using the company's now iconic three stripe design on

(32:19):
all the shoes. This was kind of an evolution because
the shoes they had been making together had two stripes,
so Addi just threw another stripe on and said that's
my design. Ruda eventually became Puma. Incidentally, most people in
the US say Adidas the way I just did Adidas,
but a lot of people around the globe pronounce it differently,

(32:39):
and I know this confuses people sometimes. One of the
more common ones is Audidas, which is the most German
version because it references Addi's name pronunciation. So if you
hear Adidas, they're not saying it wrong. That's just a variation.
Now we're looping back to that Dunlop mythbusting earlier. In

(33:01):
nineteen twenty seven, after James Boyd Dunlop had retired from
day to day operations of the company, Dunlop collaborated with
the Liverpool Rubber Company and they produced not a sneaker
but a boot, the Dunlop Protective Rubber Boot. That was
not the first rubber boot invented, they go back to
the mid nineteenth century, but it was the first that

(33:23):
was reinforced to protect the feet in work scenarios rather
than just being waterproof footwear. But the success of the
boot led to another shoe. In nineteen twenty nine, Dunlop
introduced a model called the Green Flash that was a
white sneaker with green accents, including a sort of wedge
shaped design on the exterior side that featured the Dunlop logo.

(33:46):
Famed British tennis player Fred Perry won Wimbledon in nineteen
thirty four, nineteen thirty five and nineteen thirty six wearing
green Flash sneakers. They became a standard part of athletic wardrobes,
not just for pro athletes, but also for school kids
who needed them in their pe classes. They then transitioned
into streetwear. You can still buy Dunlop Green Flash shoes today,

(34:09):
although the original colorway is no longer available. People still
find them on the secondary market though, and there is
a seemingly never ending call from collectors for the original
white and green color scheme to be re released. Oh yeah,
you can find it so fast, just people being like,
why will you not put out new shoes with the

(34:30):
white and green? They love what they love. A lot
of them grew up wearing them in school and they
just they love them. Joe and Jeff Foster, the grandsons
of the J. W. Foster that we mentioned earlier who
started putting spikes on running shoes, started their own shoe
company in nineteen fifty four called Mercury, but there was
a problem with that name. It was already trademarked by

(34:53):
somebody else. In an interview with the BBC in October
twenty twenty five, Joe explained how they can with their
new name. Quote, the dictionary was there. I opened it up.
I like the letter R. I don't know why. After
coming across the word rebook. While perusing the entries, they
saw that it was a South African gazelle. They did

(35:15):
some more digging and they learned that the Afrikaans version
of the word is rebok, and they settled on that
as the company's new name. In nineteen sixty four, a
company called Blue Ribbon Sports was founded by Phil Knight
and Bill Bowerman. Bowerman had been Knight's track coach when
Knight was enrolled at the University of Oregon. After graduation,

(35:36):
Knight had become a certified public accountant and then a professor.
He went into business with Bowerman, initially to sell a
Japanese sneaker brand called Tiger in the US. Blue Ribbon
rebranded as Nike in nineteen seventy one. They paid a
designed student named Carolyn Davidson thirty five dollars for the
swoosh logo that became globally iconic, then later said in

(36:00):
an interview that night didn't really like the swoosh, but
told her maybe it'll grow on me. Carolynton is credited
with by a lot of people as being integral to
the development of the brand, and she was given quote
Nike stock and a gold swoosh ring, according to her
account given a number of years later, when Nike stock
went public. Yeah, for a long time, there were a

(36:23):
lot of articles that were coming about out about how
Nike had cheated this person who really designed the icon
of their brand, and it's she was like, no, they
gave me more money. Yeah. One of the most repeated
stories about the early days of Nike involves a waffle iron.
I feel like, if we don't tell the story, the

(36:44):
people who love sneakers in our audience will lose their minds.
Bill Bauerman was trying to solve this problem, which was
the Eurothane tracks that have become popular and that he
had put in at Oregon were a little too slick
for regular sneakers. You kind of slid on them. But
they were also unsuitable for spike shoes because those would
destroy this new running surface, and he famously was inspired

(37:07):
to try to create rubber spikes by pouring liquid your
thane onto the family waffle iron. I think this was
a wedding present he and his wife had gotten some
years earlier, and that destroyed that waffle iron. It glued shut.
But Bauerman thought this was still a good idea, so
he thrifted a whole bunch more used waffle irons to
keep doing this experiment. Once he got a shape that

(37:31):
he thought actually was pretty good, it was obviously inverted
from what it needed to be, so this led to
mold making and negative casting, and eventually he had a prototype,
and he had a small run of them made with
those spikes so the University of Oregon's track team could
test them, and next it was tried by Olympic marathoners.

(37:52):
They all love these. These new shoes were called moon shoes,
and they are kind of a holy grail for sneaker collectors.
They didn't really put them out as a regular line,
but there were a few that had been made that
never got used, that apparently got put in their company
store early on, and some people got those, but pair

(38:12):
of them sold at auction for four hundred and thirty
seven thousand, five hundred dollars in twenty nineteen. I think
the expected amount was like one hundred and sixty two
one hundred and eighty thousand, so they obviously blew that
out of the water. The Moon Show, as I said,
never went into wide production, but one of the models
that followed it, the Waffle Trainer, is credited with solidifying

(38:35):
Nike's business. Incidentally, Bauerman's kids eventually found that original destroyed
waffle maker. He buried it in the backyard. I guess
that's what you do when you break appliances there, but
it is now on display at Nike's headquarters. In nineteen
sixty six, the Van Doren Rubber Company was founded by

(38:55):
Paul and James Van Doren. The company debuted it's deck She,
known initially as Van's Number forty four, that same year.
Eventually it was renamed The Authentic, and you can still
buy them under that name. In fact, a lot of
the models that Vans debuted in its first two decades
are still in production. The number ninety five debuted in

(39:17):
nineteen seventy six and was an instant it with skateboarders.
It's now known as the Era. The following year, the
number thirty six Old School was introduced, which used leather
instead of just canvas, and then a slip on style
that remains a staple in their line also came out
that year. The Skate High, another longtimer, debuted in nineteen

(39:39):
seventy eight. In the nineteen seventies, there was a huge
surge of interest in the US and Europe, especially in jogging,
which bolstered sales across all brands. Up to that point,
athletes had still been the primary consumer group for all
of these sneakers, but a much wider audience of runners

(40:00):
suddenly needed shoes. Nineteen seventy was the year that a
number of popular road races were started, including the New
York City Marathon, the Seattle Marathon, and the Peachtree Road
Race in Atlanta. Focusing on the Peachtree since it is
our hometown race and I've run it several times, it
is so easy to track the rapid growth of running

(40:22):
as a pastime by just looking at the Peachtree's numbers,
Because in nineteen seventy, one hundred ten or one hundred
and fifty runners participated in the ten k. The numbers
vary by source, but even so, the suit it's a
pretty small number. Five years later it was one thousand runners.
In nineteen seventy eight, it was twelve thousand, five hundred.

(40:43):
By nineteen eighty, race officials decided that they would cap
registrations at twenty five thousand. If you run the Peachtree,
this is making you crack up, because today they take
sixty thousand. This is just one race, obviously, but it
parallels the rapid growth of US other road races as
interest in running for health and fitness and community exploded

(41:05):
in the US in the seventies and eighties, and every
one of those runners needed shoes. The modern fitness industry
also boosted shoe sales. Joe Foster of Reebok noted that
once Jane Fondo wore a pair of Rebox in one
of her workout videos in the mid nineteen eighties, the
brand really took off. Minor heads up that he calls

(41:26):
women girls in this quote. Quote for being a nine
million dollar running company, we became a nine hundred million
dollar aerobics women's company in four years. The girls loved
aerobics so much that they went to work in them,
put their heels in their bag and went to work
and changed when they went to work. This is where
Rebok became, just became lifestyle and street and the volumes

(41:49):
were incredible, so they quickly introduced the Freestyle specifically marketed
to women's aerobics classes, and then started to introduce a
lot of items to appeal to gemgoers. And Reebok was
not alone. Most of the major shoe brands expanded their
lines to include clothing and accessories to capitalize both on
the increased interest and exercise programs and the street style

(42:13):
that grew out of the burgeoning fitness industry. The idea
of sneakers as fashion was cemented in nineteen eighty four
when Gucci made their first sneaker and that became the
first one that was associated with a luxury brand. That
same year, Michael Jordan entered into an endorsement deal with Nike,
which is sometimes pointed to as the transition point of

(42:35):
sneakers from sport related shoe to status item. This idea
was further reinforced the following year when Adidas or Adidas
and run DMC entered into an endorsement deal that made
the group the first sneaker Ambassadors who were not athletes.
According to Statista, the sneaker industry is projected to generate

(42:58):
one hundred and sixty one billion dollars in twenty twenty six.
That's a lot of dollars. It's a lot of shoes.
We will never stop loving sneakers at our house. Do
you have some listener mail that you love? I do,
and it is not about sneakers, but it is about clothes.
It's from our listener Caroline or Carolyn, I always wonder

(43:20):
she's written us several times. Chritz Hilan, Tracy, thank you,
thank you for all you do to keep us all informed,
entertained and in stitches pun intended. I just listened to
your two parter on e. Virgil Neil and the listener
mail about the Abigail Adams costume. It brought me way
way back to the bi centennial. It's nineteen seventy six
for younger folks who missed it. When my brownie troop

(43:42):
dressed up as women for the Revolution. My mom, who
was a great seamstress, made our costumes. I can't remember
who my sister portrayed, but our then five year old
brother was an adorable minuteman. As this email's title suggests,
I was Betsy Ross, despite my mom's which she'd inherited
from her mom, a professional seamstress. I almost failed the

(44:04):
sewing portion of home economics. I've never been able to
read a pattern, and there I was portraying someone who
is then most well known for sewing the first flag.
I not thought of my portrayal as something suspect a
Deil Neil's history, and the listener mail put it all
together for me. I hope this message brought a smile
or a chuckle, as so many of your episodes do

(44:24):
for me. Stay amazing, as I know you will. Attached
as yet another picture of Penny, who loves all the
kisses you send, her away seriously in love with the stock.
She also sent us pictures from a recent trip she
took to LA where she visited the Academy Museum of
Arts and Sciences. Did I say that right? I don't know,
but in any case, thank you, thank you, thank you

(44:46):
for sharing your travels with us and all of your
fun anecdotes. And that dog is really cute. Penny's a cutie.
But also I just I love these moments where we
remember something from childhood, yeah, uh oh uh oh, but
it is funny that she didn't inherit sewing. I think
I've said on the show before a lot of people
in my family, so I sew more than all of them,

(45:06):
and I did not want any of them to be
teaching me. Not because they weren't great. My mom was
an excellent seamstress, but like we did not get along,
and also like her taste and my taste, we're not
gonna ever align. So I understand this, although I went
the opposite direction of I will outpace all of you
and make all my clothes. Thank you for sending us
that email. If you would like to send us an
email for a childhood memory that we've accidentally jogged that

(45:31):
makes you wonder if you were being appropriate or not,
or if you just misrepresented yourself, you can do that
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
email about anything else you cared to you. You can
find the show notes for today's episode in all of
our episodes at mystinhistory dot com. We'll have all of
the resources that we pulled from in creating these episodes

(45:52):
right there. On any given episodes, information you can also
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(46:15):
you listen to your favorite shows.

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