Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  In this century, the institution witnessed changes in three principal areas. Following the school’s centennial in 1902, the curriculum was expanded to include English, foreign languages, history, and the social sciences. And following World War II, in recognition of the intense physical demands of modern warfare, the academy focused on physical fitness, with the stated goal to make “Every cadet an athlete.” Perhaps the biggest change in the academy’s history came in 1976, when it admitted females as cadets.

  From a Revolutionary War fortress, the site at the S-bend in the Hudson became a flourishing center for military and academic excellence—all that General George Washington had intended and more.

  Statue of Liberty: 1865, France

  The Statue of Liberty, refurbished for her 1986 centennial, is perhaps the most renowned symbol of American patriotism throughout the world. It is the colossal embodiment of an idea that grew out of a dinner conversation between a historian and a sculptor.

  In 1865, at a banquet in a town near Versailles, the eminent French jurist and historian Edouard de Laboulaye discussed Franco-American relations with a young sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. De Laboulaye, an ardent admirer of the United States, had published a three-volume history of the country and was aware of its approaching independence centennial. When the historian suggested that France present America with an impressive gift, sculptor Bartholdi immediately envisioned a massive statue. But at the time, the idea progressed no further than discussion.

  A trip later took Bartholdi to Egypt. Strongly influenced by ancient colossi, he attempted to persuade the ruling authorities for a commission to create a large statue to grace the entrance of the newly completed Suez Canal. But before he could secure the assignment, war erupted between France and Prussia, and Bartholdi was summoned to fight.

  The idea of a centennial statue for America was never far from the sculptor’s mind. And in 1871, as he sailed into the bustling mouth of New York Harbor on his first visit to the country, his artist’s eyes immediately zeroed in on a site for the work: Bedloe’s Island, a twelve-acre tract lying southwest of the tip of Manhattan. Inspired by this perfect pedestal of an island, Bartholdi completed rough sketches of his colossus before the ship docked. The Franco-American project was undertaken, with the artist, engineers, and fund-raisers aware that the unveiling was a mere five years away.

  The statue, to be named “Liberty Enlightening the World,” would be 152 feet high and weigh 225 tons, and its flowing robes were to consist of more than three hundred sheets of hand-hammered copper. France offered to pay for the sculpture; the American public agreed to finance its rock-concrete-and-steel pedestal. To supervise the immense engineering feat, Bartholdi enlisted the skills of French railroad builder Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, who later would erect the tower that bears his name. And for a fittingly noble, wise, and maternal face for the statue, Bartholdi turned to his mother, who posed for him.

  Construction of the Statue of Liberty in 1885.

  From the start, the French contributed generously. Citizens mailed in cash and checks, and the government sponsored a special “Liberty” lottery, with profits going toward construction costs. A total of $400,000 was raised, and the esteemed French composer Charles Gounod created a cantata to celebrate the project.

  In America, the public was less enthusiastic. The disinterest centered around one question: Did the country really need—or want—such a monumental gift from France? Publisher Joseph Pulitzer spearheaded a drive for funds in his paper the World. In March 1885, Pulitzer editorialized that it would be “an irrevocable disgrace to New York City and the American Republic to have France send us this splendid gift without our having provided so much as a landing place for it.” He lambasted New York’s millionaires for lavishing fortunes on personal luxuries while haggling over the pittances they were asked to contribute to the statue’s pedestal. In two months, Pulitzer’s patriotic editorials and harangues netted a total of $270,000.

  The deadline was not met. When the country’s 1876 centennial arrived, only segments of the statue were completed. Thus, as a piecemeal preview, Liberty’s torch arm was displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial celebrations, and two years later, at the Paris Fair, the French were treated to a view of Liberty’s giant head.

  Constructing the colossus in France was a herculean challenge, but dismantling it and shipping it to America seemed an almost insurmountable task. In 1884, the statue’s exterior and interior were taken apart piece by piece and packed into two hundred mammoth wooden crates; the half-million-pound load was hauled by special trucks to a railroad station, where a train of seventy cars transported it to a shipyard. In May 1885, Liberty sailed for America aboard the French warship Isère.

  When, on October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland presided over the statue’s inauguration ceremonies, Lady Liberty did not yet bear her now-immortal poem. The verse “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” was added in 1903, after the statue was closely identified with the great flow of immigrants who landed on nearby Ellis Island.

  The moving lines are from a sonnet, “The New Colossus,” composed in 1883 by New York City poet Emma Lazarus. A Sephardic Jew, whose work was praised by the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, Lazarus devoted much of her life to the cause of Jewish nationalism. She tackled the theme of persecution in poems such as “Songs of a Semite,” and in a drama, The Dance to Death, based on the accusation leveled against Jews of poisoning water wells and thus causing Europe’s fourteenth-century Black Death.

  But her sonnet “The New Colossus” was almost completely ignored by the critics of the day and the public. She had written it for a literary auction held at New York’s Academy of Design, and it expressed her belief in America as a refuge for the oppressed peoples of the world. Sixteen years after her death from cancer in 1887, the sonnet’s final five lines were etched in bronze and in the memory of a nation.

  Chapter 12

  On the Body

  Shoes: Pre-2000 B.C., Near East

  Although some clothing originated to shelter the body, most articles of attire, from earliest times, arose as statements of status and social rank. Color, style, and fabric distinguished high priest from layman, lawmaker from lawbreaker, and military leader from his followers. Costume set off a culture’s legends from its legions. In fact, costume is still the most straight-forwardly visible means of stating social hierarchy. As for the contributions made to fashion by the dictates of modesty, they had virtually nothing to do with the origin of clothing and stamped their particular (and often peculiar) imprint on attire centuries later.

  Shoes, as we’ll see, though eminently practical, are one early example of clothes as categorizer.

  The oldest shoe in existence is a sandal. It is constructed of woven papyrus and was discovered in an Egyptian tomb dating from 2000 B.C. The chief footwear of ancient people in warm climates, sandals exhibited a variety of designs, perhaps as numerous as styles available today.

  Greek leather sandals, krepis, were variously dyed, decorated, and gilded. The Roman crepida had a thicker sole and leather sides, and it laced across the instep. The Gauls preferred the high-backed campagus, while a rope sandal of hemp and esparto grass, the alpargata, footed the Moors. From tombs, gravesites, and ancient paintings, archaeologists have catalogued hundreds of sandal designs.

  Although sandals were the most common ancient footwear, other shoes were worn. The first recorded nonsandal shoe was a leather wraparound, shaped like a moccasin; it tightened against the foot with rawhide lacing and was a favorite in Babylonia around 1600 B.C.

  A similar snug-fitting leather shoe was worn by upper-class Greek women starting around 600 B.C., and the stylish colors were white and red. It was the Romans, around 200 B.C., who first established shoe guilds; the professional shoemakers were the first to fashion footwear specifically for the right and left feet.

  Roman footwear, in style and color, clearly designated social class.
Women of high station wore closed shoes of white or red, and for special occasions, green or yellow. Women of lower rank wore natural-colored open leather sandals. Senators officially wore brown shoes with four black leather straps wound around the leg up to midcalf, and tied in double knots. Consuls wore white shoes. There were as yet no brand names, but there were certain guild cobblers whose products were sought for their exceptional craftsmanship and comfortable fit. Their shoes were, not surprisingly, more costly.

  The word “shoe” changed almost as frequently over the ages as shoe styles. In the English-speaking world, “shoe” evolved through seventeen different spellings, with at least thirty-six variations for the plural. The earliest Anglo-Saxon term was sceo, “to cover,” which eventually became in the plural schewis, then shooys, and finally “shoes.”

  Standard Shoe Size. Until the first decade of the fourteenth century, people in the most civilized European societies, including royalty, could not acquire shoes in standard sizes. And even the most expensive custom-made shoes could vary in size from pair to pair, depending on the measuring and crafting skills of particular cobblers.

  That began to change in 1305. Britain’s King Edward I decreed that for a standard of accuracy in certain trades, an inch be taken as the length of three contiguous dried barleycorns. British cobblers adopted the measure and began manufacturing the first footwear in standard sizes. A child’s shoe measuring thirteen barleycorns became commonly known as, and requested by, size 13. And though shoes cut for the right and left foot had gone out of existence after the fall of the Roman Empire, they reemerged in fourteenth-century England.

  A new style surfaced in the fourteenth century: shoes with extremely long spiked toes. The vogue was carried to such lengths that Edward III enacted a law prohibiting spikes’ extending two inches beyond the human toe. For a while, people observed the edict. But by the early 1400s, the so-called crakows had attained tips of eighteen inches or more, with wearers routinely tripping themselves.

  The crakows, arriving in the creative atmosphere that nurtured the Renaissance, ushered in a new shoe-style trendiness, as one fashion extreme replaced another. The absurdly long, pointed toe, for example, was usurped by a painfully short, comically broad-boxed toe that in width could accommodate an extra set of digits.

  In the seventeenth century, the oxford, a low calf-leather shoe laced up the front through three or more eyelets, originated with cobblers in the academic town of Oxford, England.

  In America at the time, shoe design took a step backward. The first colonial cobblers owned only “straight lasts,” that is, single-shape cutting blocks, so right and left footwear was unavailable. The wealthy resorted to British imports. Shoe selection, price, and comfort improved in the mid-eighteenth century when the first American shoe factory opened in Massachusetts. These mass-produced shoes were still cut and stitched by hand, with leather sewn at home by women and children for a shameful pittance, then assembled at the factory.

  Complete mechanization of shoemaking, and thus true mass production, was slow in coming. In 1892, the Manfield Shoe Company of Northampton, England, operated the first machines capable of producing quality shoes in standard sizes and in large quantities.

  Boots: 1100 B.C., Assyria

  Boots originated as footwear for battle. The Sumerians and the Egyptians sent soldiers into combat barefoot, but the Assyrians, around 1100 B.C., developed a calf-high, laced leather boot with a sole reinforced by metal.

  There is evidence that the Assyrians, as well as the Hittites, both renowned as shoemakers, had right-and left-footed military boots. One translation of a Hittite text tells of Telipinu, god of agriculture, in a foul temper because he inadvertently put “his right boot on his left foot and his left boot on his right foot.”

  The Assyrian infantry boot was not readily adopted by Greek or Roman soldiers. From fighting barefoot, they progressed to sandals with hobnail soles for additional grip and wear. It was primarily for extended journeys on foot that Greek and Roman men outfitted themselves in sturdy boots. In cold weather, they were often lined with fur and adorned at the top by a dangling animal paw or tail.

  Boots also became the customary footwear for nomadic horse-riding communities in cold mountainous regions and on the open steppes. Their sturdiness, and the slight heel that held the foot in the stirrup, guaranteed boots a role as combat gear. In the 1800s, cobblers in Hesse, Germany, introduced knee-high military boots called Hessians, of polished black leather with a tassel, similar to the Romans’ animal tail, hanging from the top. And during the same period, British shoemakers, capitalizing on a military victory, popularized Wellingtons, high boots named for Arthur Wellesley, the “Iron Duke” of Wellington, who presided over Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.

  French high heels c. 1850 and a gentleman’s boots, the earliest shoes to sport elevated heels.

  Boots have been in and out of fashion over the centuries. But one aspect of the boot, its pronounced heel, gave birth to the fashion phenomenon of high-heeled shoes.

  High Heels: 16th Century, France

  High heels did not appear overnight. They grew inch by inch over decades, with the upward trend beginning in sixteenth-century France. And though the term “high heels” would later become a rubric for women’s elevated footwear, the shoes were first worn by men. In the sixteenth century, there was comparatively little development in women’s shoes because they were hidden under long gowns.

  The advantage of an elevated heel on a shoe was first appreciated in horseback riding; a heel secured the foot in the stirrup. Thus, riding boots were the first shoes routinely heeled. And during the Middle Ages, when overcrowding and poor sanitation made human and animal waste street obstacles, boots with thick soles and elevated heels offered a few inches of practical protection as well as a psychological lift.

  It was for the purpose of rising above public filth, in fact, that clogs were developed during the Middle Ages. They originated in Northern Europe as an overshoe, made partly or wholly of wood, with a thick base to protect the wearer’s good leather shoes from street debris. In warmer months, they were often worn in place of a snug-fitting leather shoe.

  A German shoe called a pump became popular throughout Europe in the mid-1500s. The loose slipper, plain or jeweled, had a low heel, and historians believe its name is onomatopoeic for the “plump, plump” sound its heel made in flapping against a wood floor. A later woman’s slipper, the scuff, would be thus named.

  In the mid-1600s, male boots with high heels were de rigueur in France. The fad was started, and escalated, by the Sun King, Louis XIV. In his reign of seventy-three years, the longest in European history, France attained the zenith of its military power and the French court reached an unprecedented level of culture and refinement. None of Louis’s towering achievements, though, could compensate psychologically for his short height. The monarch at one point had inches added to the heels of his shoes. In a rush to emulate their king, noble men and women at court instructed bootmakers to heighten their own heels. The homage forced Louis into higher heels. When, in time, Frenchmen descended to their anatomical heights, women courtiers did not, thus launching a historic disparity in the heel heights of the sexes.

  By the eighteenth century, women at the French court wore brocaded high-heeled shoes with elevations up to three inches. American women, taking the fashion lead from Paris, adopted what was known as the “French heel.” It helped launch a heel polarization in the United States. As women’s heels climbed higher and grew narrower, men’s heels (though not on boots) correspondingly descended. By the 1920s, “high heel” no longer denoted a shoe’s actual heel height but connoted an enticing feminine fashion in footwear.

  Loafers. The laceless, slip-on loafer is believed to have evolved from the Norwegian clog, an early overshoe. It is known with greater certainty that the Weejun loafer was named by a cobbler from Wilton, Maine, Henry Bass, after the final two syllables of “Norwegian.”

  Bass began making sturdy,
over-the-ankle shoes in 1876 for New England farmers. He eventually expanded his line to include a lumberjack shoe and specialty footwear on request. He constructed insulated hiking boots for both of Admiral Byrd’s successful expeditions to the South Pole, and lightweight flying boots for Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight. In 1936, Henry Bass was shown a Norwegian slipper moccasin that was fashionable at the time in Europe. He secured permission from the Norwegian manufacturer to redesign the shoe for the American market, and the finished loafer launched his Bass Weejun line of footwear. By the late 1950s, the Bass Weejun was the most popular hand-sewn moccasin ever made, a collegiate status symbol in the ancient tradition of the shoe as statement of social position.

  Sneakers: 1910s, United States

  The rubber-bottomed athletic shoe whose silent footsteps earned it the name “sneaker” had to await a technological breakthrough: the vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear in the 1860s. Goodyear proved that the natural gum from the rubber plant did not have to be sticky when warm and brittle when cold. Mixed with sulfur, rubber became a dry, smooth, pliant substance, perfect for footwear such as rain galoshes, one of its first successful uses in apparel in the late 1800s.

  Before the turn of the century rubber was on the soles of leather shoes. And vulcanized rubber soles were being glued to canvas tops to produce what manufacturers advertised as a revolution in athletic footwear. In 1917, U.S. Rubber introduced Keds, the first popularly marketed sneaker, with a name that suggested “kids” and rhymed with ped, the Latin root for “foot.” Those first sneakers were neither all white, nor white soles with black canvas; rather, the soles were black and the canvas was a conservative chestnut brown, because that was the popular color for men’s leather shoes.