Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  In 1839, Charles Goodyear of Massachusetts discovered a combination of sulfur and heat that at last made rubber a serviceable material. One of his first licensees was the Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company in Naugatuck, Connecticut, later merged into the giant holding company U.S. Rubber, formed out of nine manufacturers in 1892. Today we think of rubber mainly as a tire industry, but even as recently as 1901, half the crude rubber production of the United States was used in footwear, and U.S. Rubber moved into the automotive market only to diversify and offset fluctuations in the shoe business. Its plants overwhelmingly produced overshoes, galoshes, and boots for miners, fishermen, policemen, and others who worked outdoors or in hazardous conditions. The first sport shoes with rubber were probably the beach slippers first worn in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans and Americans discovered the seashore—previously considered a desolate, marginal zone of salt-marsh farming—as a summer playground made invigorating by sunlight and salt air. As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has observed, the heat and shifting movement of sand make it an inviting but exasperating surface. Sand scorches the bare foot but its grains spill into shoes. While Charles Goodyear was developing vulcanization in the United States, John Boyd Dunlop was finding a way to bond rubber soles to canvas uppers, marketing them as “sand shoes.”16

  In the mid-nineteenth century, vulcanized rubber-soled shoes were best known as croquet sandals, specialty footwear selling to the affluent starting in 1868 at $6 per pair, several times the cost of good leather shoes. A few elite pedestrians, at least in England, also used the new material. Sir John Dugdale Astley, the sport’s reigning arbiter, referred to “india rubber shoes which fitted him like gloves.” In the later nineteenth century, rubber soles spread for special purposes. Thieves and prison guards alike appreciated their silence, hence the enduring nickname “sneakers,” which first appeared in 1873. The rubber joint, called the foxing, between sole and upper reminded others of the Plimsoll line around ships’ hulls, marking the limit of safe loading. The popularity of the nickname Plimsolls for the footwear suggests that rubber recreational shoes were growing in popularity as early as the later 1870s. New models were introduced for boating, tennis, and cycling.17

  The rise of the rubber-soled shoe in the early twentieth century was connected with basketball rather than with track. Spalding introduced a gum rubber marathon shoe in 1908 but returned to leather in 1913 after complaints of excessive wear. Meanwhile, basketball had originated as a winter sport at a school for YMCA instructors in 1891; by the early twentieth century it was swelling YMCA memberships. It was partly for this market that U.S. Rubber developed its Keds brand, introduced in 1916–17. Several companies had trademark claims on Peds, and Keds was less a play on kids than a neutral word inspired by the recent success of Kodak. But the name did attract children and parents and helped give the company an identity; until then, U.S. Rubber had remained more of a trust than a modern corporation, with thirty plants and thirty rival brands. Converse All-Stars also appeared in 1917. With B. F. Goodrich, Dunlop, and Spalding, these competed for the growing sneaker market. Converse, kept out of other outlets by the rubber companies, became a specialist in athletic footwear and began to publish a basketball yearbook that has become a standard reference on the game. Until World War II, the athletic shoe industry remained divided between the makers of leather sports shoes and the sneaker companies rooted, with a few exceptions like Converse, in the rubber industry. Sneakers of all kinds remained largely limited to sports and children’s wear; only the Duke of Windsor experimented with them as street shoes.18

  Specialized athletic footwear was not widely produced until the late nineteenth century. The Schneider shoe, designed for the increasing number of indoor gymnasiums with wooden floors, has “flexible elastic pads” in its heels for absorbing shocks. Whether or not this design ever went into production, the search for optimal resilience in sports shoes has continued.

  The 1930s were important for athletic footwear because of the growing understanding of the relationship between the skills of athletes and the construction of their shoes: technology following technique. Innovations often came from sports rather than from manufacturers’ laboratories. It was in this period that Vitale Bramani, an Italian mountaineer, developed a new sole material after six of his climbing companions perished because they had discarded their heavy approach boots before being surprised by a storm and had to spend the night in mid-climb in lightweight boots. Vibram made possible a single boot with both strength and grip. Around the same time, the American Paul Sperry introduced a new kind of deck shoe with a superior grip after nearly dying in a sailing accident. The young Bavarian shoe manufacturer Adolf Dassler, founder of the later Adidas, was also an athlete. Dassler’s great achievement of the 1950s was a new kind of soccer shoe that matched a new style of play. The dominant British-made models were boots of heavy vegetable-tanned leather. Their studs of layered leather were attached with bent-back iron nails that could penetrate the insole when the studs shrank after repeated wearings and exposure to moisture. Painful as they could be, they were well suited to the prevailing English “kick and rush” method. Dassler worked with West Germany’s international team to make possible a new style of play, based on mobility and control of the ball. To reduce weight and aid passing, he lowered the shoe’s profile and softened the toes, replacing heavy materials with soft kangaroo leather. Interchangeable spikes replaced the built-up leather studs. To maintain spacing of the eyelets he used stiffer leather trim, stabilized with two and later three stripes across the instep. In 1954, these innovations combined to help the German team win the World Cup from the Hungarians, thanks to their ability to change from short to long studs after rain had drenched the field.19

  The classic age of the sneaker was the baby boom era of the 1950s. Life and dress became more informal after World War II, especially in the United States. Adult men and women wore hats less often, and sneakers gained favor with children over leather shoes. In fact, they were among the first products sold explicitly for youth appeal. School authorities dropped their initial resistance. When the New York State legislature abolished its public school dress code in 1957, other states followed. While total footwear sales remained flat at 600 million pairs per year, sales of sneakers grew from 35 million in the early 1950s to 150 million by 1962. Just as the Hat Council of America (now long defunct) unsuccessfully promoted the health benefits of headgear in the same era, the Leather Industries of America warned in magazine advertisements, press releases, and even cartoons of the dangers rubber-soled sneakers posed to growing feet. Although sneakers had been available with heel and arch supports since the 1930s, one advertisement in Parents’ magazine cautioned: “Madam, only leather shoes assure your child proper support, correct fit and protection.” So powerful was the campaign that even an overview of sneakers published in 1978 recalled mothers’ warnings of “flat feet, fat feet, swollen ankles, bulbous heels, ingrown toenails …” To the future newspaper columnist Richard Cohen, growing up amid this propaganda, something was not right. Sneaker-wearing children of low-income families were becoming formidable runners. By the 1960s, medical opinion had already begun to turn. Only 11 percent of doctors disapproved of sneakers, according to a study commissioned by one manufacturer—for Cohen, a warning against medical alarmism.20

  B. A. Spinney was one of a number of now-forgotten inventors experimenting with air-cushioned insoles early in the twentieth century. Leaks doomed early models. The idea had to wait for new gases and containment systems.

  THE TUBE AND THE SHOE

  Just as medical opinion was turning in favor of sneakers, a technological and social transformation was beginning. The boundary between the competitive athletic shoe and the sneaker, once sharply defined except in basketball and tennis, was starting to break down. And international markets, once strictly segmented by continent, were combining. The makers of leather shoes were losing not only children but adults to the diverse group of rub
ber companies and athletic suppliers.

  What changed the sneaker into the modern running shoe was a series of new techniques. The first was essential: jogging. It originated in New Zealand in the early 1960s as a public fitness movement that sent dozens of men, women, and children trotting through public parks. Bill Bower-man, a founder of Blue Ribbon Sports (later Nike) and a nationally famous track coach, was amazed at the speed and endurance even of elderly New Zealand runners. In 1963, he introduced jogging classes in Oregon; YMCAs across the country used his materials to promote their own programs. Running was starting to influence style: in August 1966, Footwear News noted that the film The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was helping sales of “track shoe fabric casuals.” In 1967 Bowerman coauthored the best-selling Jogging: A Fitness Program for All Ages. Track or marathon shoes were not really necessary, the authors said: “Probably the shoes you wear for gardening, working in the shop or around the house will do just fine.” But Bowerman’s consulting orthopedist concluded, after reviewing medical articles on an epidemic of foot and leg injuries among runners, that shoes were indeed the problem and that special shoes with more elevated heels were needed.21

  While Nike and its competitors made their reputations on the endorsements of many of the world’s greatest athletes, it was really the out-of-shape, casual runners who inadvertently triggered a technological revolution. The nineteenth century’s great pedestrians had contributed almost nothing, though their mix of running and walking was not so different from jogging. The shoe renaissance was a favorable unintended technological consequence of the worldwide spread of a technique. Seldom in the history of any apparel industry have so many new ideas emerged in only two decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Already in 1966 the U.S. branch of the Bata Shoe Organization (originally a Czech company, reestablished in Canada) introduced the two-color, injection-molded sole on its basketball model the Bullet. Thus began the decline of vulcanizing (processes derived from Goodyear’s original purification of rubber with heat and sulfur). From Europe came the “training shoe,” so called because it was designed not for any one sport like track or football but for conditioning programs to prepare for competing. From America emerged the heel wedge, developed for runners in 1962 by New Balance, a Boston orthopedic shoe company that applied other lessons from corrective footwear, widening the toe box and eliminating seams. Americans also were the great tread experimenters. New Balance introduced a ripple sole, and Nike’s first model featured a sole molded on the household waffle iron of Bill Bowerman, bringing a cleatlike surface to the rubber sole itself. (Bowerman intended it for tracks; road runners, not the inventor, first promoted it as a training shoe.) And Japan was an important early innovator. Sneakers were already beginning to supplant zori among children in 1955, although the influence of traditional footwear remained so strong that one marathon shoe of the same year actually had a tabilike divided toe box. The manufacturer, Tiger, introduced the now ubiquitous nylon uppers in the 1960s. It was also using arch supports and continuous midsole cushioning on different shoes; Nike, still under its original name of Blue Ribbon Sports, combined these innovations in a single shoe, originally made for the new company by Tiger.22

  The technology that did the most for athletic footwear starting in the late 1960s had nothing to do with shoemaking. It was television. Athletic shoe promotion had a long history, going back at least to A.G. Spalding’s out-fitting of the track and field events of the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, and his assistance to U.S. marathoners in the 1908 games in London. The basketball star Chuck Taylor joined Converse in the 1920s and added his signature to a line of sneakers, still a classic brand with 600 million pairs sold through the twentieth century. The favorite model of the 1932 Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue was the Dutch Lonborg Basketball Shoe, designed by a championship-winning Northwestern University coach and featuring a “non-heat insole” and sponge-rubber cushion heel. Still, most print accounts of sporting events did not mention the winners’ equipment, and even spectators might need coaching to recognize the Lonborg by its khaki-colored duck and double toe cap. Television meant that recognizably branded shoes, especially when worn by champions, could have instant national and global recognition. Even before the 1954 World Cup match, Adi Dassler had been producing his shoes with contrasting stripes because young customers were requesting them not by their brand name but as the shoes with this feature. The Adidas trefoil appeared during the broadcast of the German team’s World Cup breakthrough in 1954. The German baby boom generation was soon clamoring for them. In Britain, too, enthusiasm for Adidas was strong: the shoe consultant Phillip Nutt recalls that his father, who made traditional models, abandoned the soccer market and converted his factory to children’s shoes. The power of the visual endorsement was born.23

  Paradoxically, the greatest American media testimonial was made by athletes who removed their shoes. After finishing first and third in the 200-meter event in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos took off their shoes before climbing the medal stand, bowed their heads, and raised their fists in black gloves as a protest against racism. Appearing in their stockinged feet to symbolize black poverty, they inadvertently drew attention to their footwear, Suede model Pumas with a distinctive pattern of swirling and crossing strips, made by another branch of the Dassler family that had become Adidas’s fratricidal archrival. Some shoe industry veterans believe the incident was crucial in accelerating the black youth market, which in turn was shaping national popular culture. (The writer Stephen Talty has remarked that “black New York teenagers … are to sneakers what the Académie Française is to the French language.”) The European market followed a parallel course. Soccer enthusiasts in England began to wear Adidas Sambas and even crossed the Channel to find the latest sport shoe models. The 1972 Olympics was the high point of the Adidas strategy: more than three out of four athletes and all officials wore their shoes, including thirty-one of thirty-eight gold medalists in track. Since then, most athletic shoes have been designed with a trademark prominently displayed as an element of stitching. Visual marketing made team adoption and celebrity endorsement more important than ever.24

  The controversy surrounding payments to Olympic athletes and others has only occasionally touched on either the technology of shoes or the style of play. The technical innovations of the 1970s and 1980s were an explosion of creativity, of new styles and processes, sometimes cosmetic or faddish but often meticulously researched. The contemporary footwear industry developed few entirely new materials. A standard handbook published in 1987 notes that by 1959, all “basic polymers important to footwear manufacture” were already commercially available. Natural and synthetic rubber, modified by a number of agents for optimal durability, elasticity, and appearance, are still the favored materials for outsoles.25

  It is the upper of today’s athletic shoes that determines not only much of their look but also the international organization of their production. Today’s upper is an intricate weave of synthetics and often leathers, setting it off from the usually black or white canvas of the 1950s sneaker. The change amazed veteran workers in the industry. When Nike began U.S. production in a former sneaker plant in Saco, Maine, in 1978, the cutters they hired had been accustomed to producing just three pieces, a vamp (for the forefoot) and two quarters (for the sides and heel). Now there was a rainbow of nylon, vinyl, transparent mesh, and suede, each with different properties, that had to be cut precisely and stitched together to form a rugged unit. Performance, comfort, looks, cost, and visual marketing— not necessarily in that order—have determined the geometry of the upper. Combinations of parts can interact in unexpected ways. In 1979, the Nike Tailwind was acclaimed by runners for its new cushioning under the Air trademark, only to fall apart in the middle of races as bits of metal in the silver dye slit their way through the mesh.26

  Assembling the upper does not necessarily require as much labor as the complexity of the project sugges
ts. In the mid-1990s, reporters discovered that of the $70.00 retail price of a pair of Nike Air Pegasus shoes, production labor accounted for only $2.75, less than a third of the $9.00 needed for the materials. That does not mean that labor is unimportant. The difference in labor costs has slashed the number of athletic shoes produced in North America, and even those labeled “Made in U.S.A.” have components, sometimes including stitched uppers, from around the world. Asia is especially attractive because of its dense network of suppliers. The Nike Air Max Penny of the mid-1990s had fifty-two components from the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan. Using competing sources around the world can provide powerful leverage in pricing and quality control.27