Adventures in skating historiography
Cross-grinding refers to sharpening skates with a grinding stone whose axis of rotation is parallel to the skate blade. This means that if you hold the skate sideways (blade parallel to the floor), the grinding wheel rotates down. This is how the ordinary bench grinders from the hardware store are set up. A bench grinder.… Continue reading Why cross-grinding is (not always) bad
I think I just found the first reference to forward crossovers in the skating literature. In 1788, Gerhard Ulrich Anton Vieth gave a lecture to a group of (what he called) friends. That lecture was published in Neue Litteratur und Völkerkunde and, in 1790, reprinted as a book with the title Über das Schrittschuhlaufen. It's… Continue reading The first crossover
I saw this skate in a cabinet at the National Museum of Roller Skating: Plimpton's "improved parlor skate" at the National Museum of Roller Skating. The tag on it says: The improved James L. Plimpton parlor skate introduced in 1866 combines rollers and an ice blade. The silver brass swans attached at the front show… Continue reading James Plimpton’s swan skates
James Hines, author of the great big skating history book, has come out with another book. This one is billed as focusing on figures and has been made much of by US Figure Skating: Sarah Brannen reviewed it on the USFSA site and the August 2022 issue of Skating mentioned it. It's a self-published limited… Continue reading End of the Compulsories
On July 14 and 15, I visited the roller skating museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. It is a relatively small museum housed at the headquarters of USA Roller Sports, but it is packed of amazing stuff. There are many miscellaneous old skates in display cases without labels) on the entryway. Signs lead through the Hall of… Continue reading National Museum of Roller Skating
A caricature of Jones? Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Today marks the 250th anniversary of Robert Jones's conviction. On this blog, Jones is best known for his Treatise on Skating—the oldest known book about ice skating—and his skates, which I tried to reproduce. Jones is also known for child molestation. Today day in 1772, he was… Continue reading 250 years of Robert Jones
Today's book report is on Schaatsen en schaatsenmakers in de 19e en 20e eeuw [Skates and skatemakers in the 19th and 20th centuries] by A. C. Broere. I have the 1988 edition (dark blue cover); there's also a version with a white cover. I don't know what the difference is. It's only 80 pages long… Continue reading Skates and skatemakers in the 19th and 20th centuries
Zwerven op de schaats door Holland This post continues the backlog of skating books books I have to write about. This one is in Dutch, and the title means "roaming on skates through Holland." It's a small book—only 96 pages and about 5"x7"—published by Van Gorgum in 1942. The book includes short chapters on the… Continue reading Zwerven op de schaats door Holland
This book was published in 1966 by the US Figure Skating Association, but exists outside of the Rulebook and test structure. It, according to the foreward [sic], exists to help further interest, proficiency and enjoyment to the skaters who like this phase of our sport.Ice Dances, p. 3 The book can be divided into three… Continue reading Ice Dances, Figures and Exercises
The idea of designing your own figure is something that goes way back in figure skating. Late nineteenth-century competitions in the International style invited skaters to create their own patterns on the ice, called special figures. Many of these were published in books like Holletscheck's Kunstfertigkeit im Eislaufen. Some were actually what we'd call freestyle… Continue reading Creative figures and the USFS Adult Gold Figure test