Author: Bev

An experiment no student ever did

Bev1 Comment
The title page of Newton’s Opticks. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I used to teach at Shimer College, and one of the courses I taught frequently was Natural Sciences 3: The Nature of Light. As part of the final exam, I asked the students to select one of the Queries from Isaac Newton’s* Opticks and design an experiment to answer it. Extra credit was available for actually doing the experiment. One of the more popular choices was Query 6,

Do not black Bodies conceive heat more easily from Light than those of other Colours do, by reason that the Light falling on them is not reflected outwards, but enters the Bodies, and is often reflected and refracted within them, until it be stifled and lost?

Newton 1952, pp. 339-340

This is illustrated by leaves on an outdoor ice rink.

Here’s a leaf frozen onto the surface of my backyard rink. It’s not black, but it’s dark enough to illustrate the principle.

It’s a sunny day with a temperature right around freezing. I can skate on the ice just fine, but look what’s under the leaf:

It’s a little pool of water in a hole shaped just like the leaf! Clearly the leaf is causing the ice to melt. The sun’s rays must have heated it up, just like Newton said. What’s left to do is figure out what’s going on inside the leaf that makes it heat up. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Meanwhile, here’s a montage showing how the ice melts around a darker leaf over a few warm, sunny days.

As the ice melts, a puddle forms on top of the leaf.

This explains why it’s a bad idea to use black plastic sheeting or paint hockey lines on your backyard ice rink: they’ll make the ice melt! Of course, if it’s cold enough, the ice will be fine.

*Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. Happy Birthday!

References

Isaac Newton. 1952 [1704]. Opticks. New York: Dover Publications.

Henry Eugene Vandervell

Bev1 Comment

Henry Eugene Vandervell (1824-1908) is well-known in skating circles as the “father of English style skating.” He’s remembered for inventing the counter, writing (with T. Maxwell Witham) A System of Figure Skating, and chairing the Ice Figure Committee of the National Skating Association (Hines, 233). But the skating books say little about his personal life. I spent some time going through the records on familysearch.org to see what I could piece together.

Henry was born in 1824 to Francis Vandervell. In 1854, he married Rebecca Batt, who was the same age as him. They don’t seem to have had any children, and she died in 1867.

Henry then became an attractive prospect. A wealthy widower who worked as a stockbroker and lived in a fancy townhouse, he simply had to get married, as Jane Austen noted (Austen 2008). His townhouse, 28 Aldridge Road Villas, is currently worth about 4.5 million pounds, according to zoopla.co.uk.

Just two years after Rebecca’s death, Vandervell married Fanny Thornton, who was 26 years younger than him. In the next decade, they had at least five children: Henry Eugene (aka Harry), Charles Anthony, Percy, Ethel, and Maud. Charles Anthony went on to do important work on the electrical systems in cars, and Ethel worked for the Red Cross during World War I.

Henry died in 1908, and Fanny lived until 1925. The burning question that remains is, did Fanny skate? Given Henry’s involvement in the sport, I’d be surprised if she didn’t. And his (and T. Maxwell Witham’s) remarks on ladies skating in the first edition of A System of Figure Skating—published the year he married her—suggest that if she didn’t already skate, he would have encouraged her:

We can scarcely imagine a more delightful, exhilarating, and health-giving exercise for ladies in winter-time than skating… We rejoice to think that within the last few years the girls of England have been taking to skating in considerable numbers.

Vandervell and Witham (1869, p. 230-231)

References

Jane Austen. 2008. Pride and Prejudice. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg.

James R. Hines. 2003. “Henry Eugene Vandervell (1824-1908)” in Historical Dictionary of Figure Skating, p. 233. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow.

H. E. Vandervell and T. Maxwell Witham. 1869. A System of Figure Skating. London: Macmillan and Co.

Loop skates

Bev1 Comment

Back when all competitive skaters did both figures and freestyle, everyone who had reached a certain level had two pairs of skates, “patch skates” for figures and freestyle skates. The main difference was that freestyle skates have a larger toe pick and are sharpened to a smaller radius of hollow. Patch skates were often old, worn-out freestyle skates with the toe picks removed and blades sharpened to produce a much flatter hollow.

Dick Button, winner of the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, had a third pair. These skates were optimized for loops, figures based on circles with a diameter approximately equal to the skater’s height. Other circles were three times as large. Here’s what Dick had to say about using special skates for loops:

Dick Button skates a forward change loop.

These figures are so much smaller than the larger, conventional eights that a different radius along the length of the blade enables one to sink lower into knee action going into the figure without digging sharply into the ice. I cut the bottom toe pick of these skates even further than those for other figures since there is no need for a toe in any loop while they can be very much in the way.

Button (1955, p. 185-186)

Dick’s decision to use blades with a smaller rocker radius—meaning more curvature from end to end—is consistent with results obtained by Henry Vandervell in the previous century:

I have had very considerable experience of the effects of radii, viz., from 20 feet to 2 feet. The extreme I fix for combined skating is 9 feet, and for single figures of the epicycloid variety, such as loops, crosscuts, etc., is 3 feet. If, now, you average the two kinds you get to 6 feet for all-round purposes.

Vandervell (1901, p. 24)

Today’s figure skating blades have rocker radii of seven or eight feet, rather more than you want for loops. No blades with smaller rocker radii are currently on the market.

References

Dick Button (1955). Dick Button on Skates. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

H. E. Vandervell (1901). The Figure Skate: A Research into the Form of Blade Best Adapted to Curvilinear Skating. London: Straker Brothers.

Reconstructing the Amsterdam skate, part 3

Bev1 Comment
The skates work!

The skates work!

I finished putting the wood and metal parts together by scoring the end of the blade with a band saw, putting the skate in a vice, and hammering away. The wood part cracked a bit, but some glue fixed it well enough. Next time, harder wood and a thicker footbed are called for. The archaeological specimens are made from poplar and alder, which are both somewhat harder than the pine I used.

Once they were done, I tried them out on the ice. For boots, I used an old pair of Harlicks (not historically accurate, but quite practical). I tied them on with hockey skate laces.

The first skaters to use metal-bladed skates would have been familiar with bone skates and pole-pushing, not the foot-pushing technique used with modern skates, so pole-pushing seemed like a good way to begin. Pole-pushing works just fine.

Foot-pushing doesn’t really work. The skates feel like they don’t have edges—they don’t bite the ice when I try to push like modern skates do. The bottom of the metal runner is pretty flat, which I think is probably historically accurate.

These skates have more friction than bone skates, but also corner much, much better and feel more stable to stand still on. They’re less likely to slide out from under me when I’m not trying to slide anywhere.

Reconstructing the Amsterdam skate, part 2

Bev

This is a follow-up to my post on the Amsterdam skate, a skate dating to c. 1225 that was found in Amsterdam. In that post, I wrote about making the metal part. The skate also has a wood part, which this post is about.

Unfortunately, the wood part didn’t really survive its centuries in the ground, as you can see in this picture. I used the pictures of the Dordrecht skate to get a better idea of how it might have looked. And I tried to make it simple but structurally sound.

I ended up with a two-part design: a flat area for the foot and a block of wood to hold the blade. For wood, I used the leftover bits of a two-by-four. Pine lumber is not historically accurate (the skates were actually made from poplar and alder (Blauw 2001, p. 57)), but is easy to work with.

I used a band saw to cut out the footbed, which was inspired by my Buddy Snow Skate and the shape of my foot. The bottom piece, which held the blade, is a block from the remaining part of the two-by-four with a 3/8″-wide groove routed into the bottom for the blade to fit into and a bit of shaping done with hand tools. The holes for laces are just shallow cuts made with the table saw.

Reconstructed Amsterdam skates: wooden footbed and metal blade.

I glued the two pieces together with standard wood glue. To avoid water damage, I finished the skates with a modern lacquer.

Next, I have to grind the blade so it’s nice and shiny (and sharp!) and put the metal and wood parts together permanently. Then I can try them out on the ice.

Reference

Wiebe Blauw. 2001. Van Glis tot Klapschaats. Franeker: van Wijnen.

White boots

Bev

It’s often said that Sonja Henie was the first to wear white boots for figure skating. She may have been responsible for setting the trend because of her popularity, but she wasn’t the first to do it.

Julian Fitzgerald’s Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating—published in 1916, when Henie was just four years old—includes many pictures of skaters. Some of them are wearing white boots. Among the women are Ray Collins (p. 74), Isabel Butler (p. 75), June Rodger (p. 77), the El Ray sisters (p. 81), Grace Allen (p. 84), Adelaide D’Vorak (“America’s foremost skater,” p. 184), and five women of Baptie & Lamb, Co., who surround a man in black skates (p. 66).

Today, white boots are the norm for women, but men are rarely seen in them. That appears not to have been the case in Fitzgerald’s day. Judging from his pictures, it was not unusual for male and female skating partners to wear matching skates, whether white or black. Cathleen Pope & George Kirner (p. 63), Grace Helaine & Edward Bassett (p. 68), Ellen & Orrin Markhus (p. 70). Helen Carlos & Howard Fielding (roller skaters, p. 131), and the Rexos (roller skaters, p. 132) are all shown in matching white skates.

Edward W. Bassett & Miss Grace Helaine in matching white figure skates. From Julian T. Fitzgerald, Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating (1916), p. 68.

Men without partners are also shown in white figure skates: Roy H. Fink (p. 69) and W. T. Carey (p. 87). Here’s Roy Fink in his white skates.

Skaters seem to have picked their skate colors as part of their costumes. The skaters in white skates are generally shown in light-colored costumes. It’s hard to say whether they were wearing all white because the pictures are not in color. But there’s another reason for white skates, one that goes back even further. In 1897, Caroline Creyke noted that

Women who are at all awkward in their movements should be careful not to wear white gloves, or white lace ruffles at the end of long dark sleeves, as every gesture is accentuated by the spots of white waving against the dark background of people. White boots, on the contrary, make the feet look smaller than black ones, as their outline is lost on the white of the surface ice.

Caroline Creyke, Skating on Artificial Ice. The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 41 (1897), p. 483.

There you have it. Sonja Henie couldn’t have come up with the idea of wearing white skates because it was around fifteen years before she was born.

References

Caroline Creyke, 1897. Skating on Artificial Ice. The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 41: 474–486.

Julian T. Fitzgerald, 1916. Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating. Chicago: Julian T. Fitzgerald.

Buddy Snow Skates

Bev2 Comments
A very interesting ice skate I found at an antique shop.

Last month, I found a very interesting old ice skate at an antique shop. The label is partly worn off, but was sufficient for me to identify it as a Buddy Snow Skate from Falcon, NY.

In my quest to learn more about this skate, I found its patent. This type of skate was invented in the early 1920s by John C. Miller and Robert H. Fayfield of Buffalo, NY. Their goal was to produce cheap, easy to make skates that worked well on snow. In the patent, they stress that the runner—a piece of sheet metal riveted to the bottom of the wood part—must be concave “to prevent side slipping of the skates when in use” and wide enough “to effect a firm contact with relatively soft snowy surfaces.” The runner on my skate is about 2.2 cm wide.

These skates were meant to be used by children on snowy ground. The footbed on mine is about 22.3 cm long, which is definitely child-sized. I wonder how well these skates actually worked. Today’s snow skates seem to work reasonably well.

The only depiction of this type of skate in a book that I’ve found so far is in Jean-Marie LeDuc’s Lace Up. LeDuc dates it to c. 1880 (p. 33), which seems pretty unlikely since it wasn’t patented until 1926.

References

Jean-Marie LeDuc, Sean Graham, and Julie Léger (2017). Lace up: A history of skates in Canada. Toronto: Heritage House.

John C. Miller and Robert H. Fayfield. Snow skate. US Patent 1,569,520, filed May 16, 1924, and issued January 12, 1926.

Gösta Berg

Bev
Gösta Berg in 1945. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Gösta Berg (1903–1993) was a Swedish ethnologist who worked on skating, skiing, and other winter activities. His writings include three papers on bone skates, written in three different languages over a period of nearly thirty years:

  • “Isläggar och skridskor” (Bone skates and metal-bladed skates), published in Swedish in 1943.
  • “Skier und Schlittschuhe: Zwei nordische Fortbewegunsmittel” (Skis and skates: Two nordic modes of travel), published in German in 1952.
  • “Skates and punt sleds: Some Scandinavian notes,” published in English in 1971.

Reading these three papers in order provides a view into how Berg’s ideas about bone skates evolved over time. Climate takes on progressively more significance in his work. The first paper mentions climate considerations briefly, the second expands on them, and the third begins with a discussion of climate and nails down the details. Berg (1971, p. 4) describes the necessary climate as one with cold winters, but little snow. This explains why bone skates finds are common in southern Sweden, but not in the north, where there is much more snow.

Berg’s papers are great resources on the use of bone skates in Sweden, but he did make two mistakes, which have propagated through the history of bone skates research:

  • Only children and beginners had to tie their skates on (Berg 1943, p. 82). This statement was refuted by Edberg & Karlsson (2016, p. 15), who noted that the smaller skates found at Birka and Sigtuna—the ones suitable for young children—had no attachment mechanism and were much less elaborately worked than the larger ones.
  • The races on bone skates described by Olaus Magnus were 5–8 km long (Berg 1943, p. 84). This seems to be the result of a mathematical error converting Olaus’s 8–12 Italian miles to kilometers. A more correct figure is the 12–18 km given by Fisher & Higgens (1996, p. 86). For more details, see my blog post.

Despite these mistakes, he made substantial contributions to the study of bone skates. He also did important work on other winter activities; skiing, skating on metal-bladed skates, and sledding are covered in these papers. And he wrote more extensively on skis elsewhere (see, e.g., Berg 1950). His page on the Swedish version of Wikipedia summarizes his broader accomplishments and memberships.

References

Gösta Berg, 1943. Isläggar och skridskor. Fataburen 1943:79-90.

Gösta Berg, 1950. Finds of skis from prehistoric time in Swedish bogs and marshes. Stockholm: Generalstabens litografiska anstalts förlag.

Gösta Berg, 1952. Skier und Schlittschuhe: Zwei nordische Fortbewegungsmittel. Tribus: Jahrbuch des Linden-Museums Stuttgart 2:188-195

Gösta Berg, 1971. Skates and punt sleds: Some Scandinavian notes. In Vriendenboek voor A. J. Bernet Kempers. Arnheim: Meertens en Plettenburg. Pp. 4-13.

R. Edberg & J. Karlsson. 2016. Bone skates and young people in Birka and Sigtuna. Fornvännen 111:7–16.

Olaus Magnus. 1996. Description of the Northern Peoples. Ed. P. G. Foote, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens. London: Hakluyt Society.

Creative figures

Bev1 Comment

Creative figures are getting popular because they’re in the World Figure Championship. These patterns of tracings designed by skaters are nothing new.

Back in the day, creativity in figures was expected. Special figures have a prominent (though brief) place in every book on figure skating history. Each one has a creative skater behind it. Books like Spuren auf dem Eise expect skaters to learn the building blocks and use them to make new figures.

Special figures disappeared, but creative figures have reappeared a few times. In an opinion piece in Skating, the official magazine of US Figure Skating, Per Cock-Clausen proposed adding them to competitions—in 1965!

From the present four groups prescribed by the ISU from which one is drawn for International Championships, the first figure should be eliminated. Each skater should then compose a creative figure containing certain prescribed elements such as rockers, brackets or others. The figure should be developed in such a manner that it can be performed in a graceful style. (Not as the old Starfigures.) The figures should be executed only once. Form A as well as Form B should be skated (right and left feet).

Per Cock-Clausen (1965)

Cock-Clausen’s suggestion wasn’t taken up by the USFSA, but a couple of USFSA competitions offered them around when figures were dropped. Searching for “creative figure” in the online archive of Skating brings up the following events:

  • “July 14-16: Vail Invitational Figure Skating Championships, sponsored by the SC of Vail and Rocky Mountain FSC, at the Dobson Arena, Vail, CO. Creative Figures, Juvenile thru Senior Final Round Freestyle, Pre-Preliminary thru Pre-Juvenile Free Skating, Preliminary thru Intermediate Compulsory Moves, Intermediate thru Senior Original Program, Pairs (all levels), and Precision Teams events. For in information contact: Debbie Wordekemper, 303-252-8528, or Debby Warner, 303-949-5315.” (Skating, July 1989)
  • “July 10-12: 1992 Troy Summer Skate, sponsored by the Troy SC, at the Hobart Arena, Troy, OH. Figures, Compulsory, Free Skating, Dance, Solo Dance, Pairs, Showcase, Similar Pairs, New Era, and Creative Figures events. Badge through Senior Levels. For more information contact: Dianne Hartmann, 1815 Shaggy Bark Rd., Troy, OH 45373, 513-335-5267.” (Skating, July 1992)

The first occurred in 1989, the second in 1992. Creative figures didn’t catch on in the USFSA. It’s an interesting coincidence that the first of these two competitions was in Vail, at the rink where the World Figure Championship has been held for the last three years.

A creative figure has also been an option on the USFS Adult Gold figure test since its inception in about 1990 (as inferred from searching through Skating and my 1987/88 and 1992/93 Rulebooks). Skaters can choose to do a creative figure (after giving a sketch to the judges) or any other figure from the test structure. And the ISI has been offering creative figure events in competitions for years.

References

Per Cock-Clausen, 1965. “In my opinion 60/40.” Skating December 1965.

The 1992-93 Official USFSA Rulebook and The 1987-88 Official USFSA Rulebook. Colorado Springs: United States Figure Skating Association.

“Calendar of Events”. Skating July 1989 and 1992.

Spuren auf dem Eise

Bev2 Comments

This is one of the great books of figure skating. The full title is Spuren auf dem Eise: Die Entwicklung des Eislaufes auf der Bahn des Wiener Eislauf-Vereins [Tracings on the Ice: The Development of Ice Skating on the Rink of the Vienna Skating Club], and the authors are Demeter Diamantidi, Carl von Korper, and Max Wirth. It’s in German and, as far as I know, has not been translated into English.

Spuren went through two editions in the nineteenth century: a first edition published in 1881 and a second edition published in 1892. Both cover roughly the same topics in the same number of pages (about 350), but the second edition has more material, and a larger format to accommodate it.

This book, especially the second edition, is great for people studying special figures. About two-thirds of it consists of a catalog of figures, including some that would now be called freestyle, like one-foot spins on all four edges (p. 295–297 in the second edition).

The second edition originally included a booklet of figure diagrams that’s now very hard to find. Most copies have lost their booklets over the years, and a copy with both parts demands a much higher price on the used market than a copy that’s missing the booklet. Without the booklet, the book is much less useful, as the vast majority of figure diagrams—essential for anyone trying to skate the figures—are in the booklet.

Fortunately the University of Connecticut has been kind enough to scan its copy, including the booklet, and put it online. You can find it here.