Author: Bev

Arthur MacGregor

Bev1 Comment

Arthur MacGregor is one of the heroes of bone skates studies. He proved that bone skates really were skates in 1975 by making a couple of pairs and skating on them. The next year, he published a really great review article. His dissertation Skeletal Materials presented the bigger picture. And then his book Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn put bone skates in the general context of bone tools. After that, he did a lot of work with the York Archaeological trust, including on bone skates, resulting in contributions to various volumes of The Archaeology of York.

His work on bone skates was so amazing because he was able to connect archaeology and ethnology. In 1991, he wrote

The fact that archaeology and ethnology had useful things to say to each other became obvious from the beginning of my interest in animal bones. Having gathered references to archaeological works which “proved” scientifically that certain polished bones from the early medieval period were used in leather working, I was fortunate to discover a more extensive and persuasive ethnological literature which showed the same objects to be ice-skates, in regular use in certain communities up to the present century.

MacGregor 1991, 29

He went on to become curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and essentially found the field of museology. After a stint as the director of the Society of Antiquaries, he became president of the Society for the History of Natural History. That ended in 2018, and I suspect he retired. His more recent books include Curiosity and Enlightenment (2007), Animal Encounters (2012), and Company Curiosities (2019).

References

Arthur MacGregor. 1975. “Problems in the Interpretation of Microscopic Wear Patterns: The Evidence from Bone Skates.” Journal of Archaeological Science 2: 385–390.

Arthur MacGregor. 1976. “Bone Skates: A Review of the Evidence.” Archaeological Journal 133: 57–74.

Arthur MacGregor. 1980. “Skeletal Materials: Their Structure, Technology and Utilisation c. A.D. 400–1200.” PhD diss., Durham University.

Arthur MacGregor. 1985. Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials since the Roman Period. London: Croom Helm.

Arthur MacGregor. 1991. “Bone, Antler and Horn: An Archaeological Perspective.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 2: 29–38.

Leif Erikson in St. Paul

Bev

Last week I visited the statue of Leif Erikson in St. Paul, MN. Leif is known for discovering North America around 1000 CE. His exploits are described in Grœnlendinga saga (The Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiriks saga rauða (The Saga of Erik the Red).

The Leif Erikson statue in St. Paul.

I was interested in his hat. Look closely and you’ll see that it has wings. The wings reminded me of Hermes/Mercury’s winged helmet in Greco/Roman mythology. Mercury is known for having a winged helmet and/or shoes, which explains how he was able to travel so fast.

I’ve already written about the connection between skating and winged shoes. In a tenth-century manuscript of the Aeneid, Mercury’s winged shoes (talaria in Latin) are glossed by scritscos, the ancestor of the German word for ice skates (Gallée, 162). Variations on this term are also used to gloss the word petasus, which is a type of hat. Somehow it seems to have gotten mixed up with shoes, though, because Notker, a Benedictine monk whose writings represent the end of Old High German, wrote

Petasum héizent greci singulariter alatum calciamentum mercurii

(Petasum means, especially to the Greeks, the winged shoe of Mercury)

Piper 1882: I.701

Somehow Mercury’s winged clothing got mixed up with ice skates. That is how the Leif Erikson statue in St. Paul is connected to ice skating.

Update: Gordon Campbell has something to say about Leif’s hat:

In the second half of the nineteenth century, horned and winged helmets became the distinguishing feature of these Vikings of the imagination, all of whom were of course male. … The Norse wore helmets when conducting raids, but the helmets were smooth so that they could deflect a sword blow; a horned helmet would catch a sword blade, and allow the helmet (and the head) to be removed.

Campbell 2021, 26–27.

References

G. Campbell. 2021. Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

J. H. Gallée, ed. 1894. Old-Saxon Texts. Leiden: Brill.

P. Piper, ed. 1882. Die Schriften Notkers und seiner Schule. Freiburg: Mohr

Robert Jones’s skates

Bev

In his 1772 Treatise on Skating, Robert Jones describes what he considers the ideal skate in detail, including measurements:

Figure 1 (top) represents a skate, made after the English fashion, with some improvements; the proportions are as follows: Let the distance from the point of the fender, A, to the toe hook, which is shewn by the pricked line, be one inch, and three quarters; B, the fort of the iron, whose lower surface is five sixteenths of an inch in breadth, and gradually increases to five eighths of an inch, at the point of the fender; and from B, must gradually decrease to a bare quarter of an inch, at the heel D. C, the arch where the height of the iron is one inch three eighths; at B, one inch one eighth; and at D, one inch and a quarter: the groove that is cut in the stock, to receive the upper edge of the iron, is seldom made more than a quarter of an inch deep, so that the height of the iron from the stock will be at the arch one inch and one eighth, which is high enough for any sort of skating. E, the toe strap hole; F, the under strap hole; each of these holes must be cut so that the straps may go in very tight. G, the heel peg, whose diameter at bottom is a quarter of an inch, and at top one eighth; its height is determined by the heel of the shoe with which it is to be worn, but is seldom less than half an inch. H, the heel screw, which should always be made short.
Figure 1 (bottom) is a plan of a skate compleat, with straps, &c. M, the heel of the stock, whose diameter is two inches and three eighths. G, the waist, whose diameter is one inch one eighth. L, the tread, which is two inches and seven eighths in breadth. The thickness of the stock is three quarters of an inch; but the surface of the tread must be depressed a quarter of an inch, that the ball of the foot may rest easy.
I. I. I. are little sharp points of iron, each of which projects from the stock about one eighth of an inch; the distance from the centre of the under strap hole, to the extremity of the heel, is two inches and a half; and from the centre of the heel peg, A, to the extremity of the heel, one inch one eighth; K, the under strap; P, the heel strap, N. N. rings to which the straps are sewed; the length of the under strap from ring to ring is five inches and a half, and the heel strap seven inches; the length of the toe strap is determined by the size of the
foot, but it must always sit very tight in the stock.

N. B. These proportions are for a middle-sized foot.

Jones 2017 [1772], 34–37

He even includes a diagram:

Robert Jones’ ideal skates. Jones 2017 [1772], 36.

Jones’ detailed description doesn’t answer some rather burning questions, such as “how far toward the front did the skater’s shoe go?”. I also wonder what “improvements” he included and whether skates that incorporated them were ever actually made.

Henry Raeburn’s painting The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, painted in the 1790s, can help with some of this. Walker’s skates appear quite similar to the ones Jones recommends.

Robert Walker’s left skate (1790s). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It seems to have a clamp at the heel instead of a screw, and the rear lacing hole seems to be doubled and under the instep—a bit farther forward than Jones put it. It does show that the skater’s toes come all the way to the front of the wooden footbed and highlights one possible lacing pattern, which is shown from a different angle on the other foot.

Sybolt Woudenberg owns a pair of skates that are similar to these. In Kouwe Drukte, they’re compared with Robert Walker’s skates, but from the heel screw and position of the rear hole, they look a bit more like Jones’s. However, they do have an extra hole under the instep, like Walker’s skates. Maybe Jones forgot to include that? And the toes seem to curl up farther without flaring out like Jones’ do.

References

Robert Jones. 2017 (1772). A Treatise on Skating. Edited by B. A. Thurber. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.

Sybolt Woudenberg. 2013. “Paar van de dominee?” Kouwe Drukte 17 (49): 6.

1991: Skating Odyssey

Bev

In 1972, Irwin J. Polk published an article in Skating, the USFSA’s official magazine, predicting what skating competitions would be like in 1991. It describes a skater doing figures with lights affixed to her skates and an overhead camera recording every move. The figures are scored by a computer based on the video. Skaters with high enough scores get to do freestyle, which “is much the same as it was back in the 1970’s”—but the judges can use instant replays and watch in slow motion if they like.

Perhaps the greatest benefit is to the skaters. They take to the ice secure in the knowledge that the impartial computer is judging the figures and that, win, lose or draw they have the best judging that modern society and technology can provide.

Polk 1972, 59.

A note at the top of the article reports the use of such technologies in judging even before it was published. Still, Polk would have been surprised to see what actually happened. In 1991, the figures requirement was dropped entirely, and instant replays took somewhat longer to be incorporated into the judging system. I wonder what he would think of the new ISU judging system.

References

Irwin J. Polk. 1972. “1991: Skating Odyssey.” Skating, January 1972, 58–59.

Did snow skates work?

Bev

As far as I can tell, the answer is no.

The snow skates I’m thinking of have metal blades an inch wide or a bit more. They’re about as long as the skater’s foot and tie on to the shoes. A good example is the one I found in an antique shop. In that post, I wondered whether such skates actually work. So I made a pair and tried them out.

My snow skates.

I cut out the wooden pieces from a maple board using various power tools (table saw, band saw, belt sander, drill press, etc.) and glued them together. I made the runners by cutting sheet metal to shape and heating it in the forge to bend it. Getting the wood and metal to match up was extremely difficult. It’s hard to see here, but the blades have a radius of hollow of about an inch and a half.

Last winter, I took them out several times and tried to skate on snow. It didn’t work at all. When the snow was deep, they sunk through and got stuck. When it was not, they just got stuck. They did not slide at all well. In fact, the skates slid against the soles of my boots better than they slid across the snow. That’s probably why the one from the antique shop has a rubbery layer on the top.

The takeaway is that, in my experience, snow skates don’t work. But then, Sven Kjellberg and others have said that bone skates didn’t work, so maybe there’s more to it.

Did Swedish immigrants to the Midwest use bone skates?

Bev

Two facts are clear:

  1. People were still using bone skates in Sweden in the nineteenth century (see pp. 143–145 of my Skates Made of Bone).
  2. Many people immigrated from Sweden to the midwestern United States in the nineteenth century.

This combination of facts had led me to wonder whether Swedish immigrants to the Midwest used bone skates in their new homeland. Based on my research so far, the answer seems to be “no.” Every time I’ve visited an archive or asked at a museum or historical society, the response has been one of helpful bewilderment. While Swedish immigrants are well-known, bone skates are unheard of.

If it’s true that they didn’t use bone skates, the next question is, why not? This is a good opening for more research. A few possibilities have occurred to me:

  1. Bones were not readily available because the immigrants’ relationship to animals was different in the US. This could be related to farm vs. city life or poverty.
  2. The parts of the US where they settled weren’t well-suited to skating. They could have been too snowy (Minnesota does get a lot of snow) or lacked good places to skate. This is questionable because I have found references to immigrants using metal-bladed skates.
  3. Swedish immigrants tried to integrate themselves into American culture, which didn’t include bone skates.

The next step is to zoom in on the details to figure out what was happening on a smaller scale. I know of certain places in Sweden where people were still using bone skates—Småland and some of the other southern provinces, including the islands of Gotland and Öland. This is the blue area in the map. Further north, skiing was more popular because there was much more snow.

File:Sverigekarta-Landskap Text.svg
Provinces of Sweden. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

If I can figure out where exactly in the US people from those places tended to live, I’ll have good candidates for further investigation.

The Paulsen brothers

Bev

Axel Paulsen made history in 1882, when he performed the jump that bears his name at a competition in Vienna. What’s less well known is that his brother was also there. In fact, they skated together. Demeter Diamantidi wrote a nice article previewing the competitors for the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung. It was published the day before the competition began. Here’s what it had to say about them (translation my own).

The brothers Axel and Edwin Paulsen from Oslo, artistic skaters and most outstanding members of the ice club in Oslo, which has over 8000 members, are very interesting phenomena and attracted general attention in the morning hours with their truly classic joint program, in which it is often virtually impossible to separate them from each other due to the rapidity of the movements and the identical performances.

What was this “gemeinsame Production” (joint program)? It sounds like a pairs program! I’ve run across mentions of women skating pairs together, but two men skating together is unusual. The Syerses note that the ISU regulations allow pairs to be mixed or similar.

In the solo, Axel Paulsen portrayed himself by a positively phenomenal jump with a double twist on a backwards edge the like of which has never been seen before and a sensational sit spin with deep knee bend.

The achievements of these men in compulsory figures cannot be judged at this time, because they are very reserved in this respect. At a glance, one sees that the Haynes school is not without influence on their evolutions, although they do not seem to have copied every advantage that accompanied each of his movements and in which he is unmatched to this day.

I think this means they didn’t do the compulsory figures. They’re not mentioned in the section on figures in the follow-up article with the results.

D. Diamantidi, “Das grosse internationale Eisfest in Wien,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 19, 1882, 48–49.

In the big international flat race six times around the track = an English mile = 1600 meters, Axel will give Mr. Aune much to do, because although he is much smaller, he has developed fabulous speed and endurance. He wished the track was longer.

Our ice master, Hussek, described him in his original way as a “young locomotive”; overall, the Paulsen brothers have stolen the hearts of the entire staff at the Vienna Skating Club.

Axel did win the big speed race. Edwin challenged Callie Curtis in a race for professionals.

References

Demeter Diamantidi. “Das grosse internationale Eisfest in Wien.” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 19, 1882, 48–49.

Demeter Diamantidi. “Internationales Preis-Figuren Eislauffn [sic]: Wien gewinnt!” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 26, 1882, 69–70.

“Das internationale Preis-Wett-Eislaufen.” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, January 26, 1882, 70–71.

Edgar Syers and Madge Syers, eds. 1908. The Book of Winter Sports. London: Edward Arnold.

Kemp’s bicycle skates

Bev

On January 1, 1876, the Sporting Gazette ran a notice about a new type of skate invented by one Mr. Kemp. These skates, which he called “bicycle skates,” featured a large front wheel and a small rear wheel. They seem to have been intended for skating on roads normally traversed by bicycles.

“The Bicycle Skate,” Sporting Gazette, January 1, 1876, 6. Image copyright the British Library Board, courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.

The promised time trials don’t seem to have been successful—at least, the results were not widely advertised. I managed to find one oblique mention in the Sporting Gazette:

…the skating race on the rink did not bring out the talent, or, perhaps I should say, the pace that was expected; for Rücker, the winner, though he did his best and was far the best of the lot, was the wrong side of a minute for a quarter of a mile. The style of all was wretchedly ugly, and I think it is safe to predicate that, until some modification of the bicycle skate is invented, no good time will be made or graceful fast skating shown on the rink.

“Athletic Notes,” Sporting Gazette, July 22, 1876, 723.

These skates never took off as touring skates; instead, Mr. Kemp and a couple of friends—Miss Lilly and Mr. Fletcher—spent the next couple of years traveling around Europe performing on them as the “Chinese bicycle skaters,” sometimes prefixed with “flying.”

Liverpool Daily Post, May 27, 1876, 1. Image copyright the British Library Board, courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.

The name of the group caused some confusion, as there seems to have been no actual link to China, except perhaps in the skaters’ costumes.

We do not know whether the “Chinese” applies to the bicycle skates, which are the great feature of the performance, or to the mode in which the skaters use them, but the term does not seem intended to apply to the nationality of the artistes themselves.

“The Skating Rink at Valley-Parade,” Leeds Times, September 23, 1876, 3.

Despite their confusing name, the skaters were admired by many—and compared directly to roller skaters.

They appear to have complete control over the machines, some of the figures they describe even surpassing in elegance the most adroit manœuvres on ordinary rollers.

“Bicycle Skating at the Reservoir Rink,” Birmingham Daily Gazette, June 6, 1877, 5.

However, not everyone was in awe of their performance, and the bicycle skates were found lacking when direct comparisons to roller skates were made.

The evolutions performed resemble very much those capable of being accomplished by the skater on the ordinary roller skates, except that they are by no means so varied, so graceful, or so telling; but, at the same time, apparently much more difficult to accomplish.

“A Novelty at the Alexandra Skating Rink,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, May 26, 1876, 5.

It’s understandable why such skates wouldn’t be very popular. Why not just buy regular roller skates? Plimpton skates had been invented not long before and worked great. As a marketing ploy, these exhibitions weren’t the best idea because instead of highlighting the bicycle skate’s original niche, road skating, which roller skates weren’t very good for, they brought bicycle skates into direct competition with roller skates at indoor rinks, where they were sure to lose. The decision to make fun of beginning skaters as part of the performance probably contributed to the marketing disaster.

Much amusement is also afforded in one part of the performance by the illustration of a novice’s attempts to learn rinking, which it is needless to say as much cleverness is displayed.

“The Chinese Bicycle Skaters at the Pavilion Skating Rink,” Cheshire Observer, October 7, 1876, 6.

After the tour, Kemp returned to England and focused on developing a new method for fishing. He lost a lot of money on it and other projects, and on September 26, 1904, the London Daily News published an article with the headline “Inventor in Poverty: Applies for Poor-Law Relief.”

References

“The Bicycle Skate,” Sporting Gazette, January 1, 1876, 6.

“A Novelty at the Alexandra Skating Rink,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, May 26, 1876, 5.

“Athletic Notes,” Sporting Gazette, July 22, 1876, 723.

Leeds Times, September 23, 1876, 3.

“The Chinese Bicycle Skaters at the Pavilion Skating Rink,” Cheshire Observer, October 7, 1876, 6.

“Bicycle Skating at the Reservoir Rink,” Birmingham Daily Gazette, June 6, 1877, 5.

“Inventor in Poverty: Applies for Poor-Law Relief.” London Daily News, September 26, 1904, 3.

Women in the European Championships

Bev
Frank Gillett, The Graphic, March 7, 1908, 325. Image copyright the British Library Board, courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.

Dorothy Greenhough-Smith’s Wikipedia page notes that “[s]he never competed at the European Figure Skating Championship because the ladies event was not added to the program until 1930.” That’s true as far as it goes—Hines’s list of competitors in Figure Skating in the Formative Years does indeed show the ladies’ event starting in 1930—but is its absence really an excuse?

In 1904, Madge Syers entered the European Championship. The Field reported that

On the whole Mrs Syers executed most of the school figures admirably, her turns being clean, her edges good, and the tracing excellent, most noticeable being her execution of the three change three, but she found considerable difficulty with the bracket change bracket and loop change loop.

The Field, January 23, 1904, 131

But when it came time for the freestyle, Syers withdrew from the competition.

The weather on the second day of the competition did not prove very favorable, snow was falling slightly, and there was a fairly stiff breeze, both of which interfered materially with the skating of the free figures. Mrs Syers wisely decided not to skate her programme, the wind, of course, being a much greater handicap to her than to the other competitors.

The Field, January 23, 1904, 131

Despite her withdrawal, Syers’ participation showed experimentally that women were allowed to compete in the European Championship.

In the days leading up the the 1908 Olympics, the Westminster Gazette published a somewhat startling opinion regarding co-ed competition:

Messrs. Greig, March, and Yglesias, who will skate on behalf of the United Kingdom, have enjoyed none of the experience of their more favoured rivals, and their chances of success are not considered very bright. Indeed, there is one British lady, Mrs. Syers, who is their superior, and, in fact, the superior of any British figure-skater. Had the practice adopted in the World’s European and British Championships, of opening the lists to both sexes, been followed in the Olympic competition, Mrs. Syers would undoubtedly have been selected for the first event. As it is, she ought to have no great difficulty in winning the ladies’ gold medal.

Westminster Gazette, October 17, 1908, 16; emphasis added

It sounds to me as if women weren’t barred from the European Championships before 1930. Dorothy Greenhough-Smith can’t use the lack of a ladies’ event as an excuse.

Baseball before We Knew It

Bev
Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the ...
Baseball before We Knew It by David Block, 2005.

I just read David Block’s Baseball before We Knew It. As might be inferred from its title, this book is not about skating. It’s still great. I found a lot of parallels to my work on skating history in it. It covers some of the same ground that histories of skating cover, namely, various nineteenth-century and earlier works on sports and games.

Among these is Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, first published in 1801. Block accuses Strutt of “taking some serious liberties with his scholarship”—specifically, fabricating evidence for club-ball, an early ball-and-stick game, by changing a jug to a ball in his copy of a picture from a medieval manuscript (Block 2005, 104–107). This is cause to look on the rest of his work (including his short passage on skating!) with more than usual suspicion.

Block also talks about the excitement of finding rules for a game called “das englische Base-ball” (English baseball) in a German book from 1796. That book was Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths’ Spiele zur Übung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes: für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde unschuldiger Jugendfreuden (Games for the Exercise and Recreation of Body and Spirit: For Young People, Their Teachers, and All Friends of the Innocent Joys of Youth). Gutsmuths is also an early but often-neglected source of information on skating. This particular book includes a few pages (starting with 217, or 239 of the linked pdf) on different games played on ice. Maybe I’ll write about them another time.

References

David Block. 2005. Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Joseph Strutt. 1801. Glig-gamena angel-deod, or, the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions, and Pompous Spectacles, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London: T. Bensley. The second (1810) edition is available in HathiTrust.

Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuts. 1796. Spiele zur Übung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes: für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde unschuldiger Jugendfreuden. Schnepfenthal.