We’re in National Roller Skating Month, and we’re going all the way back to the guy who created the first skates.
And how it’s maybe reassuring that even he had trouble rolling along like the rest of us.
He was John Joseph Merlin, a Belgian who invented a little bit of everything, from musical instruments to clocks to weighing machines, even a revolving tea table…
He put out so many inventions that he opened up his own place to exhibit them, the Museum of Mechanics in London.
In the mid 1760s, he put a set of metal wheels in a row on two shoes, and demonstrated his proto-inline skates at his museum.
The problem came in with what he hadn’t invented: brakes.
The story goes that he was at a salon with other prominent people when he decided to skate through the room while playing a violin, at which point he “impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces and wounded himself most severely.”
Oops.
It got better, though.
In 1819, an inventor in Paris, Charles-Louis Petitbled filed a patent for what he called “land skates,” trying to mimic what ice skaters could do.
And in the 1860s, James Leonard Plimpton of Massachusetts built a series of skates with wheels in a sort of square layout, making skating a little more stable.
Plimpton also turned a hotel dining room in Newport, Rhode Island into a roller rink, turning skating into a social activity.
That’s how skating first got popular, and over time it led to people developing new sports like roller hockey, roller derby, speed skating.
And, most importantly, the apex of skating: roller disco.
Starting tomorrow in Massachusetts, it’s SandwichFest.
This is in the community of Sandwich, and it has arts and crafts, family activities, a car show and a dog parade.
There’s also PorchFest, where you can stroll from house to house for a wide range of live music.
Not sure if that includes any roller disco. Hopefully.
The History of Roller Skating (HowStuffWorks)
