Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Running Through Sneaker History About this episode The evolution from leather-soled shoes of the 19th century to the sneakers people wear today started slowly, then built momentum. Many of the big names in sneakers today got their start surprisingly early in the process.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:04 Speaker 01 Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new Chicken Nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces and they created a brand new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants, don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.
0:33 Holly Frey? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare.
1:16 Holly Frey? Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos, we've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.
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2:14 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:24 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I love shoes. I know you do. You love them so much. You have more shoes than anyone I know. Really? Yeah. I mean, as far as I know. I probably have more shoes than anyone else I know, too. I have a lot of shoes and I keep forgetting where I have shoes. I'm just gonna confess a thing. Okay, I converted our entire guest room into what we call Shoe Palace. Uh huh. It's where all the shoes live. Brian put up a very nice shelving system in there. I can go visit my shoes. I go sit in there. I have my shoes, but then I forget that there are other places I've stashed shoes and then I find them and go, oh, I forgot about this closet full of shoes.
3:10 Holly Frey? It's an exciting time. Uh, anyway, so normally I tell people if they stay in our guest room, they have to sign a friend DA where they won't disclose how many shoes they've seen and what a mess it is. And they're always very lovely about it, but I just, I love shoes. And I really love sneakers. Um, I could talk on Friday about sneaker head culture, which I do not count myself part of, and I'll explain why on Friday. But, um, we're gonna talk about sneakers today. And everybody knew this was coming because I mentioned it in the Charles Goodyear episode and how that was originally gonna be a teeny piece of this. And then it became its own episode.
3:45 Holly Frey? And here's the thing, in prepping for this, which I've been doing for a while and kinda dragged my tail a little bit, uh, because I kept thinking, there must be book after book after book on this subject. I've seen a bunch. I have a bunch of books about sneaker history. But really, they're all about sort of the modern era of sneaker history. They kind of pick up from the point where sneakers have already become established as a streetwear and a style thing, uh, rather than like their utility purposes that led to their invention. And those books often talk about things like scarcity and identity and desirability that are all very important and part of sneaker culture.
4:28 Holly Frey? It's cool and interesting, but that's not what I was after. Uh, I wanted to talk more about, as I said, the origin and how we got from most people wearing leather soled shoes to running around in sneakers almost all the time. Uh, and the thing is that- Because there isn't a comprehensive book about the history. There are some that talk about the history, but all of them, and this show will as well, kind of have to leave some stuff out because there was a lot of stuff going on in different places. The thing that I ran into over and over is because that's also piecemeal. There is some confusion and contradictory information and things that are flat out
5:09 Holly Frey? wrong that have been repeated over the years, even by very well-established news outlets. So we get to do a little bit of myth busting in this episode in a couple of instances, as well as talk about some mysteries which really have to do with poor or lost documentation.
5:28 Holly Frey? I also want to mention, out of the gate, there are obviously issues in the sneaker industry today regarding labor. Horrible factory conditions, low pay, forced labor, those have all been documented in the shoe industry. And in some cases, these are factories that aren't run directly by a shoe brand, but they supply the brands. Still, I would say it is on any shoe company to know where their product comes from. And in recent years, there has been a push throughout the industry, particularly for big players in the shoe industry to really do better. And a lot of them have created initiatives to improve and to address some of these problems.
6:12 Holly Frey? But there are still a lot of opaque points in the supply chain and a lot of watchdogs are like, yeah, but what's going on right here? Do you know? And so that disclosure is not always forthcoming.
6:24 Holly Frey? Listen, we're not going to get into any of that part here today, but I wanted to just acknowledge it. It is a huge, massive subject. It could be its own whole thing that I would say is not a history podcast so much as like a Consumer Report podcast. So it's outside of our, our sphere, but it's worth knowing. And I just want people to think about where their stuff comes from. Also, if you want to go all the way back to the history of athletic footwear, you could in some cases find people referencing things as far back as the eighth century BCE. That was when Greek Olympians first. To the best of our knowledge, went from running barefoot to wearing very
7:06 Holly Frey? simple leather coverings, like sandals that offered a little bit of protection for their soles, for the soles of their feet as they were running on things like rocks and very hot surfaces. But we're not going that far back. So we are starting this one in the 19th century, when people started to apply India rubber to shoes to create a sole that had a little bit of grip and a little bit of protection from water. Right out of the gate, this one has a little bit of mystery. On May 21st, 1832, a patent titled "For a Method of Attaching Leather Soles to Boots and Shoes of India Rubber" was issued to Wade Webster of New York City. But this original patent has been
7:51 Holly Frey? lost. It is what is known as an X patent. And that is because in 1836, the US Patent Office had a massive and devastating fire that destroyed the existing patents that were filed from 1790 all the way to the year of the fire. The X does not represent that loss. It designates that those patents don't use the numbering system that we see in patents today. Patents prior to this fire had, as their designation, the inventor's name and the date of the issue. There's ongoing work to try to recover those patents from copies and the records of patent holders and a retroactive numbering system is attached to those patents,
8:35 Holly Frey? which use an X in their number. So it's clear that they predate this new numbering system that's used today. Yeah, it's also like, on the off chance, there was a weird instance where the modern, starting after the fire numbering system, accidentally duplicated the number of another patent. The X would show you, no, they're not the same thing. And as Tracy just said, the Wade Webster patent was an X patent. So we might not know much about it, and mentions of Webster's patent indicate that it was actually never put into production. But there is actually a little bit more to the story than that. The Journal of the Franklin Institute from December of 1832 mentions
9:19 Holly Frey? Wade Webster's patent with an abbreviated description of it. And that reads, quote, "An insole of leather is to be put within the shoe or boot, and a corresponding outsole and heel are placed on the outside when the whole is to be attached together by nailing, pegging, or sewing in the ordinary modes of performing these processes." And there is some evidence that the patent was used to make shoes for consumer purchase. The Monmouth Democrat of Freehold, New Jersey, ran an announcement on March 5th, 1835, about them titled Patent India Rubber or Gum Elastic Shoes. It opened with, quote, "The subscribers having purchased of the patentee,
10:03 Holly Frey? Mr. Wade Webster, his exclusive patent right for the state of New Jersey, Essex County, accepted for attaching sole leather to gum elastics or India rubber boots and shoes. Hereby warn all persons that any infringement on their rights will be prosecuted. They offer for sale the above right for counties on terms as may best suit purchasers." So this write-up goes on to say, "They have them ready for people to come and try on." And from there, there's an endorsement, quote, "To whom it may concern, we the undersigned having worn Mr. W. Webster's Patent India Rubber Shoes are happy to state that they find them perfect in keeping dry feet,
10:46 Holly Frey? are easy to the wearer, and answer fully our expectations and Mr. W.'s recommendations. We most cheerfully recommend them to the public as a valuable improvement. We think they decidedly supersede all inventions for keeping dry feet, and of course, a great preservation of health." That endorsement is signed by eight men of the community. There's also a second endorsement from two other men that reads in part, quote, "The invention of fixing bottoms to the India rubber no doubt deserves and will command a universal patronage. As far as our experience and observation has gone, we can most cheerfully recommend the shoes to all who prize dry feet, good health, and long life."
11:32 Holly Frey? It's not clear what happened to this retail effort, but this was several years before Charles Goodyear figured out the process to vulcanize rubber. So it's pretty likely that these shoes just melted in the heat and cracked in the cold. And eventually people abandoned them. Yeah, it's also unclear to me if those models that they're telling people to come and try on are ones they could take home or if those are like prototypes, because it doesn't seem like there was ever a mass production. So I don't, we still don't know what exactly went on with Webster's. But now it's time for our first myth bust. So most sources, even very reputable ones, as I mentioned at the top of the show,
12:14 Holly Frey? state that John Boyd Dunlop founded the Liverpool Rubber Company and started producing rubber soled shoes in the 1830s. But this appears to be a jumble of facts that get compressed on the timeline. John Boyd Dunlop wasn't even born until the 1840s. And while he did innovate with rubber, that was more tire based. He's another one that might be on my list. We'll see what happens. We're going to come back to him though, in a moment. But the Liverpool Rubber Company, founded by somebody else, did make rubber soled shoes starting in the 1830s. And those were sand shoes. And they were named that because they were intended to make walking on sand easier. And as such, their target market was people who were headed to the seaside.
12:59 Holly Frey? Apparently people loved these shoes and how comfortable they were compared to leather soled shoes. So much so, over the course of decades, that a complaint was lodged in the Brooklyn Eagle on July 28th, 1895, in a column for the girls. That was a regular column that featured things that editors thought, quote, "home lovers and pleasure seekers should know." It reads, quote, "Sand shoes are for wearing on the sand. They are as bad for the feet as any other kind of rubber. You would think it is a great hardship. Perhaps you would say it was cruel to be compelled to wear overshoes all day. Then why put on your sand shoes to wear about the streets?
13:44 Holly Frey? This appeal is made to girls because parents are not to blame. It is the children who think it fine to wear these relics of days at the seashore."
13:55 Holly Frey? Just in case you thought criticizing girls for their clothing choices was something new in the world we're living in, it is not. Also, by this point, as you're about to see, companies were making rubber-soled shoes for streetwear, not just for the sand. So the writer of this particular comment may have just been a crabby stick in the mud, similarly to many people who continue just criticizing the clothing of young people, especially girls and young women. Yeah. Coming up, we're going to talk about the rapid growth of the shoe industry in the later half of the 19th century, and we will do that after we take a quick sponsor break.
14:38 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
14:41 Holly Frey? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T Fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
15:01 Speaker 03 It was good to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
15:09 Holly Frey? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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15:21 Holly Frey? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
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16:45 Speaker 06 Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
17:27 Speaker 06 This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.
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18:24 Holly Frey? and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
18:57 Holly Frey? As we recently discussed in our Charles Goodyear episode, vulcanization was patented in both the US and Britain in 1839 by two different people. And that development led to more reliable rubber options for soling shoes, as vulcanized rubber stands up to heat and cold much better than natural or India rubber. India just being an alternate name for natural rubber. And that moved everything that used rubber forward, and that of course included shoes. So by the 1870s, rubber-soled shoes with canvas uppers had become more common. These transitioned from sand shoes into a similar shoe, but one that was meant for wearing in
19:39 Holly Frey? daily life instead of just at the beach. These came to be known as plimsolls, and they got their name from something that is not at all connected to shoes, but from maritime practice. Samuel Plimsoll developed a system in the mid 19th century for marking the hulls of ships with horizontal lines to mark the depth that they could be submerged to safely. This was used to determine what the safe load was for their cargo. Samuel Plimsoll is on Holly's shortlist because he did a lot of interesting things. I can say with confidence, we'll have that episode not too long from now.
20:19 Holly Frey? Probably not next week, but not far off. The line where the rubber sole met the canvas upper on these early shoes reminded people of the plimsoll line on ships. It indicated that the canvas area above that line should not be submerged, so they just started calling them that. It's not clear when shoes started being called plimsolls, but the plimsoll line wasn't adopted until 1876, so it would have been sometime after that. Yeah, that's another one where people will say quite definitively this started in this decade, and it's like, no, I found one earlier, or I found one later. By the 1880s, lawn tennis shoes were very in demand as that sport became a popular
21:02 Holly Frey? pastime, following the publication of Major Clopton Wingfield's Book of Lawn Tennis Rules in England in 1873. Lawn tennis shoes spanned a really wide range, materials and price-wise. Models were often made with canvas, while those that were aimed at a more fashionable and privileged player would have been made of things like fancy leathers. A write-up in The Times Union of Rochester, New York in July 1882 included mention of lawn tennis shoes in its fashion column, stating, quote, "The regular lawn tennis shoe had a rubber sole, which ensures the player a firm footing and is harmless to the court. The canvas shoe is very desirable.
21:46 Holly Frey? It is faced with cashmere. A waterproof rubber solution cements the two materials together, producing a soft, flexible effect, comfortable and pretty." An ad placed by the Nickel Plate Shoe Store in the Des Moines Register in June of 1888 read, "Notice: Tennis Players. Our tennis shoes are made to assist in playing tennis." That was all caps. "Not made only for looks, though as for looks, fit and price, they surpass all others." Exclamation point. One of the interesting details of lawn tennis shoes was that they started out unisex, and then companies started offering different women's and men's versions.
22:27 Holly Frey? The women's versions from a lot of companies had heels for a while. By the 1890s, women were given the option of having heeled or non-heeled tennis shoes, which tickles me to no end for some reason.
22:44 Holly Frey? In our December 2024 episode on Jan Ernst Matzalliger, we mentioned that in 1882, he invented a lasting machine that enabled the tops of shoes to be joined to the soles without the need for a person to do the hand finishing. This machine was designed for leather soled shoes, but it represented the completion of a mechanized shoe production process. All of the other parts of the process had already been mechanized. And it didn't take long for companies manufacturing athletic shoes to adapt this process for rubber soles, which were often glued on, but also had some stitching. At least some of them also had some stitching.
23:26 Holly Frey? Matzalliger's invention changed the entire shoe industry, including athletic shoes, and it made mass production of rubber soled shoes possible. By the end of the 1880s, less than a decade after the lasting machine was invented, there were huge warehouses of lawn tennis shoes dotting Europe and North America. Thomas Turner's 2016 paper, "The Production and Consumption of Lawn Tennis Shoes in Late Victorian Britain," quotes an 1888 article in Pastime Magazine that complained about how difficult it was getting for sports reporters to have to make the rounds of all the tennis shoe showrooms and factories in the UK each year to see the latest models
24:11 Holly Frey? because there were so many shoe companies with new ones starting up all the time, and they had to get a look at all those shoes. I don't know why that also tickled me, just this idea of it's my job to go look at every tennis shoe. Today, there are people that have that job and they love them. And here's the thing, the demand was there for this rapidly expanding production because tennis shoes quickly made their way into other activities in sports, including things like walking for sport, not just strolling, but walking, sport walking, cycling, golf, and boxing, among others. And soon, the term tennis shoe also just came to be used to refer to almost
24:53 Holly Frey? Any shoe that had a rubber sole. So though they were used in a lot of sports, the word tennis still stuck to them. So if you've ever wondered why they're called tennis shoes, that's why. Then in 1891, Dr. James Naismith invented basketball at Springfield College in Massachusetts as a way to keep the school's students active indoors in the winter. And soon shoes that looked more or less the same as tennis shoes were being sold as basketball shoes to appeal to the players of the new sport. And players of all of these sports fell in love with the grip of the rubber sole. So by the dawn of the 20th century, sports and shoes made specifically for those sports that featured rubber were just deeply intertwined.
25:38 Holly Frey? A little bit of myth busting here. In a lot of places, books, articles, online discussions, you'll see that the first use of the word sneaker describing rubber soled shoes is attributed to a marketing man named Henry Nelson McKenney around 1917. But there are also sources that state that it came into use in the 1880s. Holly really quickly found earlier uses of the word when not even looking for earlier uses. At first, there was an article in the New Orleans Bee from November 1904 with the headline Sneakers, the Things. It opens with,
26:19 Holly Frey? quote, sneakers, said the man back from the woods. That's what you want? Sneakers? This whole write-up is about how if you're going for a trail walk, you want rubber soled sneakers, not leather soled shoes. It lays out the reasons why sneakers are the superior option, noting that the flexible sole and canvas tops, quote, permit the foot the freest play and permit it to settle and grip on whatever you step. That article incidentally ran in newspapers around the US that autumn, so that is obviously before 1917. But mentions of sneakers also go farther back than that.
26:58 Holly Frey? The sneaker was in fact so popular and so popularly known by that name in the early 1890s that on August 23 of 1894, The Boston Globe ran a sad fictional tale worthy of a Pixar short about a baseball shoe that was cast aside by its owner. It read in part, quote, "Early one spring, when the air was salubrious and the small boy was out with his marbles, the sneaker, that hybrid of rubber and cloth, the hated rival of the baseball shoe, came along to wheedle the small boy and the youth for sugared favors. My touch is like velvet, said the sneaker. I alight like the snowflake, and when laced to your foot, I cling like the vine.
27:41 Holly Frey? Unlike the dirty, red-coated baseball shoe, I never grow flabby with age. I bag not at the knee like old trousers, but hold close to the foot while yielding to its every caprice." It's so sad, this baseball shoe is just going through it. But that baseball shoe does make peace with its fate, recognizing eventually in the story that it once supplanted another shoe. But that is, again, an even earlier use of the word sneaker. The Record Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, ran an article in 1898 indicating that the writer at least believed the term sneakers in relation to shoes was a new development. That write-up started, quote, "Sneakers is a new word.
28:26 Holly Frey? It has been coined by the children of a New York family whose mother was made their unconscious accomplice in passing the counterfeit word upon the public. All soft-soled shoes, in which a child of an inquiring nature can noiselessly perambulate the house in search of raisins, lump sugar, and such lawful prey, are by these children given the euphonious and suggestive designation of sneakers. Sneak, sneaker, sneakers. The origin is too obvious to need any further explanation." The story then relays how a mother went to an apartment store asking for sneakers, only to be embarrassed when she realized that she was after tennis shoes.
29:10 Holly Frey? Or another version of this origin is similar, but it suggests that the term sneakers was applied to rubber soled shoes because adult criminals like thieves could noiselessly move around in them. Regardless of when and why people started using the term sneakers, it was obviously in use by the 1890s. So sneaker and tennis shoe were both in common use by the late 19th century. Yeah, if you go looking at a lot of, you know how newspapers would do like serialized fiction during this time, a lot of them start to include a clue that like there are sneaker prints, clearly someone very sneaky is running around in shoes that cannot be heard.
29:55 Holly Frey? I started giggling so much at how many of those I ran into. We are about to talk about a lot of familiar names because many sneaker companies that really marked the beginning of the industry are still around. We will get into it after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.
30:18 Speaker 06 Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
31:00 Speaker 06 This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.
31:13 Holly Frey? For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certifications, or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed
31:56 Holly Frey? to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
32:26 Holly Frey? Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
32:54 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to Drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you.
33:33 Holly Frey? All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
33:59 Holly Frey? In 1906, the New Balance Arch Support Company was founded in Boston, Massachusetts. But it was not initially a shoe company. As that name indicates, it made arch supports that fit inside of shoes. And those supports were a new invention of the company's founder, William J. Riley, who, according to the company and the lore that it shares, got the idea for a three-point insole after watching chickens walk around in his yard, noting the way that they balanced on their splayed-out toes. By 1938, the company was making shoes that were designed for track and field sports. The Brown Bag Harriers Sports Club commissioned Riley to design and make them shoes that year, which he did.
34:44 Holly Frey? Those first models for the Harriers were famously made of kangaroo leather. And the company remained primarily an arch support manufacturer for decades, even after they made those shoes. And they didn't introduce the first true sneaker in their line, the Trackster, until 1961. And that happened after the company had been through a few ownership changes. In 1908, Marquis Mills Converse founded the Converse Rubber Shoe Company. And this was a significant moment, not just because Converse would grow into a huge multinational brand, but also because this is one of the first instances where a rubber company was formed to make shoes.
35:25 Holly Frey? Up until this, rubber-soled shoes were being made by companies that were rubber generalists. They were also making things like tires and other non-apparel rubber Products, but even though the company made shoes, it wasn't making sneakers initially. The first products were water resistant boots. The limited offerings of doing just water resistant boots created a seasonality problem. When there was a dip in sales in the warmer months, when things like snow and rain were not quite as prevalent. So the first Converse tennis shoe designed came out in 1910. Eventually, to take advantage of the growing popularity of basketball, Converse introduced
36:06 Holly Frey? a basketball specific shoe in 1917 called the non-skin. And the non-skin became the All-Star in 1919. The All-Star model was developed after the company got feedback from coaches on how to improve the original. And at this point, throughout pretty much all of shoe marketing, coaches were really the target market for athletic shoes because they would select the models that their entire team would wear throughout the season. A few years later, in 1923, Converse made its deal with basketball star Charles Hollis Taylor, better known as Chuck Taylor. Taylor had been a professional player, but that was very different in the early 1920s from how it is today.
36:51 Holly Frey? He played a few semi-pro games before being hired at Converse. And when he was brought onto the company, he was a salesman and a coach for the Converse All-Stars basketball team. Part of Taylor's job was touring the US, selling the All-Star shoe model. He promoted basketball as he traveled, giving clinics to teach about basketball. It was really this work promoting the sport and the shoe that led Converse to officially rename the All-Star as Chuck Taylor's All-Star in 1934. Two years later, the company made the shoes for the US Olympic basketball team's appearance at the 1936 Berlin Games.
37:32 Holly Frey? That was the debut of the red and blue stripes on the foxing band around the outside edge of the shoe. The Olympics were a good advertisement for Converse internationally, and soon other countries wanted to place order for their teams as well. Yeah, I think sometimes people think that Chucks are named for Chuck Taylor because he was like an amazing, high achieving pro basketball player. And that's, that's not really what's up. He was an amazing, high achieving staff member for Converse.
38:03 Holly Frey? Um, listen, we love our Chucks. In 1916, a new shoe brand entered the market and it was made by US Rubber. They had made a boot before this, but then they got into making more athletic style shoes, and those were Keds. At the time, US Rubber, which had formed when several smaller companies joined together in the late 19th century, dominated the US Rubber market, but they didn't have a shoe at market at that point. The first plan was to call the shoes Peds, pulling from the Latin word petitas, which means foot, but that name was already in use by another company. So Keds was eventually chosen. Apparently, there were a few other things that they considered that switched out that first
38:47 Holly Frey? letter as well. In the 1920s, a Keds model that was made for women's tennis was named the Champion, because a lot of players who won tournaments wore them, and that kind of bolstered their image and they took off from there. The J.W. Foster and Sons Shoe Company was established in 1895 by Joseph William Foster. Over the years, Foster had spent a lot of time repairing the spiked shoes that cricket players used, and it occurred to him that shoe spikes might be beneficial for other sports as well. Foster liked to run, and he added spikes to his running shoes and found that he really liked the extra grab and stability that he could get from
39:27 Holly Frey? them. This invention gained worldwide attention in 1924, when athletes Harold Abrams and Eric Liddell won medals running in the Paris Olympics, wearing custom spiked running shoes, made for them by Foster. The model was then mass-produced as Olympian track shoes. The Foster family is going to come up again shortly. In 1924, two German brothers, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, started a company called Geburte Dassler, that literally translates to Dassler Brothers. And they started this company to make shoes in their hometown of Hertzogenarich. The company went by Geta for short, and the two brothers hand stitched their sneakers
40:09 Holly Frey? in the home that they lived in with their parents. And for the first several years, although their company grew, it was pretty slow. But then everything changed when they made shoes for several athletes in the 1936 Olympic Games, including US track star Jesse Owens. Just as Geta was gaining some notoriety, World War II ramped up. World War II, of course, impacted the progression of the growing sneaker industry globally because rubber became an important material for military applications. A lot of shoe factories transitioned temporarily to producing military items. The Dassler factory was one of them, although that didn't happen until 1943. This also starts a complicated part of the brothers'
40:53 Holly Frey? history, since they both joined the Nazi Party, although some historians have come to believe that this was a move to ensure that their business survived, rather than being a matter of ideology for the two of them. Particularly given their ties to sports, the company would have been very valuable to the Nazi Party. Adolf, who went by Addy, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940, but was discharged the following year, having been deemed necessary for the running of the factory. When his brother Rudolph, who went by Rudy, was called up in 1943, he had to go. And it seems that there was already a good bit of tension between the brothers, but being forced to go to war when his younger brother had been released from service, in
41:38 Holly Frey? part due to Rudy's campaigning for him to be released so that he could come and handle the family business, this whole thing really tore open a rift that continued to grow between the two of them due to additional other factors. By 1948, the two brothers had reached a point where reconciliation was just not going to be possible. Their company closed and each of them opened their own shoe company on either side of the river Aruk that separates the city of Herzegunarak. Rudy formed the company Ruda and Adi started Adidas. We're going to talk about that name in just a second. And a year later, he started using the company's now iconic three stripe design on all the shoes.
42:21 Holly Frey? This was kind of an evolution because the shoes they had been making together had two stripes. So Adi just threw another stripe on and said, that's my design. Ruda eventually became Puma. Incidentally, most people in the US say Adidas the way I just did, Adidas. But a lot of people around the globe pronounce it differently. And I know this confuses people sometimes. One of the more common ones is Adidas, which is the most German version because it references Adi's name pronunciation. So if you hear Adidas, they're not saying it wrong. That's just a variation. Now we're looping back to that Dunlop myth busting we did earlier.
43:02 Holly Frey? In 1927, after James Boyd Dunlop had retired from day to day operations of the company, Dunlop collaborated with the Liverpool Rubber Company and they produced not a sneaker, but a boot, the Dunlop Protective Rubber Boot. That was not the first rubber boot invented. They go back to the mid 19th century, but it was the first that was reinforced to protect the feet in work scenarios rather than just being waterproof footwear. But the success of the boot led to another shoe. In 1929, Dunlop introduced a model called the Green Flash. It was a white sneaker with green accents, including a sort of wedge shaped design on the exterior side that featured the Dunlop logo.
43:47 Holly Frey? Famed British tennis player Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1934, 1935, and 1936 wearing Green Flash sneakers. And they became a standard part of athletic wardrobes, not just for pro athletes, but also for school kids who needed them in their PE classes. They then transitioned into streetwear. You can still buy Dunlop green flash shoes today, although the original colorway is no longer available. People still find them on the secondary market, though, and there is a seemingly never-ending call from collectors for the original white and green color scheme to be re-released. Oh, yeah, you can find it so fast. Just people being like, why will you not put out new shoes with the white and green?
44:33 Holly Frey? They love what they love. A lot of them grew up wearing them in school and they just, they love them. Joe and Jeff Foster, the grandsons of the JW Foster that we mentioned earlier, who started putting spikes on running shoes, started their own shoe company in 1954 called Mercury. But there was a problem with that name. It was already trademarked by somebody else. In an interview with the BBC in October 2025, Joe explained how they came up with their new name. Quote, "The dictionary was there. I opened it up. I like the letter R. I don't know why." After coming across the word rebok while perusing the entries, they saw that it was a South African gazelle.
45:16 Holly Frey? They did some more digging and they learned that the Afrikaans version of the word is reebok and they settled on that as the company's new name. In 1964, a company called Blue Ribbon Sports was founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman. Bowerman had been Knight's track coach when Knight was enrolled at the University of Oregon. After graduation, Knight had become a certified public accountant and then a professor. He went into business with Bowerman initially to sell a Japanese sneaker brand called Tiger in the US. Blue Ribbon rebranded as Nike in 1971. They paid a design student named Carolyn Davidson $35 for the swoosh logo that became globally iconic.
46:00 Holly Frey? Davidson later said in an interview that Nike didn't really like the swoosh, but told her, maybe it'll grow on me. Carolyn is credited with, by a lot of people, as being integral to the development of the brand. And she was given, quote, Nike stock and a gold swoosh ring, according to her account given a number of years later when Nike stock went public. Yeah, for a long time, there were a lot of articles that were coming about, out about how Nike had cheated this person who really like designed the icon of their brand. And it's, she was like, no, they gave me more money. Yeah.
46:37 Holly Frey? One of the most repeated stories about the early days of Nike involves a waffle iron. I feel like if we don't tell the story, the people who love sneakers in our audience will lose their minds. Bill Bowerman was trying to solve this problem, which was that urethane tracks that had become popular and that he had put in at Oregon were a little too slick for regular sneakers. You kind of slid on them, but they were also unsuitable for spiked shoes because those would destroy this new running surface. And he famously was inspired to try to create rubber spikes by pouring liquid urethane onto the family waffle iron. I think this was a wedding present he and his wife had gotten some years earlier. And that destroyed that waffle iron. It glued it shut.
47:22 Holly Frey? But Bowerman thought this was still a good idea, so he thrifted a whole bunch more used waffle irons to keep doing this experiment. Once he got a shape that he thought actually was pretty good, it was obviously inverted from what it needed to be. So this led to mold making and negative casting. And eventually he had a prototype and he had a small run of them made with those spikes. So the University of Oregon's track team could test them. And next, it was tried by Olympic marathoners. They all loved these. These new shoes were called Moon Shoes and they are kind of a holy grail for sneaker collectors. They didn't really put them out as a regular line,
48:04 Holly Frey? but there were a few that had been made that never got used that apparently got put in their company store early on and some people got those. But a pair of them sold at auction for $437,500 in 2019. I think the expected amount was like 160 to 180,000. So they obviously blew that out of the water. The Moon Shoes, I said, never went into wide production, but one of the models that followed it, the Waffle Trainer, is credited with solidifying Nike's business. Incidentally, Bowerman's kids eventually found that original destroyed waffle maker. He buried it in the backyard. I guess that's what you do when you break
48:47 Holly Frey? appliances there. But it is now on display at Nike's headquarters. In 1966, the Van Doren Rubber Company was founded by Paul and James Van Doren. The company debuted its Dex shoe, known initially as Vans number 44 that same year. Eventually, it was renamed the Authentic and you can still buy them under that name. In fact, a lot of the models that Vans debuted in its first two decades are still in production. The number 95 debuted in 1976 and was an instant hit with skateboarders. It's now known as the Era. The following year, the number 36 Old School was introduced, which used leather
49:29 Holly Frey? instead of just canvas. And then a slip-on style that remains a staple in their line also came out that year. The Skate High, another long-timer, debuted in 1978. In the 1970s, there was a huge surge of interest in the US and Europe especially in jogging, which bolstered sales across all brands. Up to that point, athletes had still been the primary consumer group for all of these sneakers, but a much wider audience of runners suddenly needed shoes.
50:04 Holly Frey? 1970 was the year that a number of popular road races were started, including the New York City Marathon, the Seattle Marathon, and the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta. Focusing on the Peachtree, since it is our hometown race, and I've run it several times, it is so easy to track the rapid growth of running as a pastime by just looking at the Peachtree's numbers. Because in 1970, 110 or 150 runners participated in the 10K. The numbers vary by source, but even so, this is a pretty small number. Five years later, it was 1,000 runners. In 1978, it was 12,500.
50:44 Holly Frey? By 1980, race officials decided that they would cap registrations at 25,000. If you run the Peachtree, this is making you crack up. Because today, they take 60,000. This is just one race, obviously, but it parallels the rapid growth of other road races as interest in running for health and fitness and community exploded in the US in the 70s and 80s. And every one of those runners needed shoes. The modern fitness industry also boosted shoe sales. Joe Foster of Reebok noted that once Jane Fonda wore a pair of Reeboks in one of her workout videos in the mid 1980s, the brand really took off. Minor heads up that he calls women girls in this quote.
51:29 Holly Frey? Quote, "For being a $9 million running company, we became a $900 million aerobics women's company in four years. The girls loved aerobics so much that they went to work in them, put their heels in their bag and went to work and changed when they went to work. This is where Reebok became, just became lifestyle and street, and the volumes were incredible." So they quickly introduced the freestyle specifically marketed to women's aerobics classes, and then started to introduce a lot of items to appeal to gem goers. And Reebok was not alone. Most of the major shoe brands expanded their lines to include clothing and accessories to capitalize both on the increased interest in exercise programs
52:13 Holly Frey? and the street style that grew out of the burgeoning fitness industry. The idea of sneakers as fashion was cemented in 1984 when Gucci made their first sneaker, and that became the first one that was associated with a luxury brand. That same year, Michael Jordan entered into an endorsement deal with Nike, which is sometimes pointed to as the transition point of sneakers from sport-related shoe to status item. This idea was further reinforced the following year when Adidas or Adidas and Run DMC entered into an endorsement deal. That made the group the first sneaker ambassadors who were not athletes.
52:54 Holly Frey? According to Statista, the sneaker industry is projected to generate $161 billion in 2026. That's a lot of dollars. It's a lot of shoes. We will never stop loving sneakers at our house. Do you have some listener mail that you love? I do, and it is not about sneakers, but it is about clothes. It's from our listener Caroline or Carolyn, I always wonder. She's written us several times. She writes, "Hi, Ollie and Tracy. Thank you, thank you for all you do to keep us all informed, entertained, and in stitches, pun intended. I just listened to your two-parter on E. Virgil Neil and the listener mail about the Abigail Adams costume. It brought me way, way back to the bicentennial.
53:39 Holly Frey? It's 1976 for younger folks who missed it, when my brownie troop dressed up as women from the revolution. My mom, who was a great seamstress, made our costumes. I can't remember who my sister portrayed, but our then-five-year-old brother was an adorable Minuteman. As this email's title suggests, I was Betsy Ross. Despite my mom's skill, which she'd inherited from her mom, a professional seamstress, I almost failed the sewing portion of Home Economics. I've never been able to read a pattern, and there I was portraying someone who is then most well-known for sewing the First Flag. I'd not thought of my portrayal as something suspect until Neil's history and the listener mail put it all together for me.
54:22 Holly Frey? I hope this message brought a smile or a chuckle, as so many of your episodes do for me. Stay amazing, as I know you will. Attached is yet another picture of Penny, who loves all the kisses you send her away. Seriously in love with the stock." She also sent us pictures from a recent trip she took to LA, where she visited the Academy Museum of Arts and Sciences. Did I say that right? I don't know. But in any case, thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your travels with us and all of your fun anecdotes. And that dog is really cute. Penny's a cutie. But also, I just, I love these moments where we remember something from childhood. Yeah. Uh oh, uh oh. But it is funny that she, you know, didn't inherit sewing. I think I've said on the show before, a lot of people in my family sew.
55:06 Holly Frey? I sew more than all of them, and I did not want any of them to be teaching me. Not because they weren't great. My mom was an excellent seamstress, but like, we did not get along. And also, like, her taste and my taste were not gonna ever align. So I understand this, although I went the opposite direction of, I will outpace all of you and make all my clothes. Thank you for sending us that email. If you would like to send us an email for a childhood memory that we've accidentally jogged, that makes you wonder if you were being appropriate or not, or if you just misrepresented yourself, you can do that at [email protected] . You can also email about anything else you care to. You can find the show notes for today's episode and all of our episodes at missedinhistory.com.
55:49 Holly Frey? We'll have all of the resources that we pulled from in creating these episodes right there on any given episode's information. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
56:07 Holly Frey? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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