History
John Joseph Merlin experimented with single- to many-rowed devices worn on feet in 1780. Inline skates, skates designed to work like ice skates during periods of warm weather, were invented by Louis Legrange of France in 1849. Legrange designed the skates for an opera where a character was to appear to be skating on ice. The skates were problematic and unsuccessful as the wearer could not turn nor could they stop. The first U.S. patent for modern in-line skates, designed to behave like ice runners with individually sprung and cushioned wheels, was granted under patent number US 2644692 in July, 1953 to Ernest Kahlert of Santa Ana, CA. They were briefly described in the April 1950 issue of "Popular Mechanics" and again in the April 1954 issue of "Popular Science" in the section called "New Ideas from the Inventors." In Canada in 1972, Mountain Dew attempted to sell Mettoy's product the "Skeeler", an inline skate that was developed for Russian hockey players and speed skaters. The first commercially available inline skate for this form of Rollerskating is in 1987 by Rollerblade. In 2012, Kacie Fischer became the first woman, and the fastest person, to inline skate across the United States; she skated from California to Florida in 47 days.
Read more about this topic: Inline Skates
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)