Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

SLOW TIME, FAST TIME, HARD TIME

  The environmental educator David Orr has contrasted the “fast knowledge” of Promethean problem-solving Western societies with the “slow knowledge” of communities living together with other species in their habitats. The athletic shoe was born with the chemical transformation of the nineteenth century and may be the leading material sign of the enthusiasm for speed that has marked the last 150 years so strongly. If the original rice-straw zori stood for slow knowledge, the athletic shoe reflects and proclaims the glory of speed itself.2

  Sandals and sneakers represent a contract between the two experiences of time. One form tends to limit speed, the other to promote it, a distinction apparent even on the streets. A federal police officer and sociologist who has done fieldwork on the crack cocaine traffic in Honolulu reports that the runners—homeless men and women who shuttle between dealers’ safe houses and drug buyers—are usually able to recognize police by their black tennis shoes, worn even undercover “to be ready to fight, chase a suspect, make an arrest, etc.” The runners, lacking “tactical training,” wear the most comfortable local garb, sandals or flip-flops. These observations suggest that the boundary between trained officer and low-level addicted criminal is more than just the gap between enforcement and transgression. It is the difference between two ways of moving, between fast time and slow time.3

  As early as the 1960s, black prisoners in South Africa’s infamous Robben Island penitentiary were allowed only rubber sandals as footwear. More recently, prison authorities worldwide have issued sandals, often flip-flops, not only to save money but to compel a slower, controllable style of movement. The bright orange or red jumpsuit and zori has become ubiquitous as the prescribed garb of the accused in televised arraignments. In court, sneaker-wearing convicts—especially wearing civilian-style clothes—can be an escape risk not only because they can run faster, but because they can blend more easily into a crowd. Conversely, sandals can impede mobility even in warm climates; one South Carolina escapee was apprehended trying to buy a pair of shoes to replace them, while another fugitive in Arizona was caught by a discount store security guard after switching his sandals for a pair of Reeboks. And the growing complexity of athletic shoes has become a security risk in itself. The American Correctional Association (ACA) security manual for prison administrators cautions that normally “tennis shoes from the community and shoes with air pockets or pumps should not be authorized, as they provide a particularly convenient hiding place for contraband.”4

  On the street, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, one synonym for sneakers was “felony shoes”: a means of escape for offenders more ambitious than Honolulu crack runners. Perpetrators like the same showy styles as other young people despite the added risk of identification. Police tracked and caught at least one convenience store robber by following the blinking lights built into the heels of his running shoes, earning him an appearance on a new television series, America’s Dumbest Criminals. Other officers identified a young bank robber by the unusual thick-soled shoes he was wearing when arrested on a minor traffic charge. America’s most proficient cat burglar of the 1990s, Blane David Nordahl, routinely discarded his shoes (as well as clothing and tools) after his sneaker print on a countertop led to arrest and a three-year jail sentence. The FBI is able to identify 70 percent of the footwear impressions it receives, according to the former head of its footwear unit, William J. Bodziak.5

  Sneakers are as suited for self-assertion as for flight. The bouncing and dragging “pimp walk” was a staple of black exploitation films of the 1960s and early 1970s, just before the sneaker explosion. In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities, youthful black defendants in the Bronx County Courthouse defy officialdom with the pimp walk’s successor, an insolent gait called the “pimp roll,” a “pumping swagger” that another writer, a London journalist, has described as “that swaying, strutting way you walk when your soles are bouncy and your ankles supported”—a gait less feasible in sandals than in running shoes.

  As usual in conflicts, the police have body techniques of their own. Many younger officers are bodybuilding fitness enthusiasts far from the old doughnut-munching stereotype, and athletic shoes fit their new image. One of Wolfe’s white protagonists, the assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, begins to wear sneakers on the subway hoping he will be mistaken for one of the plainclothes policemen who have adopted them en masse. The Chicago Police Department recently converted from standard issue black oxfords to a leather shoe close in construction to running shoes.6

  The athletic shoe embodies speed, dynamism, ambition, and the search for a technological advantage. Apart from relatively high-priced specialized sports models, such as the Teva brand developed by a whitewater-rafting enthusiast, the ordinary flapping sandal, whether in flimsy plastic or luxurious materials, connotes voluntary or enforced idleness. The story of the sport shoe is as remarkable as that of sandals. And it, too, shows how new techniques of motion interact with new materials and processes to create endless variations on a classic theme.

  RUNNING WITHOUT SHOES

  The specialized running shoe is remarkably recent in Western history. Even before shoes were made by machine, it would not have been difficult to use lasts and materials optimized for running. When Romanticism brought an ethereal spirit to ballet in the early nineteenth century, shoemakers responded with the pointe shoe. The new dance style, made famous by the ballerina Maria Taglioni, was and remains one of the most demanding of all Western body techniques. The shoe, with its reinforced toe box modified and conditioned by each dancer according to her personal formula, was not the hardware that made the style possible; the technique brought the new form of construction into being. (And technique is so important that most ballet dancers have so far rejected high-technology pointe shoes designed to protect toes and cushion impacts, partly because the new models are stiffer and partly because dancers are so attached to their idiosyncratic customization rituals.) It took far longer for purpose-built athletic shoes to emerge. The reason for the delay lies not just in the limits of technology and materials but in attitudes toward running and toward shoes.7

  Running may be the oldest sport of the West. It played an important part in ancient Egyptian festivals. Egyptians recorded times for distance running that compare with those of the best nineteenth-century European athletes, and the Egyptians were almost certainly barefoot. In Greece, at the first Olympics in 776 B.C., races of from about 192 meters to 5,000 meters were run without shoes. Although Greek message carriers ran in soft leather boots called endromides, and although the Greeks were aware of spiked shoes used in the icy Caucasus, they had no interest in footwear for athletics. The original Olympic starting line had grooves for runners’ toes, and in the absence of cleats even sprinters are pictured standing upright at the start rather than leaning forward on their hands. Bare feet were, of course, part of male athletic nudity, a custom that scandalized foreigners but served the Greeks themselves as proof of their superiority to barbarians. Even “hoplite” foot races based on warfare, run with shields and at first with helmets, omitted sandals. (Women, who ran wearing light clothing at special events for them, at least sometimes wore sandals.) The Greeks applied their ingenuity to running terrain rather than foot coverings. They went to some expense to prepare the track for bare feet. The soil was weeded and dug up before the events, and covered with fine sand. At Delphi the cost of the sand alone was considerable: over 83 staters, the equivalent of more than ten months’ wages for a laborer. Runners trained for this surface, practicing on deeper sand. Today’s experts recommend grass as the best running surface and warn that running on beaches endangers the Achilles tendon, but in antiquity, a carefully prepared layer of sand over dirt may have been the state of the art. Late in the Olympics, during Roman rule, Greek athletes did begin to wear a type of sandal called the krepis, probably owing either to the influence of Roman customs or to changing standards of track maintenance. By the time of Diocletian (A.D. 245�
�313) there is a reference to shoes called gallica used for running. But, having been born with the Romans, the athletic shoe appears to have vanished in the West with the end of the Olympics and the disappearance of Greco-Roman physical culture under Christianity.8

  Unlike the ancient Greeks, who prized moderation too much to train for anything like the modern marathon or, indeed, any race longer than about three miles, many New World peoples were superb distance runners. Running was not only part of a spiritual regime, as it was for the Greeks; it was often essential in hunting and for communication among dispersed settlements. Native Americans developed sophisticated shoe forms like the moccasin that continue to influence the footwear industry today, and some athletes and couriers wore sandals or moccasins. The Tarahumaras of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, were famous for a kickball race lasting up to sixty hours, run with sandals. Today their descendants still earn a living as corn farmers, their feet protected only by tire-tread sandals with leather thongs (huaraches), routinely covering ten miles or more a day at work or going to school in their harsh climate. In the 1990s they defeated some of the strongest U.S. athletes in hundred-mile ultramarathons in the Southwest, on at least one occasion discarding the running shoes donated by footwear companies that had sponsored them. Complaining that their feet were sweating, they replaced the shoes with new huaraches they had fashioned soon after their arrival in the United States from dumped tires that by Mexican standards had ample tread left. (Their U.S. supporters failed to find a tire company to replace the backing of the shoe manufacturers.) Moccasin-wearing Mohave couriers covered a hundred miles a day, at least in the times before the martial tribe’s defeat by U.S. troops in 1859. Many Native Americans were able to run scores of miles daily without any foot protection at all. The Hopi Louis Tewanima (1879–1935), a 1912 Olympic silver medalist, was said as a youth to have run 120 miles from his village to Winslow, Arizona, and back, barefoot, just to see the trains coming through. Photographs of Native American races from the early twentieth century suggest that bare feet were still the norm.9

  FROM PEDESTRIANS TO MARATHONERS

  Europeans and European Americans took a different course. As the very term chivalry implies, European combat arts were rooted in an equestrian society that left walking and running to laborers, servants, and common soldiers. There was no courtly counterpart to the armed footraces of the Greek Olympics. Real knights did not run. Competitive Western footracing reemerged in early modern England in the lowest domestic ranks. Footmen ran at the sides of coaches to protect them from obstacles and raced to the inn at the next destination to procure lodgings. This strenuous pace required constant training, and a first-rate footman could cover sixty miles a day. In the early seventeenth century footmen began to race each other, but without the glory of Greek or Indian runners, despite the new term celeripedians. Servile most remained, although some artisans and even a few highborn young men also took up running, and footmen’s employers bet on their servants’ matches. Footmen wore pumps, light shoes with thin soles and no fasteners, kept on the foot at the toe and heel—a style now best known in women’s dress shoes and men’s formal shoes, not as athletic gear. One of the early aristocratic runners, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest son, once competed in boots as a handicap and won.10

  Competitive walking and running took the public imagination only in the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, it was improved coach transportation and, later, railroads that promoted them. When the roads were dangerous and disagreeable, only rare eccentrics and occasional foreign travelers joined the poor and criminals on foot. Once even workers could afford cheap railroad tickets, walking was no longer a necessity but increasingly a recreation, especially since trains also served destinations with picturesque paths. As recreational walking emerged, contests flourished. Beginning in the 1830s, walking footraces in England, the United States, and Continental Europe became mass spectator sports that sometimes attracted over 25,000 people. Usually run for ten to fifteen miles, the smaller contests took place in enclosures built by the tavernkeepers who sponsored them, but the larger ones were held at horse tracks. The competing pedestrians, as the contestants were called, sometimes wore gaudy clothing like jockeys’ silks. In fact, the footrace was a kind of poor person’s horse race without the expense of the horses. But the “peds” themselves could earn handsome purses and, along with jockeys, were America’s first professional athletes.11

  If the pedestrians used specially built shoes, they did not call attention to them. They were the sports stars of the time—some of the first modern celebrity athletes—and shoe manufacturers would have been natural sponsors. Edward Payson Weston, the most famous of the later nineteenth-century American long-distance walkers, was supported on one walk by a sewing-machine maker, a druggist, a photographer, and a clothing store in return for promotion of their products. But there was no shoe manufacturer. Weston did advise his many admirers who were taking up walking to get comfortable, low-heeled shoes. But his technique, almost a shuffle with little bending of the knees—to conserve energy—made minimal demands on footwear. He wore sturdy shoes with high red tops. The leading mid-century distance runner of England and America, William Howitt, billed as “The American Deer,” is shown in a contemporary drawing wearing low, slipperlike shoes similar in shape to the former footmen’s pumps. Only in the 1880s, just before the decline of pedestrianism amid corruption and drug scandals, did shoemakers start to advertise. One firm, McSwyny of New York, boasted of “Bengal Tiger, Alligator, Porpoise, and Seal Skins, Tanned especially for my use,” with the endorsement of Daniel o’Leary, who had walked 520 miles in 139 hours. But in design these were probably conventional mid-length leather boots.12

  Specialized footgear seems to have appeared first in the 1870s, when interest began to turn from marathon walking to speed running, and amateur associations were beginning to promote track and field for exercise and health. The main innovation, besides the use of lighter leathers, was spikes. Patented for cricket in 1861, they were soon applied to running. Peter R. Cavanagh, a leading biomechanics scientist and athletic footwear analyst, believes that running shoes first diverged from street shoes only in 1865, with a pair of spiked running shoes made for Lord Spencer. Probably about the same time, a New York shoemaker named John Welsher ran an advertisement before a celebrated race, offering walking shoes for $6.50. For $7.50, they were available with springs: one of the first energy-return systems in athletic shoes. Despite these beginnings, the later nineteenth century was not a great time for running footwear. Team sports, such as football, cricket, and baseball, as well as participant sports, such as croquet, lawn tennis, and bicycling, were eclipsing pedestrianism. The spiked shoes sold by the A. G. Spalding Company were costly by contemporary standards. In Bolton, England, an amateur runner named Joseph William Foster designed and made his own spiked running pumps in 1892 after finding available models too heavy; they were the foundation of an athletic shoe company that later became Reebok. By 1897 the Sears, Roebuck catalogue featured many specialized sports shoes, including calfskin track shoes with spikes, “lace nearly to the toe,” men’s “Kangaroo calf” bicycle shoes, canvas baseball shoes with leather soles and counters, and canvas “gymnasium shoes” with canvas soles. There were “tennis oxfords” in black sateen and “tennis bals” (“[a]lso used for yachting, baseball and gymnasium”) in white duck, a light grade of canvas. Missing were any shoes for road running or long-distance walking. In fact, most of the men’s and women’s street shoes shown in the catalogue were built on needle lasts that appear grotesquely pointed a century later. But while Sears sold “Feel Ezy” and “Corn Cure” shoes and police models with wide toe boxes, most of their products must have been agonizing over long distances. The same catalogue featured an assortment of corn and bunion plasters.13

  Without help from the shoe industry, runners of the early Boston Marathons of the late 1890s seem to have improvised their shoes from other sports. The 1898 winner, Ronal
d MacDonald, wore bicycle racing shoes. His successor in 1899, Lawrence Brignola, used a model with “light leather uppers, lacing nearly to the toes, light leather soles and rubber heels,” according to a newspaper account. Runners of the time used chamois skin inserts covering only the front part of the foot; these probably aggravated blisters. (They also clenched cork grips tightly in their hands, exactly contrary to today’s practice of avoiding tension in other muscle groups.) Nor were there great improvements for distance running before World War II. The second-prize winner in 1932, John A. Kelley, used indoor high-jump shoes. Despite openings slit in the tight shoes to relieve pressure, Kelley had to drop back with blistered feet. Other runners used de-spiked track shoes and bowling shoes, but these variants do not seem to have gone into production. “The poorest running shoes manufactured today would be far better than anything we had years ago,” Kelley later remarked. Although a retired English shoemaker named Ritchings custom-made excellent white kid leather shoes for competitors, marathons were agonizing. Runners would soak their feet in beef brine to harden them and rub their shoes with neat’s-foot oil to soften them.14

  THE SNEAKER ERA

  Athletic shoes as we know them did not originate with the street shoe industry of a hundred years ago that supplied the pedestrians and most of the early marathoners. They began with the rubber business and a largely different set of manufacturers and techniques. Native peoples of South America had for centuries used the milky sap of the Hevea tree to coat their cloaks against rain and even to make shoes and bottles. They filled bowls with caoutchouc, as they called the material, and molded it by immersing their feet and then exposing them to flames that solidified the sap, yielding custom-fitting and waterproof if bloblike footwear. In the eighteenth century, French scientists began to study the tree and the process, and to advocate new industrial uses. By 1770 the first erasers appeared, “[West] India rubbers.” For Northerners as for the Indians, shoes were a natural application for the material, given the rain and mud of both Europe and New England, but processing coagulated rubber was a challenge. Turpentine as a solvent made rubber goods sticky. Newly discovered ether produced better results but was so costly that only personages like Frederick the Great of Prussia could wear riding boots produced by submerging lasts in a solution of rubber and ether. Nevertheless, by the early eighteenth century consumers were buying footwear of cut sheet-rubber, and (nearly a century before L. L. Bean) a Boston merchant was importing 500,000 pairs of gum shoes made in Brazil on lasts he supplied. In 1832 a U.S. patent was granted for a way of “attaching India Rubber soles to boots and shoes.” But the fashion was brief. In North America, unlike in England, natural rubber hardened in the cold winters and softened and stuck in the hot summers. By the 1830s the nascent U.S. rubber footwear industry was collapsing.15