Inline & Roller Skating

Roller skating is the travelling on smooth terrain with roller skates. It is a form of recreation as well as a sport, and can also be a form of transportation. more...

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Skates generally come in two basic varieties: inline skates, and traditional quad skates, though some have experimented with a single-wheeled \"quintessence skate\" or other variations on the basic skate design, like the booster blades.

History

The first recorded use of roller skates was in a London stage performance in 1743. The inventor of this skate is lost to history. The first recorded skate inventor was John-Joseph Merlin, who demonstrated a primitive inline skate with metal wheels in 1760. The first patented roller skate design was patented in France by M. Petitbled, in 1819. These early skates were similar to today's inline skates, but they were not very maneuverable; it was very difficult with these skates to do anything but move in a straight line and perhaps make wide sweeping turns. During the rest of the 19th century, inventors continued to work on improving skate design.

The four-wheeled turning roller skate, or quad skate, with four wheels set in two side-by-side pairs, was first designed in 1863 in New York City by James Leonard Plimpton in an attempt to improve upon previous designs, The skate contained a pivoting action using a rubber cushion that allowed the skater to skate a curve just by leaning to one side. It was a huge success, so much that the first public skating rink was opened in 1866 in Newport, Rhode Island with the support of Plimpton. The design of the quad skate allowed easier turns and maneuverability, and the quad skate came to dominate the industry for more than a century.

Arguably, the most important advance in the realistic use of roller skates as a pleasurable pastime took place in Birmingham, England in 1876 when William Bown patented a design for the wheels of roller skates. Bown's design embodied his effort to keep the two bearing surfaces of an axle, fixed and moving, apart. Bown worked closely with Joseph Henry Hughes, who drew up the patent for a ball or roller bearing race for bicycle and carriage wheels in 1877. Hughes' patent included all the elements of an adjustable system. These two men are thus responsible for modern day roller skate and skateboard wheels, as well as the ball bearing race inclusion in velocipedes -- later to become motorbikes and automobiles.

Another improvement came in 1876, when the toe stop was first patented. This provided skaters with the ability to stop promptly upon tipping the skate onto the toe. Toe stops are still used today on most quad skates and on some types of inline skates.

Roller skates were being mass produced in America as early as the 1880s, the sport's first of several boom periods. Micajah C. Henley of Richmond, Indiana produced thousands of skates every week during peak sales. Henley skates were the first skate with adjustable tension via a screw, the ancestor of the kingbolt mechanism on modern quad skates.

Read more at Wikipedia.org