ROLLERSKATING
INFO

Skates generally come in two basic varieties: inline skating info, and traditional quad skating info, though some have experimented with a single-wheeled "quintessence skate" or other variations on the basic skate design.
The first recorded use of roller skating info was in a London stage performance in 1743. The inventor of this skate is lost to history. The first recorded skate inventor was Jean-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 skating info were similar to today's inline skating info, but they were not very maneuverable; it was very difficult with these skating info 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, and this allowed the skater to skate a curve just by leaning to one side. It was a huge success, so much so 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 skating info as a pleasurable pastime took place in Birmingham, England in 1876 when William Bown patented a design for the wheels of roller skating info. 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 skating info and on some types of inline skating info.
Roller skating info 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 skating info every week during peak sales. Henley skating info were the first skate with adjustable tension via a screw, the ancestor of the kingbolt mechanism on modern quad skating info.

An advert for an early 20th centry model which fit over regular shoes.
In 1884 Levant M. Richardson received a patent for the use of steel ball bearings in skate wheels so as to reduce friction. This also allowed skaters to increase speed with minimum effort. In 1898, Richardson started the Richardson Ball Bearing and Skate Company, which provided skating info to most professional skate racers of the time, including Harley Davidson (no relation to the Harley-Davidson motorcycle brand). (Turner and Zaidman, 1997).
The design of the quad skate has remained essentially unchanged since then, and in fact remained as the dominant roller skate design until nearly the end of the 20th century.
In 1979 Scott Olson and Brennan Olson of Minneapolis, Minnesota came across a pair of inline skating info created in the 1960s by the Chicago Roller Skate Company and, seeing the potential for off-ice hockey training, set about redesigning the skating info using modern materials and attaching ice hockey boots. A few years later Scott Olson began heavily promoting the skating info and launched the company Rollerblade, Inc.. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Rollerblade-branded skating info became so successful that they inspired many other companies to create similar inline skating info, and the inline design became more popular than the traditional quads. The Rollerblade skating info became synonymous in the minds of many with "inline skating info" and skating, so much so that many people came to call any form of skating "Rollerblading," thus becoming a genericized trademark.
For much of the 1980s and into the 1990s, inline skate models typically sold for general public use employed a hard plastic boot, similar to ski boots. In or about 1995, "soft boot" designs were introduced to the market, primarily by the sporting goods firm K2 Inc., and promoted for use as fitness skating info. Other companies quickly followed, and by the early 2000s the use of hard shell skating info became primarily limited to the aggressive skating discipline.
The single-wheel "quintessence skate" was made in 1988 by Miyshael F. Gailson of Caples Lake Resort, California, for the purpose of cross-country ski skating and telemark skiing training. Other skate designs have been experimented with over the years, including two wheeled (heel and toe) inline skating info, but the vast majority of skating info on the market today are either quad or standard inline design.

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ROLLERSKATING INFO

ROLLERSKATING
INFO