Roller skates

John Joseph Merlin's violin crashed into a mirror before anyone understood his invention—he was wearing it. The Belgian clockmaker rolled into a 1760 London masquerade ball at Carlisle House, playing violin while gliding on metal wheels attached to his feet. He had no way to steer. He had no way to stop. The resulting collision destroyed both instrument and looking glass, injured Merlin severely, and demonstrated simultaneously the promise and fatal flaw of putting wheels on human feet.

Merlin had invented inline skates a century before their time. His design placed two metal wheels in a line beneath each foot, mimicking the blade of an ice skate. The concept was sound—ice skates had proven that humans could balance on a narrow track. But ice provides friction for stopping and edges for turning. Smooth wooden floors forgive nothing.

The adjacent possible for wheeled personal transport had been building slowly. Ice skating was ancient, with bone skates dating back 4,000 years. Wheelwrights could produce small, precise wheels. But the critical missing element was a steering mechanism, and for a century, nobody solved it.

Inventors tried. In 1819, M. Petitbled patented inline skates in Paris. In 1823, Robert John Tyers created the "Rolito" with five wheels per skate. In 1849, Louis Legrange added four wheels in a 2x2 pattern. None achieved commercial success because none could turn reliably.

James Leonard Plimpton, a Massachusetts furniture dealer, cracked the problem in 1863. His insight was mechanical: mount pairs of wheels on pivoting trucks cushioned by rubber, allowing the skate to curve when the wearer shifted weight. This was the same physics that makes bicycles turn—lean into the curve—but applied to four independent wheels. Plimpton called them "parlor skates" and patented them on January 6, 1863.

Plimpton didn't just invent a product; he constructed an entire niche. He opened roller rinks in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. He established the first roller skating club with rules of conduct, lessons, and proficiency tests. He created a social context where his invention made sense. By the 1880s, "rinkomania" had swept America and Europe—the Chicago Casino rink held 1,000 skaters; the "Richmond Roll" became a dance craze.

The roller skate's history demonstrates punctuated equilibrium in consumer culture. Boom-bust cycles repeated: 1880s rinkomania, then decline; Great Depression revival with cheap mass-produced skates; 1970s roller disco when Black and gay skaters at New York's Empire Roller Disco invented jam skating, drawing celebrities from Cher to Madonna; 1990s inline explosion when Scott and Brennan Olson repurposed Merlin's original concept with modern materials, creating Rollerblade. Each boom required both technology and social context—the product alone was never sufficient.

The pattern persists. Quad skates never disappeared; they just cycled through subcultures—artistic skating, roller derby, disco revival. Inline skates displaced them in mainstream retail by 1995, only to see quads resurge on social media in the 2020s. The technology remains essentially unchanged from Plimpton's 1863 design. What evolves is who skates, where, and why—the cultural niche, not the mechanical solution.