Roller skating is travelling on smooth terrain with roller
skates. It is often done for recreation and as a sport,
and, more often than ice skating, it can be done as a
form of transportation. 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.
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 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 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, 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 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
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 skates
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 skates created
in the 1960s by the Chicago Roller Skate Company and,
seeing the potential for off-ice hockey training, set
about redesigning the skates using modern materials and
attaching ice hockey boots. A few years later Scott Olson
began heavily promoting the skates and launched the company
Rollerblade, Inc.. During the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the Rollerblade-branded skates became so successful that
they inspired many other companies to create similar inline
skates, and the inline design became more popular than
the traditional quads. The Rollerblade skates became synonymous
in the minds of many with "inline skates" and skating,
so much so that many people came to incorrectly call any
form of skating "Rollerblading," though this is a misuse
of the company's 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 skates. Other companies quickly followed,
and by the early 2000s the use of hard shell skates 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 skates, but the vast majority of skates on the
market today are either quad or standard inline design.