Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-09)

Work

Wear

MIKE MAGNUSON

Gore-Tex breath-

able waterproof

membrane first

used in hiking boots

migrates to work

boots, keeping our

feet drier in the wet.

Work boots are in

their infancy. Greeks

make ones from

terra cotta. Romans

pound hobnails

through sandal soles

for traction.

Philadelphia cobbler

William Young pop-

ularizes separate

boots made for left

and right feet.

The Golden Years.

Charles Goodyear,

Jr. invents the Good-

year Welt to attach

boot upper to sole.

Red Wing popular-

izes the steel toe.

Italian mountaineer

Vitale Bramani

invents the Vibram

sole made of grippy,

lugged rubber.

O

NCE UPON A time,

there was a boy (me)

who was blessed, as

had been genera-

tions of his family,

with both the desire

and the strong back

to excel at digging

holes and carrying bags of cement

and mixing mortar and felling

trees and the like, and he was

always happiest when he was bust-

ing his ass, a situation wherein joy

meets ability and opportunity and

thus should have been a simple

path to bliss but was complicated

because the boy had also been

cursed with a weird second toe, a

Morton’s toe, sometimes called a

Viking toe, a condition impacting

roughly 20 percent of the world’s

population, wherein the second

toe is longer than the big toe.

This condition aff licted the

boy throughout his life and caused

him much misery, because not a

single work boot available at his

local Farm and Barn Store made

accommodation for a second toe

being longer than a big one.

Work boots, the boy came to

understand, had been invented

with the idea that a big toe pressed

into the shoe’s toe box and held the

The AdTec work

boots that finally

saved the boy’s

sorry second toe.

The Steel

To e B o o t

Lets You

Bust

Your Ass

Without

Busting Up

Your Feet

foot firmly in place and distrib-

uted the body’s weight properly.

This meant that the boy’s sec-

ond toe would have to step up, as

it were, and bear the responsibil-

ity of keeping the foot from sliding

forward in the shoe. Second toes

have never been the right men

for that job. So when the boy frol-

icked all day in the woods or on a

job site, that toe would mash into

shoe’s toe box and turn the toenail

black or bruise it so badly it bled.

This all made him very sad.

Now, this boy’s mind was not so

caught up in the rigor and reward

of physical labor that a work-

A Brief,

Glorious

History

of the

Work Boot

900 B.C. 1812 1869–1930s 1937 1982–TODAY

// B Y M I K E M A G N U S O N //

14

82 September 2019