Equipment

Photo above: Walter Amstutz led the transition from free-heel to locked-heel skiing. In 1928, he pioneered a spring to control heel-lift, soon known as the “Amstutz spring.” Reduced heel-lift helped spark the parallel turn revolution. Photo courtesy Ivan Wagner, Swiss Academic Ski Club

From 1929 to 1932, steel edges and locked-down heels transformed downhill and slalom racing into the high-speed alpine sports we love today.

It’s often said that alpine skiing was born in 1892, when Matthias Zdarsky experimented with skis adapted for steeper terrain, or perhaps with Christof Iselin’s 1893 ascent, with Jacques Jenny, of the Schilt in Switzerland.

But Zdarsky, Iselin and their heirs—including Hannes Schneider—were free-heel skiers and today we would lump them in with the nordic crowd. The sport we recognize as alpine skiing began with a pair of inventions that transformed downhill and slalom racing over the course of three winters, from 1929 to 1932.

Racers in Austria and Switzerland were primed for alpine competition, but lacked the tools for downhill speed. Kitzbühel held its first Hahnenkamm downhill in April 1906, won by Sebastian Monitzer at an average speed of 14 mph. Arnold Lunn launched the Kandahar Cup at Crans-Montana in 1911. After the Great War, Lunn headquartered at Mürren and in January 1924 founded the Kandahar Ski Club. This prompted Walter Amstutz and a few friends to launch the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) the following month. Lunn intended the Kandahar to promote racing amongst his British guests—a rowdy assortment of public school Old Boys. Another contingent of sporting toffs infested the neighboring town of Wengen. Rivalry between the groups led the Wengen chaps, in 1925, to create their own ski-racing club. Because a railway ran partway up the Lauberhorn, the Wengen skiers disdained climbing. They called themselves the Downhill Only Ski Club (DHO).

 

 

Downhill and slalom racing were still fringe sports, pursued by a few dozen people at half a dozen meets each year. Lunn often said it was just good fun, and no one took it seriously. The equipment—hickory or ash skis without edges, and bindings with leather straps—worked well only in soft snow. Downhills were gateless route-finding exercises. Winning time on a typical two-mile downhill might be 15 or 20 minutes, for an average speed around 15 mph. Low speeds meant that falls, while common, rarely produced serious injury. Racers expected to fall, get back up, and finish. Slaloms were usually set to produce a one-minute winning time, but every gate required an exaggerated stem turn. A smooth stem christie was the mark of an expert skier.

On hard snow, edgeless hickory skis slipped and skidded uncontrollably. Skiers dreaded any traverse across an icy or crusted steilhang. In 1931 Christian Rubi, director of the Wengen ski school and a founder of the Lauberhorn race, recalled the terror of wooden edges:

“Touring skiers are on a Whitsun tour in the high mountains. They take their skis to the summit, and prepare to descend. Then comes the traverse on the hard firn, above the bergschrund. One of them slips, his edges don’t grip, he falls, slides, tries to stop in vain, slips headfirst and disappears into the coal-black night of the yawning crevasse – After half an hour, rescue is at hand. Someone dives into the cold depths on a double rope. There the victim dangles head-down from his ski bindings, face bloody. . .”

 

 

In December 1917, the mountaineer and ski jumper Rudolf Lettner had just such a scare during a solo tour on the Tennenbirge south of Salzburg. Lettner was able to self-arrest, stopping a potentially fatal slide by using the steel tip of his bamboo pole. Back at his accounting job, Lettner began doodling designs for steel edges. It took nearly a decade to figure out how to armor the skis without making them too stiff, but he filed a patent in 1926 for what we now call the segmented edge: short strips of carbon steel screwed to the edge of the ski-sole in a mortised channel.

Using steel edges, Lettner’s daughter Kathe finished second in downhill at the very first Austrian championships in 1928 (she reached the podium four more times in the next six years). Another early adopter was the 18-year-old ski instructor Toni Seelos of Seefeld, who used Lettner edges when he won a 1929 slalom at Seegrube—by five seconds.

Skiers outside of Austria heard about metal edges, but were skeptical. In 1927, Tom Fox of the DHO acquired a set of Lettners, but other Brits scoffed. Segmented edges looked fragile. Besides, 120 screws might weaken the ski. Arnold Lunn, after grumbling that some Englishman had tried unsatisfactory steel edges in the early ’20s, ran articles in the British Ski Yearbook suggesting that they made skis heavy, dragged in the snow, and inhibited turning. Beginners, he wrote, should by no means use metal edges. Over the next decade, experiments were made with continuous edges of brass and aluminum (continuous edges of steel proved far too stiff).

However, Lettner’s neighbors took notice. A handful of racers from the Innsbruck ski club saw an opportunity and on January 10-12, 1930, at Davos, they beat the pants off everyone at the second World Inter-University Winter Games. On Lettner edges, the Innsbruck boys took four of the top five places in slalom (and eight of the top 15 spots), plus the top four places in downhill. Notable were the Lantschner brothers, Gustav (Guzzi), Otto and Helmuth, who took first, second and fourth in downhill; Otto won the slalom with Helmuth fifth. On January 15, three days after the Davos triumph, Guzzi and Otto each went 65.5mph at the first Flying Kilometer, organized by Walter Amstutz at St. Moritz. They did it on jumping skis without steel edges, though they obviously hit the wax.

The Lantschners were hot but they had not previously been world-beaters. Only a year earlier, Guzzi came fourth in the 1929 Arlberg-Kandahar downhill and Otto tenth in the slalom.

It was obvious after the January 1930 races that steel edges were now essential for winning. Top “runners” scrambled for Lettner edges. The wealthy Brits of the Kandahar and DHO clubs were happy to pay a carpenter about $100 (in today’s money) to mortise their skis and sink about 120 screws.

 

 

In Wengen, Christian Rubi and Ernst Gertsch were convinced. Seeking to prove that local Swiss skiers could beat the Brits, they were busy organizing the first-ever running of the Lauberhorn, set for February 2-3. But Gertsch found time to take over the workbench at his father’s ski shop and install the new edges.

So equipped, they were able to beat the Lantschners. Rubi won the downhill, with three Brits following: Col. L.F.W. Jackson, then Bill Bracken, founder of the Mürren ski school, with Tom Fox third. Guzzi Lantschner settled for fifth, with Gertsch seventh.

The next day, Gertsch tied for the slalom win with Bracken. The next three places belonged to Innsbruck skiers, including Guzzi Lantschner in fourth, followed by Fox and Rubi. Bracken, who had grown up skiing in St. Anton, thus became the first Lauberhorn combined champion.

Over the space of three weeks, all the top alpine racers in Europe had converted to steel edges.

 

 

In the Illustrated Sportsman and Dramatic News (London), Arnold Lunn wrote “The Austrian team at the Winter University Games last year had all provided themselves with steel-edged skis, and they scored a run-away victory in the slalom. Again, steel edges had a great triumph in the race for the Lauberhorn Cup which was held at Wengen in the middle of February. The snow in the Devil’s Gap was the nearest thing to genuine ice that I have seen on the lower hills in winter since I was nearly killed twenty-five years ago on a cow-mountain above Adelboden. The contrast between the ease and security of the racers with steel edges and the slithering helplessness of the other competitors was most impressive.” Lunn predicted universal adoption of metal edges and recommended armor for the lower legs to prevent lacerations.

Scotsman David A.G. Pearson of the DHO reported to Ski Notes and Queries (London), “At my particular sports shop in Wengen the first supply [of edges] was sold out almost immediately, and I had to wait some days before a new stock came in. I believe that our friends at Mürren were as keen as we were.” Pearson warned that “A certain amount of skill is needed for their use. . . . If, in doing a Christiania one gets for a fraction of time on to the outside edge of the lower ski, one can hardly avoid going over like a shot rabbit . . .” This may be the first reference in print to catching an edge.

In late February, after years of lobbying, Lunn finally persuaded the FIS to sanction alpine races (some accounts say that Walter Amstutz did most of the talking on Lunn’s behalf).

 

 

Meanwhile, a parallel revolution was brewing. The switch from free-heel to locked-heel skiing began when Walter Amstutz took a close look at his bindings. Amstutz, like nearly every ski racer of his era, used a steel toe iron (Eriksen and Attenhofer Alpina were the popular brands) with leather straps over the toe and around the heel. Rotational control, not to mention what we would today call leverage control, was imprecise at best. In 1928, Amstutz introduced a steel coil spring to control heel-lift. The spring attached at one end to a leather strap above the ankle, and at the other end via a detachable clip to the top of the ski, about six inches behind the boot heel.

Arnold Lunn considered this a brilliant innovation. Beginning in 1929 nearly all top racers adopted the spring or some variant—less expensive competing versions used rubber straps. Decades later, Dick Durrance told Skiing Magazine’s Doug Pfeiffer, “The Amstutz springs were great. They held your boot to the ski. . . . we did add some strips of innertube for better tension.” By tension, Durrance meant heel hold-down.

Better control of the boot heel optimized the advantage of steel edges. Toni Seelos figured out how to cinch down his leather binding-straps to hold his heel solidly to the ski-top. He practiced jumping his ski tails around close-set slalom gates, using plenty of vorlage (forward lean) to get the tails off the snow so he could swing them sideways, in parallel, and land going in the new direction. The technique eliminated the draggy stem. Gradually he refined the movement, moving the tails sideways as a unit, without a visible hop.

 

 

Amstutz’ friend Guido Reuge, a mechanical engineering graduate of ETH Zurich, went one better. With his brother Henri, in 1928 he cobbled up a new binding, the first to use a steel cable to replace leather straps. The cable tightened around the boot heel with a Bildstein lever across the back of the boot (the lever was later moved out ahead of the toe iron, where a skier could reach it easily for binding entry and exit). But the real innovation was a set of clips

 

 

screwed to the sidewalls ahead of the boot heel. With the cable routed under the clips, the boot heel was clamped to the top of the ski for downhill skiing—English speakers called this effect “pull-down.” With the cable routed above the clips, you had a free-heel binding for climbing, touring and telemark. Reuge called this the Kandahar binding. He received a patent and began selling it in 1932. The two new technologies—steel edges and locked-heels—worked perfectly in concert, enabling all forms of stemless turning.

Meanwhile, Seelos perfected his skidless parallel turn. The concept was new and unique: No practitioner of Arlberg had ever thought of it. As late as 1933, Charley Proctor wrote in The Art of Skiing that the ultimate downhill turn was the “pure Christiana,” which skidded both skis.

That year Seelos brought his new turn to the FIS World Championships and won the two-run slalom by nine seconds over stem-turning Guzzi Lantschner. (For the full story of the Seelos turn, see “Anton Seelos” by John Fry, in the January-February 2013 issue of Skiing Heritage.) Seelos instantly transformed from ski instructor to international coach, and over the next two decades taught parallel turns to Olympic and world champions from Christl Cranz and Franz Pfnur to Toni Matt, Emile Allais and Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Decades later Durrance told John Jerome: “Seelos . . . developed this knack for getting through slalom gates like an eel. In the first FIS that he ran I think he won the slalom by something like thirteen seconds. He was head and shoulders above anybody else. He was my idol when I left Germany [in 1933]. . . With nothing but your weight shift you cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you.”

 

 

“I thought I’d just start skiing slalom like Seelos and I’d beat anybody,” Durrance said. If “anybody” meant any North American, he was right. But he couldn’t beat another Seelos fan, the professional Hannes Schroll, winner of the 1934 Marmolada downhill and new ski school director at Yosemite.

Like the steel edge, the Kandahar binding became an instant must-have for alpine racing, and then for all alpine skiers. The binding was manufactured under license, or simply copied, by numerous companies around the world. Under a variety of brand names (for instance, Salomon Lift) it remained the standard alpine heel binding design into the 1960s, long after the Eriksen-style toe iron was replaced by lateral-release toes. Some of the top racers, including Durrance, used both the Kandahar and the Amstutz spring for extra pull-down.

With new technology, race times tumbled. In 1929 at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke downhill, Charley Proctor set the fast time of 11 minutes, 59 seconds on the 2.6-mile course (average speed 13mph). He had hickory edges and free-heel bindings. By 1933, with steel edges and Kandahar bindings, he had it down to 7:22 for an average 20.25mph.

In 1930 the Lauberhorn start moved up to the summit, and assumed its modern length of 4.4km (2.7 miles). Christian Rubi won that race in 4:30.00, for an average speed with steel edges of 36 mph. In 1932, with heels locked, Fritz Steuri knocked 20 seconds off that time for an average speed of 38.9 mph.

Top speeds were getting interesting, and alpine racing became a spectator sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch, 50,000 people turned out to watch the slalom. The winner was Franz Pfnur. But there was a faster skier on the course. Toni Seelos, ineligible to race because he was a professional instructor and coach, was the forerunner. He beat Pfnur by five
seconds.

Pretty soon skiers didn’t even have to unlock their heels to reach the race start. A few resort hotels had already built rack railways and Switzerland’s first cable-pulled rail car, or funi, opened in 1924 at Crans, the first cable tram in Engleberg in 1927, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkammbahn in 1928, and Ernst Constam’s T-bar at Davos in 1934. The race was on for uphill transportation, and alpine skiing had conquered Europe. 

Sources for this article include numerous reports in Der Schneehase and in the British, Canadian and American Ski Year Books for the years 1928 through 1939. Thanks to Einar Sunde for scanning many of these articles from his own library. Dick Durrance quotes from The Man on the Medal by John Jerome and from Skiing Magazine. More details from Snow, Sun and Stars, edited by Michael Lutscher. 

Other photo credits for the print edition: Guzzi Lantschner photo from Getty Images; Toni Seelos photo source unknown.

Finally perfected after 30 years, the carving ski failed to gain a popular following. In its place, we got a ski that has made resort slopes less safe.
By Jackson Hogen

For most of modern skiing’s history, the execution of a perfect turn has been an unobtainable ideal. Leather boots and wooden skis weren’t able to initiate and sustain a continuous, seamless carve. In the January 1967 issue of SKI magazine, Olympic gold medalist and Jackson Hole ski-school director Pepi Stiegler described a teaching method of getting the skis on edge so “the skis are literally carving the turn for you.” He called it the “Moment of Truth on Skis.” 

“To start the turn, the skier should have the feeling of his weight going forward on the uphill ski and twisting the skis downhill. The resulting sensation is of a drift in the direction of the turn. At some split second during this process, the skier senses a moment to apply the edges and start the skis carving.”

At the time, the invention of plastic boots and the use of metal and fiberglass in ski design had brought the grail of the carved turn within reach. Stiegler, who became the NASTAR national pacesetter, clearly saw the desirability of recreational skiers knowing how to carve a turn. 

The year before he died, the incomparable Stein Eriksen sent ski historian John Fry a package that included several photos of Stein in his iconic reverse-shoulder stance, along with a letter in which Eriksen asked Fry whether he should be considered the inventor of the carved turn. Ever the diplomat, Fry replied that he doubted an uninterrupted carve was possible on 1950s-era equipment, “but if anyone could do it, it would be you.”...

Seven decades ago, Roger Sylvand and Emile Allais invented a safer new way to get injured skiers off the mountain.

By Thomas Sylvand

During the summer of 2019, Bonneville, the ski-resort town in the French Alps, lost a landmark. The factory Traineau Sylvand (Sylvand Sleds) was torn down to make way for real estate development.

For six decades, beginning in 1947, that factory produced rescue sleds (traineaux de secours) for ski patrols across France and around the world. The inventor of that sled was my grandfather, Roger Sylvand. He created the prototype at the request of Emile Allais, the world champion skier who was the guiding light for French ski resort development in the post-war years.

The Sylvand family has lived in the high mountains for many generations. My great-grandfather Louis, wounded in World War I, moved his young family to Praz-sur-Arly, just outside Megève, in 1922, when Roger was 11 years old.

As my father, François, tells the story, Roger was greatly impressed by Robert Flaherty’s classic documentary Nanook of the North, and especially fascinated with the dogsleds. He built his own sled, from barrel staves, and tested it with his infant brother André as passenger. Naturally, the sled came to pieces on a curbstone. Fortunately, André was wrapped in layers and layers of swaddling, and came to no harm. Roger suffered a severe scolding.

The family lived in a hillside cottage. Like the neighbors, in winter they hauled groceries and firewood on sleds and sledges, and throughout the 1920s witnessed the rapid growth of alpine skiing (Megève was the first of the French lift-served resorts). As a teenager, Roger helped to set up the first ski-tows, on land owned by cousins, and drove buses hauling skiers uphill. He became an inventive mechanic, rigging up a rack-and-pinion system to simultaneously operate all the window-shutters on one side of the cottage. In the years leading up to World War II, he served in the mountain artillery and was tasked with devising over-the-snow transport solutions. He got to build more sleds.

Hilaire Evrard, a maternal uncle, owned a hardware store in Megève and an up-to-date factory in Bonneville that produced steel cable and elevator machinery, plus skis sold under the Brévent, Buet and La Para brands, and the Swiss-designed “Luge de Megève.” Evrard died suddenly in 1946. The family split up the businesses—the Evrards took over the hardware store and Roger Sylvand managed the factory, gradually buying ownership. He dropped the cable and elevator operations to focus on wood products: skis and sleds.

Roger set to work modernizing the carpentry operations. After a loose router bit nearly killed him, he focused on safety issues, ventilating sawdust to the basement to reduce fire hazard, installing an elaborate fire-alarm system he designed himself, and even setting up a system to stop the machinery automatically whenever a stranger came through the door.

It was an era of rapid innovation in ski resort management. Emile Allais returned from the Americas, where he had designed new trail systems and set up new ski schools. He brought with him Howard Head’s new metal skis, and a lot of great ideas about mechanical slope grooming and ski patrol operations.

In consultation with Allais, in 1947 Roger Sylvand came up with a great improvement for ski patrol rescue sleds—a simple and robust braking system that would allow a single patroller to bring the sled down safely on most pistes. Very simply, he put the meter-long steering handles on hinges, and when the steering skier pressed the handles down, they levered a pair of steel claws into the snow (or ice), slowing the rig efficiently. The claws were spring-loaded so as to retract when pressure was released on the handles. He applied for a patent in 1950, and it was granted in 1952. Allais helped to sell the system to other European ski patrols. In 1954, Allais demonstrated the new sled at a convention in Davos, and it won a gold medal. 

Photo top of page: Roger Sylvand encourages his son François to demonstrate how little muscle it took to operate the rescue-sled prototype.

The sled, made of hardwood, aluminum and steel, with a thin canvas-covered mattress, was light and tough enough to be handled by one “pisteur” in most skiable terrain. It sold well, and kept the factory operating long after wooden skis and luges went defunct.

Even after retiring, my grandfather kept a close eye on the factory until his death in 1995, and it continued to produce sleds until closing in 2008. Recently the village of Praz-sur-Arly opened a new medical clinic, Chalet Sylvand, named in his honor.

ISHA president Seth Masia translated this story from its original French version and added editorial notes and clarifications.

A Short History of Rescue Sleds

The first patent for a sled with a braking system was issued in 1869 to Constantine de Bodisco, of St. Petersburg, Russia, who created a heavy iron contraption for coasting down icy hillsides. A spring-loaded steel plunger was mounted on the steel runners on either side. A rider would press down on the knob at the top of the plunger to engage the bottom end into the ice. Thus could a gentleman calm the nerves of his lady passenger.

The need for rescue sleds became evident during World War I, especially for use in the bloody alpine battles between Italy and Austria. Beginning in 1914, dozens of patents were issued for devices to mount a canvas stretcher onto a pair of skis, presumably the skis belonging to the evacuee. The inventors were Swiss, Austrian, Canadian, Norwegian, American and French. None of these systems addressed braking. On a schuss, ski-borne operators had to control speed by wedging or side-slipping. As alpine skiing developed in North America during the 1930s, early ski patrollers rigged toboggans with a variety of steering-handles and dragging-chain braking systems.

Also during the 1930s, Finnish skiers used newly available aluminum sheeting to bang together a lightweight trough-shaped sled they called an akja. It was designed to float boat-like in deep snow, and with steel runners it could be safely handled on ice. With a skier at each end, it could haul munitions cross-country, and was so used during the Winter War with Russia in 1938. The German Army took note and stamped out akjas for its own mountain troops, going so far as to mount machine guns on some. Thus came the akja to Austria, where it is still manufactured, thousands per year, for ski patrols around the world. Austrian mountaineer Kurt Beam, who emigrated to Seattle in 1941 and became a fixture in ski patrolling, introduced the akja to North America in time for the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics.

In 1940, soldiers of the nascent 10th Mountain Division came up with their own rescue-and-cargo toboggans. Lieutenant Colonel Avery Cochran, who had begun working with dogsleds in Alaska in 1939, in 1943 was issued a patent on behalf of the 10th’s Mountain’s rescue sled—a toboggan equipped with a light steel framework at each end, attached via quick-linking rods to belts worn by skiers in front and in back. Thus the troopers had their arms free for the use of poles in cross-country skiing.

Then, in 1946, 10th Mountain veteran Nelson Bennett returned to his job as ski patrol director at Sun Valley and began working on his own sled design. Introduced in 1948, the Bennett sled used a wooden toboggan stabilized with a couple of steel skegs at the back corners, a detachable wire-mesh Stokes litter, and folding or removable steering steering arms. Braking was aided by a drag chain under the nose of the sled, controlled by the pilot with a rope. Not only could it be piloted by a single patroller, it could be uploaded on a single chair by the same patroller. It became a standard item of equipment at North American resorts.  —Seth Masia

 

 

From the January 2019 issue of Skiing History magazine

As life returned to normal after World War II, skiers on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to replace their pre-war equipment. The first order of business was to dump the old leg-breaking Kandahar bindings, with their solid toe irons and long-thong wraps designed to support the ankle and prevent heel release. In 1948 the French sporting goods manufacturer Jean Beyl introduced a pivoting plate meant to prevent spiral fractures of the tibia. It didn’t release from the ski but could pivot 360 degrees in a twisting fall. By 1950 he had talked a number of French racers into using the “Antifracture” plate.

In the afterglow of liberation, the French still referred to U.S. soldiers as “Amis” (“friends”). American products had a reputation for quality and were in high demand. French companies sent production engineers to visit U.S. factories for guidance on rebuilding their own industries. Beyl wanted to give his new ski binding an American-sounding name. Besides, North America might become a healthy export market someday.

Beyl noticed that American soldiers got weekly magazines with punchy names like Time, Life and Look. He chose Look as the corporate name, after the large-format photo magazine. And he replaced the boot-length plate with an easier-to mount high-elasticity toe unit paired with a cable heel system. He called the new toe Nevada, another word evoking America despite its Spanish origin (it means “snowy mountain”).

As a product name, Look Nevada had a spectacular run. Its next redesign, in 1962, became the Nevada II and paired with the step-in Grand Prix turntable heel. That combination campaigned into the 1980s.

Beyl wasn’t finished with American magazines. In 1983 he designed Look’s releasing-clip bicycle pedal. After leaving the company, in 1987 he created an improved pedal, and called it Time. –Seth Masia

Who made the first ski boots without laces? Henke in 1955, right?

Wrong. In the postwar years, Joseph Mauron, a 21-year-old Swiss shoemaker, had had it with frozen laces on double-laced boots. He experimented with alternate systems, and settled on a clever design with two buckled straps: the first one fastened down a snow-proof cover (what we would today call the external tongue), and the second held the foot firmly in place and kept the heel down in the boot. That second strap crossed the instep three times and tightened around the Achilles for better purchase on the heel.
Introduced in 1948, the Mauron boot that year received the Diplôme de Vermeil medal from the International Leather Bureau in Paris, and the following year a gold medal from the International Leather Organization in London. Mauron lacked the resources to market the boot successfully. He died in 1993.

For the record, Heierling used a similar instep-and-heel strap in 1941 to supplement a laced double-boot. In 1953, the Swiss ski racer and stunt pilot Hans Martin patented his over-center buckle, and licensed it to Henke, already one of the world’s leading boot factories. Henke introduced the laceless buckle boot in 1955, to worldwide acclaim. —Luzi Hitz

The MV2, designed by Jean Liard and introduced in 1964, was a magnificent giant slalom ski, raced to a downhill win at Morzine that winter by Mariel Goitschel, and to World Championship gold medals at Portillo, in 1966, by Goitschel and Guy Périllat. It was unique in its era for having not two but three layers of aluminum -- specifically a hard alloy of Aluminum, zinc and copper called Zicral. Like all top racing skis of the late 1960s, it had a wood core with aluminum layers top and bottom, but the core was reinforced with a third sheet of aluminum, formed into a “hat-section” rib the factory called an omega, for its rough resemblance to the Greek letter Ω. That rib reinforced the MV2 in torsional stiffness, giving it tremendous edgehold when turning on ice.

Historically, the MV2 is unique, blending American and French inventions.

The story begins at the Vought-Sikorsky aircraft factory in Connecticut, in 1945. The factory is best known for the Vought F4U Corsair fighter, one of the fastest and, piloted by U.S. Marine aviators, most capable aircraft of World War II. As it became clear that the end of the war was near, Vought-Sikorsky managers expected aircraft orders to drop sharply, so they looked around for consumer products they could build and sell. Because the company knew how to laminate aluminum to balsa wood, some bright soul decided that Vought could build skis. The project was handed to three of the company’s engineers, who happened to be skiers: Arthur Hunt, Wayne Pearce and Dave Richey. In short order they created the prototype of an aluminum “sandwich” ski -- a lightweight wood core between aluminum top and bottom sheet. The Vought factory ran off 1000 pairs and created the brand name Truflex. It was the first mass-produced aluminum ski.

By 1946, as the French and other European air forces rebuilt after the war, orders flowed in for the Corsair, and the company became busy building helicopters. The ski wasn’t needed, and management killed the Truflex project. Hunt, Pearce and Richey quit and formed their own ski company, introducing the Alu 60 in 1947. In order not to violate the Vought patent, they dropped the wood core and made their ski from two layers of aluminum: a flat base sheet and the hat-section topskin to reinforce it and control flex (see cross-section drawing, top of page). The trio then invented the celluloid-plastic yellow TEY Tape, applied to the aluminum base to improve glide speed (TEY referred to the last letters of their names). Then they invented the snow gun,  which was so successful that they quit making skis. But Adolf Attenhofer, who owned a sizeable ski factory in Switzerland, bought the Alu 60 patent and began marketing the ski as the Attenhofer Metallic. He licensed manufacturing to the French sporting goods firm Charles Dieupart & Fils, who created the Aluflex brand. By adding a strip of wood under the hat-section top, Dieupart smoothed out the ski’s ride and vibration. Beginning in 1954, Aluflex was a big hit in France. Former World Champion James Couttet put his name on it. Aluflex and Couttet skis were widely adopted by ski instructors and even by the French Army’s mountain troops. Actual manufacturer was the metal-products company Les Ressorts du Nord (Northern Springs – as in auto suspensions).

In the mid-50s, fiberglass became available in commercial quantities. In France, Paul Michal’s Dynamic factory, building great wooden slalom skis since 1931, spent seven years experimenting with the new material and learned how to wrap wet fiberglass around a wood core to create, with the help of Charles Bozon, the VR7 of 1960 (VR for verre résine, or resin glass, 7 for the development time). The ski hit the race circuit in 1962 and was an instant success. That year Aluflex formed a partnership with ski-binding distributor Claude Joseph, who had begun building fiberglass skis under the company name Les Plastiques Synthetiques. Ressorts du Nord built a new factory in Sallanches, just down-valley from Chamonix. The glass ski was named Starflex, to be marketed alongside Aluflex.

The chief engineer at the Sallanches factory was Jean “Jeannot” Liard. He developed the Starflex fiberglass ski into a slalom model called the Compound RG5 (RG for resin glass, an Anglicized tribute to the VR7). Air bubbles in the resin caused the tips to break. Liard called on engineers from Dynamic to help iron out the production problem. In order to repair the RG5 reputation, the new company paid Michal for the right to put a Dynamic seal of approval on every RG ski -- then launched the Dynastar brand. Michal and his team weren’t amused by the copy-cat branding, and killed the consulting relationship. Meanwhile, Charles Dieupart fell out with Ressorts du Nord and split, taking Aluflex with him. His new venture didn't last long.

Meanwhile Liard needed a new aluminum ski. Onto the existing Aluflex structure (flat aluminum base, hat-section aluminum top rib) he added a flat aluminum topsheet. The ski now contained three layers of Zicral aluminum and three strips of wood (one under the “hat” rib, one on each side). It was stable, precise and very fast. Liard named the ski MV2 for “mass times velocity squared,” the formula for calculating energy. And that’s the ski you’re looking at here – a direct descendent of the Connecticut-built Alu 60 of 1947. –Seth Masia, International Skiing History Association

This article is based on information from several sources, chiefly Une histoire du ski, by Franck Cochoy; “Eight Classics,” by Morten Lund (SKI Magazine, January 1986); interviews with Michel Arpin and Adrien Duvillard (both now deceased); and Jean Liard. Many thanks to Jean-François Lanvers for interviewing Liard.

Early boot design was dictated by binding design. The modern era introduced new materials, fit and height that led to a revolution in alpine technique.

BY SETH MASIA

In the beginning, Norwegian farmers and hunters used their daily work shoes when skiing. Until the 1840s, the typical ski binding was a simple leather strap that passed across the front of the boot. The main design concern was to keep the inside of the boot dry, so the socks could do their job of insulating the foot. Water repellency depended on tough top-grain leather liberally slathered with a mixture of wax and animal fat. This combination of a flexible boot, simple binding, and skis without steel edges was useful mainly for running across meadows and gently rolling woodland, and an occasional sporting ski jump. The simple forefoot strap imposed a limit on running performance: If the skier kicked back too briskly, the boot could slip backward out of the strap. Saami skiers—the original Lapplanders—had a solution for this: They built a vertical lip onto the toe of their reindeer-hide boot, to keep it from sliding back through the binding strap. Sometimes this lip became an exaggerated curled-up toe; Santa’s elves are often depicted wearing Saami boots.

When skiing became a sport, and skiers began to tackle steeper hillsides and real jumps, skiers needed better control of both steering and edging. Bindings grew stiffer, with the invention around 1840 of the heel strap to pull the boot firmly forward into the toe strap. Sondre Norheim and his friends, for instance, devised a heel-strap binding of braided willow. When Fridtjof Nansen equipped his team for the 1888 crossing of Greenland, the Saami-style toe was still in use, but a buckle loop had been added to keep the heel strap in place.

The toe strap then evolved into the rigid steel toe iron, and the heel strap became more robust in order to push the boot firmly into the toe iron. These developments required a boot with a stiffer, heavier sole, usually reinforced with a wooden shank to resist crumpling under the forward pressure of the heel strap. The heavy sole was extended front and back to provide purchase for the toe iron and heel strap. Climbing boots of the era were made on a similar pattern to accommodate crampons, but had steel cleats or calks nailed to the soles for traction, which would have destroyed any wooden ski top in short order.

From village cobbler to mass production

Until the 1870s, all of these boots were handmade by local cobblers. Mass production of military boots, nailed and screwed together mechanically, became common in England during the Napoleonic Wars, and during America’s Civil War, Union troops were equipped with mass-produced boots made to the first-ever standard sizing system. These developments didn’t really affect ski boot design. Because climbers and skiers ordered their boots from someone they knew in the village, nearly all ski boots were, in fact, custom made—the cobbler measured your foot before starting work. 

This changed with the introduction, in the United States, of industrial sewing machines and mass-produced shoes and boots. The key inventions were the Goodyear welt, developed beginning in 1865 by mechanics working for Charles Goodyear, Jr.; and the automatic lasting machine, patented in 1883 by Jan Matzeliger. The inventions were promptly put to work in New England’s mill towns. By 1876, the G.H. Bass boot factory in Portland, Maine, cranked out a thousand pairs of shoes and work boots every day. European shoe factories sprang up using the new industrial sewing equipment, and by 1885 companies in Switzerland, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy shipped thousands of shoes and boots daily. Around the turn of the century, the first mass-produced leather ski boots appeared in sporting goods catalogs.

The first alpine boots

For a quarter century thereafter, the typical ski boot was just a lace-up work boot with a roomy box toe (to accommodate those wool socks) and an extended sole to mate with the heel-strap binding of the era. Then, in 1928, the Swiss ski racer Guido Reuge invented a cable binding designed to hold the heel down for alpine skiing. He named the binding after the Kandahar series of alpine ski races. 

The powerful steel cable and front-throw adjuster cranked hard on the boot sole, which had to be stiffened considerably. At this point, alpine ski boot design diverged from nordic boots. Boots for cross-country racing and ski jumping needed a flexible sole. But because alpine racing didn’t require the boot to flex at the ball of the foot, the sole could be built with a stiff full-length shank. And because alpine skiers wanted the foot held firmly down on the ski, bootmakers created an instep strap. Coincidentally, 1928 was the year the mountaineer Rudolf Lettner invented the segmented steel edge for alpine skis. Suddenly, skis could be controlled on steep and icy faces—if your boots were stiff enough to drive the edges.

Most skiers used inexpensive mass-produced ski boots, but racers, instructors and wealthier sportsmen ordered their boots custom-made, from ski-town cobblers in the Alps. A few of these craftsmen, like Peter Limmer Sr., set up shop in America. 

After World War II, custom bootmakers developed the double boot, with a soft and comfy lace-up inner boot protected and stiffened by a thick bull-hide outer casing laced with heavy-duty corset hooks. The complex design was difficult to reproduce with machines, and the European cottage industry adapted to mass production of hand-stitched leather boots. Companies like Henke in Switzerland, Le Trappeur in France and Nordica in Italy employed hundreds of workers to export hand-stitched boots.

With the commercialization of ski boots came the first serious marketing campaigns, and the first athlete endorsements. In 1950, when the Nordica shoe factory in Montebelluna, Italy, sold its first ski boots, the company had the good fortune to equip Zeno Colò, who won two World Championships at Aspen that winter. The publicity put Nordica on the map.

Even with several layers, leather boots were not very waterproof, warm or durable. If you skied more than a few days a year, boots quickly grew soft and sloppy. An aggressive skier needed new boots each winter, an expensive proposition. It was possible to soak leather in glue and make it stiff as a board, but then the boot couldn’t be laced closed, and wouldn’t adapt to the shape of the foot. Even reinforced boots got wet and softened steadily. Like many top racers, Jean-Claude Killy loaned boots to friends for breaking in. When the boots were “seasoned”—comfortable but not yet soft—they were good for a few races. Something better was needed.

Buckles and wedeln

A partial solution to making boots stiffer and more durable arrived in 1954, when Swiss bike racer and stunt pilot Hans Martin patented the ski boot buckle. His original patent specified a quick-adjust “lacing system” with overlapping boot flaps, to allow loosening for climbing and tightening for descents. Martin licensed the patent to Henke, and went to work helping to design their boots. The buckle was far more powerful than any set of laces and could close a very stiff boot. Quick, short turns became possible, and the tail-wagging wedeln technique became popular in ski schools around the world. To make boots even stiffer, bootmakers added internal plastic heel cups and cuff reinforcements.

Plastics and edging power

Then, during the half-decade from 1966 to 1972, everything changed. By 1962, European bootmakers were experimenting with sheets of plastic laminated to the outer leather for waterproofing and improved durability. At the same time, Bob Lange and Dave Luensmann made the first vacuum-molded plastic boot shell, and the following year figured out how to mold it from liquid urethane (see “50 Years of Lange” in the March-April 2015 issue of Skiing History).  Nordica’s Aldo Vaccari—a chemical engineer by training—saw the Lange boot and quickly figured out how to replace 

hand-stitching of the leather sole with a waterproof polyurethane outsole, permanently bonded to the leather upper, using high-speed injection molding machinery. This was a big improvement, quickly adopted by competing factories. It superseded eighty years of lasting machinery based on sewing-machine technology.

But the real revolution occurred in 1966, when Lange equipped the Canadian ski team with plastic boots for the Alpine World Championships in Portillo (see “Fifty Years of Lange,” March-April 2015). The boots were a sensation—it quickly became clear that laterally stiff plastic boots dramatically improved edging power on ice, and that they would eventually dominate racing. At the 1968 Olympics, Jean-Claude Killy won four gold medals in his fiberglass-reinforced leather Le Trappeur Elite boots (including the FIS Combined championship), and his French teammates won six more, all in leather boots. Only five of 24 medals were won in plastic Langes (by Nancy Greene and Heini Messner), and one or two in the fiberglass Raichle, but the handwriting was on the wall. Leather boots soon disappeared from racing. Nordica introduced its first all-plastic boot that year. Neighboring boot factories in Montebelluna rushed to make “plastic” boots with urethane-coated leather. By the following year full-bore injection-molded boots were available from Kastinger and Peter Kennedy, Rosemount was shipping its fiberglass boot, and Mel Dalebout offered a magnesium shell.

Spoilers and avalement

Meanwhile, French racers developed a new technique using knee flex to absorb or “swallow” the cross-under portion of turn initiation. This was dubbed avalement, French for swallowing. The move demanded full use of the ski tail in powering the turn exit, and that required a higher boot back. In 1961, Le Trappeur introduced the Elite (See Le Trappeur Elite), a stiff, forward-canted boot that gave racers a better tool for knee-flexed pressure control, and it was widely imitated by Nordica, Heierling, Heschung and other factories. In 1966, Canadian Dave Jacobs told Bob Lange to make the Lange Comp ski like the Trappeur. Before the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, “spoilers” appeared on racing boots, including the stovepipe Lange Comp and sleek leather Nordica Sapporo and plastic Olympic, designed by Sven Coomer (see

“Master Boot Laster,” May-June 2014). By 1973, driven mainly by Coomer at Nordica, the fully modern ski boot had emerged, with its removable and customizable innerboot, overlap or external-tongue closure, and hinged cuff with a high-back spoiler. The Nordica Grand Prix became the model for almost all high-performance boots to follow. Plastic boots didn’t break in like leather, and required “flow” materials or some form of adaptable or injected foam to conform comfortably to the infinite variety of foot shapes.

There were significant departures from this model: the warm and comfortable rear entry boot, first sold by Freyrie, Montan and Heschung in 1968, had a good run beginning with Hanson in 1971, and accounted for 80 percent of all boots sold by 1987 (see The Rear Entry Boot).. But racers weren’t impressed, preferring the closer shell-to-foot fit of overlap designs. Most factories kept a few overlap race models in production, and by 1990 most high-performance boots returned to that model. In 1980, half a dozen factories introduced innovative knee-high boots, which proved both comfortable and powerful—but the ski pants of the era didn’t fit over the tops, so ski shops quit selling them after a year. 

There were also some design improvements. A huge step forward came when ski boot sole shapes standardized in the 1970s. It meant that ski bindings finally had a reliably consistent mechanical surface to grasp. Driven by international standard-setting organizations, binding design consolidated around a well-understood set of engineering principles, and the rate of lower-leg injuries dropped by 90 percent.

In the late ‘70s, Mel Dalebout invented the detachable and cantable outsole. Sven Coomer developed the custom-fit “orthotic” insole to improve power, comfort and precision in any boot, and then, in 1983, working for Koflach, he introduced the power strap, which had the effect of a fifth buckle at the top, bringing the effective tongue height to mid-shin. Henke introduced the three-piece shell (“bathtub” lower shell, external tongue, upper cuff) with the Strato in 1971, and the concept took off with the introduction of Nordica’s Comp 3 (1978) and Raichle's Flexon (1980) (see Origin of the Three-piece boot). That Raichle is still in production under K2’s Full Tilt brand. Over the decades, several attempts were made to popularize soft and comfortable “walking” boots that could slip into a supportive exoskeleton for skiing (Ramer, Bataille, Nava). Denny Hanson finally made it work with the new Apex brand. 

And that’s where we stand. 

 

As technical editor of SKI Magazine for 20 years, Seth Masia witnessed much of the modern evolution of ski equipment. He wishes to thank Gary Neptune for providing sample boots for photography, from the Neptune Mountaineering collection.

By Seth Masia

In writing about the origins of the Head and Aluflex aluminum skis during the postwar years, ski historians have focused on the transfer of aviation technology from Glenn L. Martin Aircraft (Howard Head’s wartime employer) and from Vought-Sikorsky (employer of the TEY trio, Arthur Hunt, Wayne Pearce and Dave Richey). Because Head worked on succeeding versions of the Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber, and the TEY team assisted in the evolution of the Vought F4U Corsair fighter, ski historians have assumed – and often stated – that the composite structures they created for postwar skis were derived from those two airplanes.

That’s not actually the case. Neither the Marauder nor the Corsair used the compound sandwich structures that made the new skis unique. Both aircraft were designed very rapidly in 1939, and had innovative features that made them extraordinarily fast for their era. Both adopted some new construction techniques – but none of these featured composite sandwiches. The Marauder had a uniquely streamlined fuselage and engine nacelles, requiring compound curves in the aluminum skin. Engineers led by Peyton Magruder came up with a new way to form the single-layer skin panels. To get the smoothest possible airflow over the aft fuselage, the Corsair employed a new technique to fasten single-layer aluminum panels without rivets: the panels were butted together over the frame and spot-welded into place. Neither of these techniques were used in the prototype Head or Vought/TEY skis.

In 1945, long after the Corsair was designed, Vought assigned the TEY team to create a consumer product that could take up production slack for the postwar years. The company chose this team because all three men were skiers, and the idea was to use Metalite construction to build a laminated aluminum ski. Metalite was an aluminum sandwich with a balsa wood core, made possible by Redux, a new phenol-formaldehyde-vinyl glue developed in England in 1941 and used in aircraft construction beginning in 1943 (the U.S. patent was filed late in 1944). Redux was designed specifically to glue metal and other impervious materials. Vought tried out Metalite in the F6U Pirate (photo top), an unsuccessful jet fighter designed in 1945. Vought’s first mass-production aircraft to use Metalite skin panels was the postwar F7U Cutlass shipboard jet fighter.

Similarly, Howard Head knew about a honeycomb-core sandwich structure developed at Martin long after the Marauder went into production (photo left: Howard Head cutting honeycomb cores). The process for making a tough plastic honeycomb for use as the core of panel structures was devised by George May at Dufay Chromex Ltd., and patented in May, 1944. The material Head used began as a paper honeycomb, soaked in plastic resin. In 1949. Martin engineer Theodore Pajak patented an aluminum-foil honeycomb and from about 1956 on it has been used extensively in jet planes, especially as flooring in all 

commercial airliners. This is the stuff familiar to skiers as the heart of the Hexcel ski (and the Hart HC Comp, and Century skis, and a lot of superlight XC racing skis).

Vought built 1,000 pairs of the original wood-core Truflex ski, a Metalite sandwich, making it the first aluminum ski to see mass production (photo right: Attenhofer Metallic, TEY Alu 60, Vought Truflex). Vought stayed busy after the war, developing jet fighters for the U.S. Navy, and even the Corsair remained in production until 1953 -- the French Navy bought new Corsairs for use in ground attack in Indo-China, and the US Marine Corps bought them for the same role in Korea). The company didn't need a consumer product, and dropped the ski. So the TEY team quit and launched their own ski factory. Vought had a patent on the Metalite wood-core design, so the TEY Alu 60 was a hollow beam using nested hat-section aluminum elements on top, and a flat aluminum base -- at first riveted together, and later all bonded together with Redux. The hollow-beam ski, an undamped spring, proved nearly unskiable on hard snow.

In the early 1950s, the TEY company invented snowmaking. That technology instantly outsold the Alu 60 ski, so the company licensed production to Attenhofer in Switzerland. Adolf Attenhofer contracted with sporting goods manufacturer Charles Dieupart to build the ski in France. In 1956 Dieupart, with the help of racer James Couttet, solved the skiability problem by reengineering the ski with a wood core under the hat-section top plate. The ski thus became the Aluflex and was a commercial success. A decade later, after Aluflex merged with Starflex to become Dynastar, race director Jean Liard put a flat plate atop the hat-section channel to creat the fabulously successful Dynastar MV2 GS race ski. Dynastar called that hat-section rib an "omega," and it became the factory's hallmark for decades.

Meanwhile, Howard Head used the Chromex-process plasticized honeycomb as the core for his early 1947 prototypes, using Redux or a similar metal-friendly glue to attach the aluminum sandwich layers. When these skis proved too fragile for real-world skiing, he resorted to a vertically laminated wood core (edge-on marine plywood), similar to the original Vought ski. But Head used Bostik, a powerful but flexible contact adhesive developed during the war from rubber-based shoe-sole glues. Bostik allowed the adjacent layers to flex easily against one another without coming apart. It helped Head skis feel smooth and snaky over rough icy trails. Today Bostik is widely used under wood flooring and in non-structural aircraft interiors.

 

Photos: Vought F6U Pirate jet fighter, the first American aircraft to use a Metalite skin. US Navy photo.

Howard Head cutting ski cores from plasticized paper honeycomb, 1947: Howard Head photo

From left to right: Attenhofer Metallic, TEY Alu 60/Aluflex, Vought Truflex. Photo by Jeff Leich / New England Ski Museum

At one time, Heierling was among the most famous names in skiing. In the postwar years, the Swiss company’s handmade leather boots equipped an entire generation of racing champions.

Beginning in 1885, cobbler Franz Heierling copied the Laupar shoe brought to Davos by Norwegian ski instructors. His son Hans introduced custom-made ski boots for jumpers, with a high supportive shaft. With the introduction of Guido Reuge’s Kandahar binding and the evolution of alpine technique in the 1930s, Heierling developed higher heels and longer lacing, in custom-fitted boots like the Allais Special II, used by Emile Allais, Walter Prager and Jack Ettinger, among other champions.

Beginning with the 1948 Olympics in St. Moritz, and through to the introduction of plastic boots after the 1964 games in Innsbruck, Heierling’s double boots, with brass-reinforced soles, equipped French, Swiss and American medalists. The Davos shop was able to produce up to 3,000 custom-fitted boots annually, mostly for skiers who had visited the shop at one time and had their feet measured. Heierling kept those measurements on file and could make replacement boots years later. With the introduction of injection-molded outsoles, the company was able to export about 15,000 pairs of mid-priced, mass-produced (non-custom) boots each year.

After 1972, to keep up with the boom in plastic boots, Heierling needed to collaborate with partner factories that could tool up for rapid mass production. Weinmann, the manufacturer of bicycle components, produced a cable-closure Heierling boot. Manufacturing moved to Slovenia, Italy and Germany. The brand name was licensed to Rhode Island retailer Harold Jacober. For a couple of decades Jacober sold it into ski shops across North America. At home in Davos, the brothers Thomas and Hans-Martin Heierling continued to operate a custom-fitting boot shop catering first to racers, then to the public, and by 1983 were also able to sell 90,000 pairs annually of Heierling-brand mass-produced ski boots into the wholesale trade. Even so, the highly competitive export environment forced the closure of many small boot factories, and Heierling shipped its last Italian-made boot in 1997.

The family returned to its roots in custom fitting. In 2000, Heierling’s Sportschuh-Fitting-Center became the Heierling Salomon Racing Center. Among others, Lindsey Vonn, Bode Miller and Didier Cuche got their boots fitted there. In 2005 Atomic licensed Heierling’s patented I-Flex technology; based on that, Hans-Martin, with Sven Coomer, developed Atomic’s very successful Hawx series boots. In 2013, Hans-Martin launched the Swiss-made Heierling H1, made of a temperature-tolerant material to maintain consistent flex down to -20° Celsius. The limited-production boot is available in Switzerland, Austria, France and the United States.  

 

Early boot design was dictated by binding design. The modern era introduced new materials, fit and height that led to a revolution in alpine technique.

BY SETH MASIA

In the beginning, Norwegian farmers and hunters used their daily work shoes when skiing. Until the 1840s, the typical ski binding was a simple leather strap that passed across the front of the boot. The main design concern was to keep the inside of the boot dry, so the socks could do their job of insulating the foot. Water repellency depended on tough top-grain leather liberally slathered with a mixture of wax and animal fat. This combination of a flexible boot, simple binding, and skis without steel edges was useful mainly for running across meadows and gently rolling woodland, and an occasional sporting ski jump. The simple forefoot strap imposed a limit on running performance: If the skier kicked back too briskly, the boot could slip backward out of the strap. Saami skiers—the original Lapplanders—had a solution for this: They built a vertical lip onto the toe of their reindeer-hide boot, to keep it from sliding back through the binding strap (photo left). Sometimes this lip became an exaggerated curled-up toe; Santa’s elves are often depicted wearing Saami boots.

When skiing became a sport, and skiers began to tackle steeper hillsides and real jumps, skiers needed better control of both steering and edging. Bindings grew stiffer, with the invention around 1840 of the heel strap to pull the boot firmly forward into the toe strap. Sondre Norheim and his friends, for instance, devised a heel-strap binding of braided willow. When Fridtjof Nansen equipped his team for the 1888 crossing of Greenland, the Saami-style toe was still in use, but a buckle loop had been added to keep the heel strap in place.

The toe strap then evolved into the rigid steel toe iron, and the heel strap became more robust in order to push the boot firmly into the toe iron. These developments required a boot with a stiffer, heavier sole, usually reinforced with a wooden shank to resist crumpling under the forward pressure of the heel strap. The heavy sole was extended front and back to provide purchase for the toe iron and heel strap. Climbing boots of the era were made on a similar pattern to accommodate crampons, but had steel cleats or calks nailed to the soles for traction, which would have destroyed any wooden ski top in short order.

From village cobbler to mass production

Until the 1870s, all of these boots were handmade by local cobblers. Mass production of military boots, nailed and screwed together mechanically, became common in England during the Napoleonic Wars, and during America’s Civil War, Union troops were equipped with mass-produced boots made to the first-ever standard sizing system. These developments didn’t really affect ski boot design. Because climbers and skiers ordered their boots from someone they knew in the village, nearly all ski boots were, in fact, custom made—the cobbler measured your foot before starting work. 

This changed with the introduction, in the United States, of industrial sewing machines and mass-produced shoes and boots (photo left). The key inventions were the Goodyear welt, developed beginning in 1865 by mechanics working for Charles Goodyear, Jr.; and the automatic lasting machine, patented in 1883 by Jan Matzeliger. The inventions were promptly put to work in New England’s mill towns. By 1876, the G.H. Bass boot factory in Portland, Maine, cranked out a thousand pairs of shoes and work boots every day. European shoe factories sprang up using the new industrial sewing equipment, and by 1885 companies in Switzerland, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy shipped thousands of shoes and boots daily. Around the turn of the century, the first mass-produced leather ski boots appeared in sporting goods catalogs.

The first alpine boots

For a quarter century thereafter, the typical ski boot was just a lace-up work boot with a roomy box toe (to accommodate those wool socks) and an extended sole to mate with the heel-strap binding of the era. Then, in 1928, the Swiss ski racer Guido Reuge invented a cable binding designed to hold the heel down for alpine skiing. He named the binding after the Kandahar series of alpine ski races. The powerful steel cable and front-throw adjuster cranked hard on the boot sole, which had to be stiffened considerably. At this point, alpine ski boot design diverged from nordic boots. Boots for cross-country racing and ski jumping needed a flexible sole. But because alpine racing didn’t require the boot to flex at the ball of the foot, the sole could be built with a stiff full-length shank. And because alpine skiers wanted the foot held firmly down on the ski, bootmakers created an instep strap (photo right). Coincidentally, 1928 was the year the mountaineer Rudolf Lettner invented the segmented steel edge for alpine skis. Suddenly, skis could be controlled on steep and icy faces—if your boots were stiff enough to drive the edges.

Most skiers used inexpensive mass-produced ski boots, but racers, instructors and wealthier sportsmen ordered their boots custom-made, from ski-town cobblers in the Alps. A few of these craftsmen, like Peter Limmer Sr., set up shop in America. 

After World War II, custom bootmakers developed the double boot, with a soft and comfy lace-up inner boot protected and stiffened by a thick bull-hide outer casing laced with heavy-duty corset hooks (photo left). The complex design was difficult to reproduce with machines, and the European cottage industry adapted to mass production of hand-stitched leather boots. Companies like Henke in Switzerland, Le Trappeur in France and Nordica in Italy employed hundreds of workers to export hand-stitched boots.

With the commercialization of ski boots came the first serious marketing campaigns, and the first athlete endorsements. In 1950, when the Nordica shoe factory in Montebelluna, Italy, sold its first ski boots, the company had the good fortune to equip Zeno Colò, who won two World Championships at Aspen that winter. The publicity put Nordica on the map.

Even with several layers, leather boots were not very waterproof, warm or durable. If you skied more than a few days a year, boots quickly grew soft and sloppy. An aggressive skier needed new boots each winter, an expensive proposition. It was possible to soak leather in glue and make it stiff as a board, but then the boot couldn’t be laced closed, and wouldn’t adapt to the shape of the foot. Even reinforced boots got wet and softened steadily. Like many top racers, Jean-Claude Killy loaned boots to friends for breaking in. When the boots were “seasoned”—comfortable but not yet soft—they were good for a few races. Something better was needed.

Buckles and wedeln

A partial solution to making boots stiffer and more durable arrived in 1954, when Swiss bike racer and stunt pilot Hans Martin patented the ski boot buckle. His original patent specified a quick-adjust “lacing system” with overlapping boot flaps, to allow loosening for climbing and tightening for descents. Martin licensed the patent to Henke, and went to work helping to design their boots (photo left). The buckle was far more powerful than any set of laces and could close a very stiff boot. Quick, short turns became possible, and the tail-wagging wedeln technique became popular in ski schools around the world. To make boots even stiffer, bootmakers added internal plastic heel cups and cuff reinforcements.

Plastics and edging power

Then, during the half-decade from 1966 to 1972, everything changed. By 1962, European bootmakers were experimenting with sheets of plastic laminated to the outer leather for waterproofing and improved durability. At the same time, Bob Lange and Dave Luensmann made the first vacuum-molded plastic boot shell (photo above), and the following year figured out how to mold it from liquid urethane (see “50 Years of Lange” in the March-April 2015 issue of Skiing History).  Nordica’s Aldo Vaccari—a chemical engineer by training—saw the Lange boot and quickly figured out how to replace hand-stitching of the sole with a waterproof polyurethane outsole, permanently bonded to the leather upper, using high-speed injection molding machinery. This was a big improvement, quickly adopted by competing factories (photo left). It superseded eighty years of lasting machinery based on sewing-machine technology.

But the real revolution occurred in 1966, when Lange equipped the Canadian ski team with plastic boots for the Alpine World Championships in Portillo (see “Fifty Years of Lange,” March-April 2015). The boots were a sensation—it quickly became clear that laterally stiff plastic boots dramatically improved edging power on ice, and that they would dominate racing (photo right). At the 1968 Olympics, Jean-Claude Killy won three gold medals in his leather Le Trappeur Elite boots, but eight of the remaining 15 medals were won in Langes. Leather boots soon disappeared from racing. Nordica introduced its first all-plastic boot that year. Neighboring boot factories in Montebelluna rushed to make “plastic” boots with urethane-coated leather. By the following year full-bore injection-molded boots were available from Kastinger and Peter Kennedy, Rosemount was shipping its fiberglass boot, and Mel Dalebout offered a magnesium shell.

Spoilers and avalement

Meanwhile, French racers developed a new technique using knee flex to absorb or “swallow” the cross-under portion of turn initiation. This was dubbed avalement, French for swallowing. The move demanded full use of the ski tail in powering the turn exit, and that required a higher boot back. In 1961, Le Trappeur introduced the Elite, a stiff, forward-canted boot that gave racers a better tool for knee-flexed pressure control, and it was widely imitated (including by Lange). Before the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, “spoilers” appeared on racing boots, including the stovepipe Lange Comp and sleek leather Nordica Sapporo (photo left) and plastic Olympic, designed by Sven Coomer (see

“Master Boot Laster,” May-June 2014). By 1973, driven mainly by Coomer at Nordica, the fully modern ski boot had emerged, with its removable and customizable innerboot, overlap or external-tongue closure, and hinged cuff with a high-back spoiler (photo right). Plastic boots didn’t break in like leather, and required “flow” materials or some form of adaptable or injected foam to conform comfortably to the infinite variety of foot shapes.

There were significant departures from this model: the warm and comfortable rear entry boot, first sold by Freyrie, Montan and Heschung in 1968, had a good run beginning with Hanson in 1971, and accounted for 80 percent of all boots sold by 1987. But racers weren’t impressed, preferring the closer shell-to-foot fit of overlap designs. Most factories kept a few overlap race models in production, and by 1990 most high-performance boots returned to that model. In 1980, half a dozen factories introduced innovative knee-high boots, which proved both comfortable and powerful—but the ski pants of the era didn’t fit over the tops, so ski shops quit selling them after a year. 

There were also some design improvements. A huge step forward came when ski boot sole shapes standardized in the 1970s. It meant that ski bindings finally had a reliably consistent mechanical surface to grasp. Driven by international standard-setting organizations, binding design consolidated around a well-understood set of engineering principles, and the rate of lower-leg injuries dropped by 90 percent.

In the late ‘70s, Mel Dalebout invented the detachable and cantable outsole. Sven Coomer developed the custom-fit “orthotic” insole to improve power, comfort and precision in any boot, and then, in 1983, working for Koflach, he introduced the power strap, which had the effect of a fifth buckle at the top, bringing the effective tongue height to mid-shin (photo left). Henke introduced the three-piece shell (“bathtub” lower shell, external tongue, upper cuff) with the Strato in 1971, and the concept took off with the introduction of Nordica’s Comp 3 (1978) and Raichle's Flexon (1980). That Raichle is still in production under K2’s Full Tilt brand. Over the decades, several attempts were made to popularize soft and comfortable “walking” boots that could slip into a supportive exoskeleton for skiing (Ramer, Bataille, Nava). Denny Hanson finally made it work with the new Apex brand. 

And that’s where we stand. 

 

As technical editor of SKI Magazine for 20 years, Seth Masia witnessed much of the modern evolution of ski equipment. He wishes to thank Gary Neptune for providing sample boots for photography, from the Neptune Mountaineering collection.