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I had very exciting new boots when we recorded this! I still have them, in fact. They are surprisingly comfortable. But my boots are only a tiny piece of excitement of our excitement about shoes. Plus, someone asked us to talk about shoes, so we decided to do that.
Unlike many modern inventions, high heels can’t be traced to a single inventor. In fact, this unique form of footware dates back into antiquity. Listen in and learn more about the evolution of high heels.
There’s a part in the movie Big Fish where the protagonist, Edward Bloom, loses his shoes to a girl named Jenny Hill. Jenny doesn’t want Edward to leave the subtly mythical town of Spectre and indoctrinates him as per the town custom: tying the laces of one’s pair of shoes and throwing them over a telephone wire, to dangle out of reach. The logic, ethereal as it is, goes that without one’s shoes, one can no longer travel and might as well settle down.
How long does a new technology last in the modern world? The CD only lasted (as a mainstream technology) for 2 decades before its replacement (MP3 files) came along. DVDs may have an even shorter life before streaming video replaces them. The analog TV lasted less than a century, as did the CRT screen. They have been replaced by digital TV and a combination of LCD, Plasma, DLP and OLED technologies. The internal combustion engine has had a pretty good run, but keep in mind that the Model T was invented a century ago.
But if you are looking for record breaking runs in the area of technology endurance, it appears that the laced leather shoe is up there near the top of the list, as seen here…
Stuff that makes you go Hmmm #15 – The altitude limit on high heel shoes
by Marshall Brain | February 16, 2010
With this video we see that high heel shoes, apparently, have reached their upper altitude limit: If a trained professional cannot even navigate in them, they have become unnavigable. It makes you go hmmm because, when shoes were invented, the idea was to make people better/stronger/faster. You put shoes on your feet, in most normal […]
We are bombarded with shoe ads from companies like Nike, Adidas and Reebok. These ads tell us how much protection the shoes offer. Here is a typical discussion of the Nike Shox shoes, which are said to offer “independent suspension” to protect your feet. Now imagine that everything we’ve been told might be wrong – […]
These days, recycling goes way beyond glass and paper. How about old shoes? Prom dresses? Join Molly and Cristen as they discuss some of the surprising things you can recycle in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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