Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (5 page)

The interaction of inventors (who may or may not be athletes) with participants (who may or may not have technical skills) allows technology and technique to produce striking results envisioned by neither designers nor athletes. Rowing, fencing, speed skating, bowling, and bicycling show five outcomes of the interaction
of technology and technique. In rowing, an innovation forgotten since antiquity was independently revived in the nineteenth century, but it took outsiders nearly a hundred years to refine a style that exploited it fully. In fencing, hardware innovation at first upset traditional technique, then rapidly reached a new equilibrium with it as both equipment and behavior changed together. In
speed skating, a design
from the 1890s was ignored for a century, then swept the field when athletes finally adjusted their technique. In recreational cycling, an alternative design helped change the nature of the sport itself, appealing to new riders with a different attitude. And in bowling, new equipment has altered the definition of winning technique.

Technology and technique were linked
in the early history of rowing, when it was a vital military skill rather than a sport. The sliding seat was first used by rowers of the ancient Greek triremes. Their leather cushions and low-level seating, lubricated by fats, promoted more efficient motion with a sliding stroke that exploited leg power. Most rowers were free citizens, and the sliding stroke, then as now, required practice, so twelve
thousand men were paid to train for eight months annually. The cushions, so familiar to Athenians that Aristophanes made comic allusions to them in his plays, disappeared with this style of rowing around 400
B.C.
as a new design, the Carthaginian quadrireme, arose. Where the trireme had used but one man per oar, the quadrireme deployed the massive power of multiple rowers on a single oar. Warships
became troop transports for grappling and boarding rather than the skilled precision ramming that was the trireme’s specialty. The exercises to maintain slide stroke skills were no longer cost effective. Whether or not the Romans could have used the sliding stroke in their own galleys, it was lost to them and their medieval and early modern European successors. But the quest for technique was
not over. Europeans had a great range of equipment and corresponding rowing styles. Venetian gondoliers use an oscillating stroke of a single oar as a fish swings its tail, while the oarsmen of medieval galleys stood upright to move their massive oars back and forth in a “walking” stroke.
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From the beginnings of modern competitive sport in early-nineteenth-century England, athletes and spectators
have recognized that equipment and style go together. And debates about their relationship could persist for decades. In rowing, some design changes were relatively uncontroversial, notably the use of narrow-beam boats with internal keels and outriggers, which helped transform the old heavy craft into lightweight shells that demanded far more finesse and balance. The sliding seat, despite its
antiquity, had a mixed reception. Professional rowers in the north of England were first to revive it. They realized that moving forward several inches at the beginning of a stroke and returning at its end permitted a longer and more powerful stroke, assisted by the legs, multiplying the oarsman’s efficiency. With substantial purses awaiting the victors, grease
on trouser seats was a small price
to pay for an edge. A slide of just nine inches could add sixteen inches to a stroke. While rowing clubs began to follow this principle in the 1870s—using seat mountings first of bone sliding on brass and ultimately of wheels in vulcanite grooves—some conservatives resisted. Even if the innovation made rowing more efficient and speedier, they objected, it was a labor-saving idea of professional
scullers, and put a premium on fast entry and leg power rather than a hard “catch” powered from the shoulders and upper body. Motion from the hips and lumbar region was no longer paramount. Letters objecting to the sliding seat and its associated technique appeared in the London
Times
as late as 1933. Because of this aesthetic model of proper use of the rower’s body, coaches and athletes revised
their style only slowly. At the most important English regattas, Henley and Oxford-Cambridge, speed records actually declined after its introduction. Even after the sliding seat’s acceptance, the fixed seat remained a norm for training in England and the basis of a style called English Orthodox that persisted well after World War II. An observer in the 1880s reported that Oxford crews were not
synchronizing slide and swing but delaying the use of the slide until their bodies were upright, as though they were still using fixed seats.
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As in swimming, it was an Australian who began a revolution of technique, and at about the same time. (The American Orthodox style was only a modification of English Orthodox.) In the early twentieth century, Steve Fairbairn (1862–1938), the coach of
Jesus College, Cambridge, introduced a revolutionary call to use the body’s weight, and especially the legs rather than the shoulders, to move the boat. His crews’ successes were the first major challenges to Orthodoxy. The next great innovations, building on Fairbairn’s ideas, came in the 1960s. A club in the north German town of Ratzeburg at last developed an alternative method, now known as International
Modern. By accelerating the slide in its approach to the front stop, the coach Karl Adam was able to assure a steadier hull speed, help the West German crew win the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, and guarantee the technique’s international influence. Adam also made significant changes in conditioning and in equipment, including a longer oar with a broader blade, and he was a ferocious
morale builder, but his great revolution was in rowing style. Through their mastery of body motion, Fairbairn and Adam reinvented the sliding seat.
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In fencing as in rowing, technology and technique have evolved together. Users of weapons have always sought more effective maneuvers, and their tactics have in turn inspired modification of their instruments. The fencing historian
Nick Evangelista has described medieval swords as “‘can openers,’ hacking and whacking devices, whose sole purpose was to find a way through armor,” but professionals at the Royal Armories in Leeds have been reconstructing early combat techniques with replica weapons and now believe that even these apparently ungainly implements required considerable skill as well as strength. Beginning in the
mid-sixteenth century, a lighter sword called the rapier coevolved with new techniques. It started as a heavy, sharp-edged blade with a complex and bulky hand guard, used offensively and backed up by a piece of heavy clothing or a smaller weapon in the left hand. Used by soldiers, duelists, masters, and armorers, the rapier became a different weapon as the possibilities of various techniques were
explored. Cutting was found to be inefficient; the rapier became a thrusting weapon without a sharpened edge. It grew lighter and simpler, and the secondary defensive weapon disappeared. Not that this was a smooth evolution. For a time, blades lengthened, reaching up to six feet before legislation restricted them to three. Ultimately the weapon became the eighteenth-century smallsword. Each change
in form was linked with a new style of practice, which had to be learned from a master. Fencing masters rose in society as they developed a body of techniques (with an extensive specialized vocabulary) for teaching as well as dueling and, like Maurice of Nassau, published diagrams of their maneuvers in illustrated volumes.
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The foil, today’s basic fencing instrument, is a notable example of
a technology developed for the sake of technique. It was a modified version of a dueling sword to be used in instructional exercises according to a system of rules and is still called a “conventional” weapon. (The épée, with its stiff, triangular blade, was introduced in the nineteenth century as an “unconventional” weapon that could score with a hit anywhere to the opponent’s body.) While an unsuccessful
electric scoring system was introduced as early as 1896 and the épée was adapted for electric scoring in 1933, it was the electrification of the foil in the 1960s that had the most radical, if mainly temporary, effect on technique.
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In the interest of objective judging, fencing officials adopted electric
scoring for the foil. To accommodate the contact at the tip of the blade, the weapon itself
was modified; the wire was run through a more rigid, weightier blade. Equipment at first could shock the perspiring athletes wearing it, and specially trained technicians now check the wiring. But these were the least of the new challenges to good technique. More important, certain light touches that judges might not have noted now could set off the scoring buzzer if the foil was handled with
a new rapid motion.

Just at this time, the fencers and coaches of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were emerging as an international force. Backed by generous state support, rejecting traditional techniques in favor of speed and mobility, they perfected new moves that took advantage of the tip’s sensitivity. Others found the new equipment harder to master. Marvin Nelson, a veteran fencer,
official, and coach, deplored the “sloppy, pig-sticking” style that flourished as officials allowed fencers to maintain attacks when procedural rules (“right of way”) should have given the touch to the other side. The flashing light overrode their knowledge of the rules. Meanwhile, the flexible weight-tipped blades whipped away from targets. Nelson recalled that he, like others, “was forced to fence
with absence of blade and reduce my game to much more simple actions.”
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These problems passed. Suppliers introduced better points and stiffer blades. And technique changed as well. Competitive fencers practiced with foils simulating the feel of the electric models. In fact, by the mid-1970s Nelson noticed a more vigorous game: “Fencers are ‘carrying’ the weapon more effectively—showing an improvement
in awareness of the different parts of the blade. Thrusts or actions are being made from positions not usual in standard foil or in the first period of electric foil.… Foot movements are increasingly efficient.” Still, these more sophisticated techniques have brought other changes in technology, notably grips with small projections for more secure finger holds. Introduced as “orthopedic”
grips for fencers with missing fingers or other disabilities, these are now widely used as “pistol” grips. They promote a more vigorous style at the expense of lightness and flexibility and have been labeled by one authority as “this monstrous brood.” And electric scoring demands self-discipline, as some athletes focus their attention so much on the gratification of a light or buzzer that their minds
wander from the bout itself, letting their opponent score the touch.
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A second group of sports changed significantly in the last century thanks to new materials and manufacturing processes. In these cases, too, the crucial change was not so much the new equipment as the development of body motions to optimize it. Most skating remains relatively conservative in equipment despite
countless refinements of skates and great improvements in ice conditioning equipment in recent years. Speed skating, too, changed little until very recently. In 1488, Leonardo da Vinci studied it but lost interest after failing to create a new design. Four hundred years later, in 1890, a Canadian and a German independently developed and patented a skate hinged at the toe and spring loaded,
so that the boot could separate temporarily from the blade. Neither model appears to have gone into commercial production.
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Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau, a professor of biomechanics at the Free University of Amsterdam, originally wanted to design a safer skate, not necessarily a faster one. He told a journalist from a Japanese news service that from the early 1980s, many skaters had complained
to him of pain in their shins. “I then realized that skating is a uniquely unnatural movement—different from walking or running—because the heel does not rise freely in motion.” The lever mechanism let the skater lift one leg at a time, the one not doing the pushing, while keeping the runner on the ice, in principle reducing strain on the calf muscles. At some point his team noticed that speed
skaters kept their ankles locked and pushed off their heels—unlike jumpers, who extended their ankles and pushed off their toes. The hinged skate in principle allowed the ankle to move with the blade still fully on the ice, using the calf muscles for a longer stride.
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In execution, the idea was not so easy. Early hinged skates had mechanical problems. A post on the upper part now fits into a
cylinder near the heel of the blade for stability. Even so the blades did not, and still do not, make learning easier for beginners. Expert skaters, who had refined their techniques on conventional fixed blades, saw no advantage that would offset the physical cost of retraining themselves to use new muscle groups. And the clacking sound of the blade snapping back to the shoe could be disconcerting.
The best of the experienced Dutch skaters even considered the new equipment dangerous. The inventors’ breakthrough came with the youngest skaters who had invested less in conventional technique and had most to gain from learning a new style. They found that the skates—with the new technique—improved their personal records. Then the women on
the national team tried them and changed over. When the
men saw improving results, they followed. German, Japanese, and American skaters resented the new equipment but by 1996–97 the main objection was not to the new design but to that fact that the patent licensee, the Dutch manufacturer Viking, was allocating its limited production to the Netherlands team and other regular customers.
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The records of 1997 confirmed the skates’ value. They helped
athletes cut a full second, a long time indeed in international winter sports competition, from each 400-meter lap of longer events. In November and December 1997 alone, adopters of the clap skates equaled or exceeded sixteen world records. In the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, the Dutch skater Gianni Romme won the 5,000-meter race clocked at 6 minutes 22.20 seconds; his previous Olympic record was
6:34.96.
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