Have you ever wondered what makes a shoe size?

After a two-hour stint of separating size 6-8 to size 9-11 socks in the shop today I got to questioning shoe sizes (amongst other things…)  I pondered what people with size 8½ size feet do too, but we’ll ignore that part…

So what makes a (British) shoe size?  Primarily an old, old measurement called a ‘barleycorn’.  It’s about 1/3 of an inch, and measures the lasts (the big fake feet) that shoes are made around to give British shoe sizes.

A nice science-y illustration of a barleycorn.

A barleycorn seems a pretty odd measurement system, but, as with most antiquated things, it sits well with British tradition.  We all know “the old way is the best way” really!  The history behind this is as follows: before the 1300s people couldn’t get standard sized shoes and sizes varied a lot depending on the cobbler.  Female readers, we all know how annoying this is whilst clothes shopping and obviously it was a state of frustration that afflicted King Edward I.  In 1305 he decided he’d had enough and that accuracy needed to be employed into all trades including cobblery.  So, with barleycorns being an available source and roughly measuring a third of an inch it was decided that these would be used to introduce standard sizes in shoes.  As time has gone on, the barleycorn has remained in British shoe measurements (if you want more see Charles Panati’s The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, available from Amazon.)

The smallest size shoe (a child’s size 0) measures a teeny 12 barleycorns (4 inches) and goes up by a barleycorn as sizes increase – so a child’s size 1 shoe would be 13 barleycorns, size 2 = 14 barleycorns… you know the rest!  Barleycorns are still used for adult shoe sizes too, but the maths behind it changes a bit.  Here an adult size 1 is about 26 barleycorns and, like before, the sizes progress again in barleycorns.

A bit of ‘pub knowledge’ for you there, the benefits of shoe store ponderances!  (I can now rapidly distinguish a size 6-8 from a size 9-11 sock, too – hello skills to add to my CV!)

So you think you can tie your shoelaces?

Perhaps not…

(Also, I’m totally going to learn how to do this so the shoe displays in the shop look that bit more aesthetically pleasing…)

Shoevolution

So, shoes.  When did we start wearing them?  Why did that happen?  This seemed like THE question when I started writing this blog (I guess I’m quite a fan of evolution and asking “why?” though …), and so whilst Science&Shoes still remains in a ‘youth-ly’ state it seems sensible to start at the beginning and address this attitude change towards attiring our feet!

We’d all probably deem someone who bucked the trend of wearing shoes a bit of a nut since we’ve all become so accustomed to wearing shoes.  Whilst I’m sat in a coffee shop in Bristol (Boston Tea Party – totally recommended!) I can see that everyone is wearing shoes – it’s a normal thing to do even here in the beautifully bohemian Bristol.  But why and how did it become such a normal thing to do in the first place?

The first shoes are thought to be animal hides (perhaps a primitive Ugg boot?) used like socks to keep our toes toasty 500,000 years ago.  However, with these things degrading quicker than we find them scientists can’t be too sure.

The “world’s oldest existing shoe” was found in a cave in America in 1938 (Rock Fort Cave in Oregon, if you want the specifics).  Pictured below, this fashionable specimen was created from sagebrush bark, which, although way less comfy than animal hide, is much more resilient meaning it has stood the test of time for about 10,500 years! 

Crafted in a fancy woven way (some sales spiel there for you) the shoe hints that its cobbler was a wised-up craftsman and that shoes were a common attire by then. 

And yet, this boom in footwear use is thought to have actually started even further back, between 26,000 and 40,000 years ago as a rough estimate.  This guess was made by a scientist called Erik Trinkaus, who decided this after he “studied scores of early human foot bones” (thank you BBC!). 

Looking at the foot bones of Neanderthals and early humans from 10,000 to 100,000 years ago he estimated the time of this boom from changes in these bones.  Erik believes that weakening and shrinking of the bones in the Neanderthals’ and humans’ ‘lesser toes’ (all of them except the big one) was caused by wearing shoes.  Basically, where the toes didn’t need to grip the ground like they did when barefoot they got less of a workout and so became weak and small… 

These weak, little toes gave Erik a good idea as to when shoe wearing began, and also ties in with the time when craftsmanship arose.  

From the amount of archaeological bits found at this time scientists think we were advancing quickly and our DIY improved with this – obviously backed up by our sophisticated shoe’age.

Science and Socks (not Shoes!)

Someone created Professor Brian Cox socks…

 

Impressive.

When your mum tells you you’re “not cool enough” to wear high-tops…

Yes, that actually happened in my life.  My own mother, who enjoys watching ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and talks to the cat, told me I wasn’t “cool enough” to wear Nike Blazers (the high-top trainer pictured below, for those of you who aren’t sure what I mean).

So this got me thinking: If I’m not cool enough for certain shoes, does this mean I’m generally not cool enough?  Do people judge me on my flawed shoe selection?

To overcome this ‘shoe depression’ I turned to science and found this little gem from ABC News (based on some genuine research – which you can view here if you have $31.50 or an Athens login).  I thought I’d check this out to soothe my growing complex and found some pretty interesting shoe stuff, such as the issue that there is very little research into the claim that “the clothes maketh the man”.  As the paper itself states:

“Although shoes are usually the single most expensive item in people’s outfit, they have received relatively little attention in research.”

This bothers me.  Mr C Louboutin needs to up his research funding and fix this, especially if people’s shoe-based judgements are as accurate as the paper suggests…

It turns out (according to the research) that people are fairly good at gauging others’ attachment anxiety and agreeableness just from photos of their shoes!  And people are even better at judging the age, gender and income of people from their shoes too (a bit self-explanatory, but pah!).  Even more, in this research it tended to be that, of all the people judging the shoes, there was consensus between the judgements – so basically LOTS of people think you’re not very agreeable, ouch!  (For anyone wondering they asked for photos of the shoes the participants wear most, so less opportunity to cheat and mess up the results!)

But why are we such cruel, judgemental creatures who form long-lasting impressions of one another so soon?  Because it’s an “adaptive social function” (the paper’s words, not mine).  Basically, by gauging things about others by quickly checking them over you don’t have to expend a load of time and energy on them.  Sort of like speed-dating, maybe?  And we’re really good at it too!  Generally the research shows that when you compare people’s judgements from when they’ve had a quick glance at someone to when they’ve had a long, soul-searching stare they’re only slightly less accurate in their judgement.

So, yes, from this I have discovered that people may judge me on my uncool choice in shoes.  The worst bit?  They may well be judging me correctly and in the masses!

Why ‘Science&Shoes’?

So here comes my very first attempt at blogging – it might not be pretty, but it should hopefully be a good learning curb and a short ‘n’ sharp welcome to the digital communications world!  In this sense, I guess my blog is partly a selfish venture but, naturally, I aim to entertain too.

So, hello!  Here’s me.  My background is in Biological Sciences (I graduated from the lovely UEA – a concrete jungle that defies all odds to become a very loveable location) and I’m now studying for a Masters in Science Communication at UWE.  I also work in a fancy shoe shop, which I wont disclose the name of because I’m not sure if I’m allowed to and I’m scared of getting in trouble, but hopefully from this you can see why I’ve called the blog ‘Science&Shoes’.

My aim with this blog is to link the two businesses of my life, which maybe seems a bit ‘far out’ but I have some ideas (and standing in a customer-less shoe shop on rainy weekday afternoons gives amazing head-space, which I can now utilise more creatively!)  Being new to the blogging game I’m going to be pretty flexible about this – we could even go down the line of looking at what shoes famous scientists wore and comparing them by it (I can’t imagine that interests anyone else but me though?)  I don’t think I’ve had any ‘famous’ scientists pop in for new shoes before, but if I do I could highlight that on here for all to see perhaps.

One thing this wont be is anything similar to this, which is unfortunately something that really did happen (it caused a big angry mass of science communicators too).  It’s a tenuous link to here, but I was concerned that people would see the words ‘science’ and ‘shoes’ paired and presume I had the same aspirations.  I don’t (and I don’t want The Telegraph to brand me as ‘offensive’…)

That aside, I hope to get a good experience of this brave new world of digital communications and any help that could be offered within that would be mightily appreciated – definitely do come forth with any constructive criticisms etc., it’s a work in progress!

An exploration of the science of shoes begins here!