(Roughly) Daily

When a large retail outlet is in its final throes, it can be fascinating to walk around one, not necessarily because you want to buy anything, but because of the things the natural selection process of panic-shopping surfaces. (When something is 90 percent off, you have to really not want it to leave it sitting there.) So when I learned my local Sears store was closing after more than 40 years in business, I made two stops: One, nine days before its closure; and two, on its final day. As you can imagine, the trip surfaced different sales items each time, even though it was the same massive store both times, but the different levels of decay put different levels of focus on what was there. And during the last time, I found myself utterly enthralled with a device I’ve seen a million times, as have most of you. Something about the removal of its full context, as well as the clear amount of use the product had received, made the device stand out that much more. I’m, of course (of course!) talking about the Brannock Device, a mainstay of shoe stores for decades. What’s your shoe size?…

From the ever-illuminating Ernie Smith and his Tedium newsletter, an appreciation of a device that all of us have used, but the few of us have stopped to appreciate.  The “barleycorn measurement scheme” (a barleycorn is the difference in space between one shoe size and the next); the history of shoe sizing; an appreciation of Charles Brannock and his efforts– even a visit to a minor league baseball game that honored Brannock’s creation– it’s all here:  “How the Brannock Device—a measuring tool you’ve definitely seen but didn’t know the name of—made it a lot easier to figure out our shoe size.”

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As we wear it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that the rubber heel was patented by Humphrey O’Sullivan (US patent #618128).  O’Sullivan, a printer tired of slipping on his inky floor, began by nailing a piece of rubber floor mat to his own shoes; after developing the product and patenting it, he launched a company to market his podiatric progress– in a way aimed at pedestrians pounding the (wet, icy, or otherwise slippery) pavements in America’s growing cities.

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