Imagine you’re a tennis player facing a tough opponent. You dart across the court, your racket in the air. Only you’re not wearing sneakers on your feet. You’re wearing a pair of stiff leather shoes with tiny heels!
That’s what many athletes wore in the mid-1800s. Back then, there were no special shoes for sports. That began to change in the 1870s. At that time, a new sport called lawn tennis was becoming popular. Players had to run back and forth across grass courts that were often wet. So they started lacing up a new type of shoe: sneakers!
The first sneakers were made of canvas, a thick fabric used to make a ship’s sails. Their soles, or bottoms, were made from rubber. This tough, flexible material kept tennis players’ feet dry. Plus it was strong enough to handle all the sprinting across the court.
Rubber was not a new material. Indigenous peoples of Brazil and Central America had long worn footwear made of rubber, says Elizabeth Semmelhack. She studies the history of shoes at Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada. “They would drain a sticky liquid called sap from rubber trees and use it to create a form of waterproof footwear.”
Back in 1839, inventor Charles Goodyear added a chemical called sulfur to natural rubber. That kept it from breaking down in very cold and very hot temperatures. By the late 1800s, rubber was being used to make everything from bike tires to car parts to sneaker soles!