Who created the first running shoe?

Answer 1

In the last century, trainers have gone from rubber soled plimsolls to air cushioned, gel-filled capsules worn as much for their looks as their sporting performance. Here's how we got there.

An early example of the running shoe, is the plimsoll -- a rubber-soled cloth shoe, or sneaker. It was created from a newly developed process called vulcanization - still in use today - which uses heat to meld rubber and cloth together. Plimsolls were lightweight and comfortable, and unlike other shoes, they enabled the wearer to move around quietly. Because of this, they became known as 'sneakers', and in 1917 the Keds shoe company was set up to sell them to America. While Keds were the first to sell these shoes on a mass scale, specialist running spikes had already been around for a long time. In the late 1890s, a British company called J.W. Foster and Sons (now known as Reebok) developed some of the earliest known running shoes with spikes in them. The company's founder, Joseph William Foster, loved running and wanted to develop a shoe that would help increase his speed. He came up with the running spike. In 1925, a German named Adi Dassler took spikes a step further. He created a range of shoes with hand forged spikes, with different shoes for different distances. Hisstate of the art materials made them as light as possible.