Edward Weston
The craze for Pedestrianism, a forerunner of race walking, hit the United States in the 1840s and even Mark Twain was not immune to it. In November 1874 he and a friend set out to walk the 100 miles from Hartford to Boston but, sensibly, gave up after ten miles and completing the rest of the journey by train, telling a reporter “there was no intention on our part to excite anybody’s envy or make Mr Weston feel badly for we were not preparing for a big walk so much as for a delightful walk”.
The Mr Weston Twain referred to was America’s leading pedestrian who cleverly combined the public’s fascination with pedestrianism with an equally popular craze, roller skating, which saw purpose-built indoor rinks open up around the country. Weston would perform walking exhibitions, charging up to 50 cents a person to watch him and thousands of people gladly paid up. To relieve the tedium he would hire bands to entertain the crowds, even playing the cornet himself while walking, dressed in his trademark ruffled shirt and riding crop or cane.
Weston had a distinctive walking style, swinging his hips with each step or with “a splendid sweeping stride that carries him over the road like the wind”. A more serious observer noted that he “accentuated each third step, visibly accelerating his speed by so doing. This method brought the extra effort alternately on the left and right foot, with a respite between, since the acceleration fell on the fourth, seventh and tenth step and so on”. He also possessed small, sturdy legs, rather like “two toothpicks stuck in opposite sides of a potato”, which he would switch with his whip.
His exhibitions were usually feats of endurance and against the clock. At a roller rink in Manhattan in 1870 a crowd of 5,000 assembled to see Weston attempt to win a wager of $2,500 by walking a hundred miles in less than 22 hours. He did it with twenty minutes to spare. The following year at the same rink he walked four hundred miles in five days, earning $5,000 in bets and gate receipts. At a rink in Newark, New Jersey, in December 1874 Weston attempted to walk 500 miles in 6 days, completing the feat in 5 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes and 15 seconds, a feat hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable on record”.
Like British pedestrians who had gone before him, Weston experienced attempts to sabotage him by those who had bet against him, one punter pouring a chemical on the track and the National Guard was called out to protect him. And he split opinion, the Spirit of the Times dismissing him as a “humbug” fleecing gullible public while the New York Sportsman accused him of staging mercenary exhibitions which were no test of real merit and called him a fraud.
Nevertheless, Weston’s derring-do struck a chord with the masses and he was a hero to many an American boy, inspiring many would-be pedestrians to form competitive leagues and seek challenges and competitors. Companies were quick to exploit the commercial opportunity with Tiffany selling a new invention called a pedometer and a cobbler, John Welsher, devising a “walking shoe” with built-in springs. “It seemed as though the muscles of the nation”, wrote Walter Bernstein in the Virginia Quarterly Review”, “were making one final, vast, collective effort before being replaced by the internal combustion machine”.
Weston’s feats also prompted the emergence of his fiercest challenger, as we shall see next time.
