Roller skating

Roller skating means moving across a surface on roller skates. People do it for fun, as a competitive sport, or to get from place to place. While roller rinks and skate parks are built specifically for it, skaters also use streets, sidewalks, and bike paths.

The activity began as a performance art in the 1700s. It first became widely popular in the 1880s. In the United States, roller skating saw huge popularity from the 1930s through the 1950s, and then again in the 1970s, when it became linked to disco music and roller discos. The 1990s brought a surge in inline outdoor skating. Throughout its history, roller skating has held particular significance in Black and LGBT communities.

Competitive roller skating includes speed skating, roller hockey, roller derby, figure skating, and aggressive inline skating.

The earliest known roller skates came from 18th-century Europe. They were used in theater and musical performances, likely to mimic ice skating on stage. Early skates could only move in a straight line, making turns or curves very difficult. For a time, they were just occasional stage props. That changed in the 1840s.

In an 1840s Berlin beer hall, waitresses used roller skates to serve customers. Ballet and opera productions in the late 1840s, like *Le prophète*, also featured roller skating. This sparked the first wave of popularity in 1850s Europe. Key improvements—rubber wheels in 1859 and four-wheeled turning skates in 1863—helped the activity spread. Since then, roller skating’s popularity has risen and fallen sharply, often called a "craze" at its peaks.

From 1880 to 1910, roller skating boomed. Skates were mass-produced, and skating in rinks became popular with the general public across Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Specialized forms like figure skating and speed skating emerged during this time.

After a lull, roller skating became widespread again from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period known as the Golden Age of Roller Skating. Many rinks with electric organ music were built across the United States. In the 1970s, roller disco took off, a style rooted in disco music and pioneered mainly by Black and gay skaters. The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of indoor and outdoor inline skating, often called "rollerblading." Popularity dropped in the early 2000s but rebounded during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roller skating has long been tied to Black American social movements, immigrant communities, and the LGBT community—especially women in roller derby. As a hobby, it is seen as playful and is widely accessible.

The first recorded use of roller skates was in a 1743 London stage performance, though the inventor is unknown. In 1760, John Joseph Merlin created the first recorded skate invention: a primitive inline skate with small metal wheels. Roller skates appeared on a Berlin ballet stage in 1818. The first patented roller skate design came in 1819 from France’s M. Petitbled. These early inline skates were hard to maneuver, mostly limited to straight lines or wide, sweeping turns.

Inventors kept refining the design through the rest of the 1800s. In 1823, Robert John Tyers of London patented the Rolito, a skate with five wheels in a single row under a shoe or boot. The first public skating rinks opened in 1857 at The Strand in London and the Floral Hall. In 1863, James Leonard Plimpton of New York City designed the four-wheeled turning skate, or quad skate, with two side-by-side pairs of wheels. A rubber cushion allowed a pivoting action, letting skaters turn by leaning. This was a huge success. The first public rinks using this design opened in 1866—first in Plimpton’s New York furniture store, then in Newport, Rhode Island. The quad skate dominated the industry for over a century.

In 1875, a rink in Plymouth, England, held its first roller skating competition. The following year, William Brown of Birmingham, England, patented a wheel design that kept the two bearing surfaces of an axle apart. He worked with Joseph Henry Hughes, who patented a ball or roller bearing race for bicycle and carriage wheels in 1877. Hughes’s patent included all the parts of an adjustable system. Together, their work led to modern roller skate and skateboard wheels, as well as the ball bearing race used in velocipedes (later motorbikes and cars). This is considered the most important advance for making roller skating a practical pastime.

Also in 1876, the toe stop was first patented, giving skaters a way to stop by tipping the skate onto its toe. Toe stops are still common on quad skates and some inline skates. In 1877, the Royal Skating indoor rink was built on rue Veydt in Brussels. In 1878, 17-year-old Pawnee skater Fred "Bright Star" Murree beat Kenneth Skinner, the fastest local speed skater, in Boston.