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Zia gets her skates on
Blast from the Past: Zia of the Dandy Warhols and her roller skates In Blast from the Past, we reunite Zia from The Dandy Warhols with her beloved roller skates. Okay, so they weren't the exact pair she had when she was little, but they were close. "I had red and blue ones, so you got the colours right. They were Snoopy roller skates, the kind you put on over your tennis shoes. They were great, they had metal wheels. But they were about four sizes too big for me, so I had lots of pairs of socks and toilet paper in the toes," says Zia. Her history She and her friends were roller skating daredevils. "We would go up the hill to our neighbours. They had dirt bikes. So we would take turns hanging on to the back of the dirt bikes, skidding around corners and kicking out sparks. I know how to fall and not get hurt too bad." When Zia outgrew these, she got another pair from a thrift store in Hollywood. They were a step up from her over-sized Snoopy skates. "They were very pro-style, really cool". So cool in fact, she even wore them in a Dandy Warhols video. Zia then tried our pair out and enjoyed herself so much she told us, "This is making me want to roller skate again." Skate history There are records of early attempts at wheeled skates from the 1700s in Holland as a summer version of ice skating. Modern roller skates, like Zia's, were invented in 1863 by an American called James Plimpton. The first ones were slow and awkward. This changed in 1884 with the invention of ball-bearing wheels. These made skates lighter and rolling faster and easier. In the early 1980s, roller skating received a big boost when the Rollerblade company released its inline skates. These used modern materials to make an old pre-Plimpton skate shape usable. One of the ways skates allow us to go faster is by reducing friction. Among the other principles of Physics you can experience on skates are inertia, acceleration and velocity. Learn more Check out The Dandy Warhols website Learn about the history of roller skates Find out how ball bearings work |
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