The Brannock Device is the iPhone of shoe salesmen
Over at the Design Observer blog, Michael Bierut waxes poetic about a triumph of industrial engineering... the ubiquitous Brannock Device. Never heard of it? Your sweaty, calloused trotter has been crammed into one by a disgruntled shoe salesman at one time or another...
Charles F. Brannock only invented one thing in his life, and this was it. The son of a Syracuse, New York, shoe magnate, Brannock became interested in improving the primitive wooden measuring sticks that he saw around his father's store. He patented his first prototype in 1926, based on models he had made from Erector Set parts. As the Park-Brannock Shoe Store became legendary for fitting feet with absolute accuracy, the demand for the device grew, and in 1927 Brannock opened a factory to mass produce it. The Brannock Device Co., Inc., is still in business today. Refreshingly, it still only makes this one thing. They have sold over a million, a remarkable number when one considers that each of them lasts up to 15 years, when the numbers wear off...Having such an exotic bit of machinery at my disposal took a job that's actually sort of demeaning — after all, I literally had to kneel in front of each of my customers — and transformed it into something akin to brain surgery. What people today feel about their iPhones, I felt about my Brannock Device.
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what, no Al Bundy joke?
I love how some cast-iron things have been invented and my never need improvement (like grommet stampers, the pneumatic ones jam after 3 hours at maximum)
There are no small parts, only small players.
This is why I love BB! Great story...
Surely I can't be the only Boingboinger who immediately thought of the original paean to the Brannock Device -- Beer Frame, the zine put out by the genius zinester (and more recently sports-uniform ESPN blogger) Paul Lukas?
His best stuff, including the Brannock column, is collected in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Inconspicuous-Consumption-Obsessive-Granted-Everyday/dp/0517886685
Sorry for the long link.
For the record, I don't know Lukas, have never met him, and have nothing to gain from pimping his book except the knowledge that I have increased overall human happiness if one person buys it.
There's a picture of a Brannock Device on the front of it.
Does anyone use this thing correctly? I sold shoes for two high end stores. We had these Devices stashed under the chairs and sometimes used them when people seemed to expect it. You'd ask two so called expert fitters and they couldn't agree on how to use it. Sitting? standing? full weight on foot? You get drastically different results depending on technique. Mostly we'd eyeball their foot and the shoe they just took off and use our fitting experience to get close to the right size. It's not like there's any consistency in the construction of shoes. I have perfectly fitting shoes labeled from 7.5 D to 10 A. No measuring device is going to tell you what box to pull off the shelf. That's experience.
It is a pretty cool looking thing though.
I loved playing with these things in the shoe store as a kid. Looking back on it, that's rather unsanitary. Oh well, probably not the dirtiest thing I've done when I was young.