Antique and Vintage Skis

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Skis are practically as old as snow, particularly in Scandinavian countries, where getting around in winter is an essential fact of life. By the 18th century, wooden skis had made the leap from tools for hunters to basic equipment for Swedish and...
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Skis are practically as old as snow, particularly in Scandinavian countries, where getting around in winter is an essential fact of life. By the 18th century, wooden skis had made the leap from tools for hunters to basic equipment for Swedish and Norwegian soldiers—their training regimes, which combined skiing and shooting, became the basis for the biathalon of the Winter Olympics, which debuted in 1924. By the 19th century, skis were being shaped and designed for specialized purposes. The design innovation that made skiing modern was the shift from a ski whose working surface was perfectly flat to one that cambered or bowed upward in the center. This concave design, which is believed to have originated in Telemark, Norway, in the early 1800s, kept a skier's weight off the center of the ski, allowing them to move more easily across a snowy surface. In 1868, a Norwegian from Telemark named Sondre Norheim invented the Telemark ski, which featured a cut in the side of the ski that permitted skiers to choose their direction by turning, rather than sliding, in the direction they wanted to go. By 1886, Norway had become the first country with a factory devoted to making nothing but skis; French entrepreneurs followed suit with a factory of their own in 1893. It was an Austrian, though, who gave skis a steel edge when, in 1926, an accountant named Rudolph Lettner patented the idea of securing steel plates to the edges of skis. Because these metal edges were screwed on, they tended to fall off with use, prompting skiers to carry spare edges and a screwdriver with them when on the slopes. Despite this early design flaw, when the Austrian ski team, equipped with their countryman's invention, swept a skiing contest in 1930, metal edges became the norm. By this time, skis had come very far from their origins as solid planks of wood. It was now routine to make skis out of laminated lumber, with hardwoods such as hickory and beech on the bottom and softer, lighter...
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