From Velcro to bedbug detectors, dogs have been the surprising inspiration behind many inventions that we take for granted. We suspect that one of them may be something you have, or have had, in your closet: The ubiquitous top sider:

 

 

Also known as the “unofficial” preppy shoe, the shoe is officially known as the Sperry Top Sider, named after its inventor, Paul Sperry. In the interest of fairness, we think the shoe should have been named the Cocker Shoe, but we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.

In 1935, Paul Sperry, a life long sailor, slipped on the freshly-refinished deck of his sailboat one night and fell overboard into Long Island Sound. It wasn’t the first time.  Just once, Sperry must have been thinking as he climbed back on board, it would be nice to walk on his boat without risking a fall. Wet and irritated, he started to experiment with ways to make a shoe that would grip the surface of a smooth, lacquered, and often wet boat deck.  In a makeshift workshop at his New Haven home, he played with rubber combinations as he searched for an elegant solution to slippery soles.

Enter “Prince,” Sperry’s Cocker Spaniel.

On a cold Connecticut winter day, Prince ran across the ice, and it struck Sperry that Prince hadn’t slipped. How was his dog able to keep traction on such a slippery surface?  The answer came when Sperry turned over Prince’s paw and noticed hundreds of tiny cracks and cuts going in every direction. Wondering if he could duplicate Prince’s paw, Sperry sliced a series of tiny grooves on a slab of crepe rubber (some say it was a chunk of gum rubber a quarter of an inch thick) using a razor blade. After several tries, he settled on a wavy herringbone pattern that he thought offered the best grip.  He fitted the crepe sole onto a pair of ordinary canvas shoes, though in time, the canvas upper would be replaced by a soft moccasin leather that Sperry treated with a new way of tanning so the leather wouldn’t fall apart after constant exposure to salt and water. According to company literature, the Sperry Top Sider was born.

As good a story as this is, it’s not the whole story. Fifteen years earlier and unbeknownst to Sperry, a slaughterhouse worker named John Sipe had also gotten tired of slipping on wet surfaces, in his case, concrete floors. Sipe put notches in the soles of his shoes (which even today we call “siping”) and patented the idea. It was his son, Frank, who thought to “sipe” pneumatic automobile tires which was embraced by tire manufacturers in the 1950s.

Evidently, either the US patent office saw no conflict, or Sipe didn’t contest Sperry’s creation because in 1939, Sperry received a U.S. Patent for his novel shoe sole design. At first, the shoes were available only through mail order, but in 1939, the US Navy obtained the rights to manufacture Sperry’s shoes in huge numbers and contracted most of the work out to Uniroyal (owned back then by the U.S. Rubber Company).  Over the next twenty years, Uniroyal sold the shoes to yachtsmen, and perhaps that is how the shoe became popular with wealthy east coast college kids whose parents owned boats. By the mid 1960s, 75 percent of all Top-Siders sold were to people who’d never set foot on a boat, though the Authentic Original was named part of the casual uniform for the U.S. Naval Academy.

In 1987, America’s Cup-winning skipper, Dennis Conner was probably wearing a pair because the brand served as the official footwear sponsor of the America’s Cup, as well as the official sponsor for the US Olympic sailing team for years.

To this day, Sperry Top-Siders are still the boat shoe, but we still think they should be called the Cocker Shoe. Just saying.

Image of Prince found on Pinterest and happily credited upon receipt of information

Thumbnail image by Paul A. Sperry – United States Patent Office, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39195294