If you go to a shoe store in the US and aren’t sure what size shoes you need, they’ll be happy to measure your feet, using a…thing. A gadget. A device. The apparatus is basically a flat plate you stand on, with sliders that touch specific places on your foot. Although nobody has ever come up with a catchy brand name for it (the Foot-O-Tron 3000?) it does have a name. It’s a Brannock Device, and it was invented by Charles Brannock, born May 16, 1903.
Brannock was born into a family specializing in shoes; his father was a shoe entrepreneur, and when he graduated college he became the owner of the Park-Brannock Shoe Store in Syracuse, New York in the US. As a lifelong shoe specialist, he was keenly aware of the benefits of properly-fitting shoes.
At the time, human feet were measured for shoe size with a different mechanism, the RITZ Stick. Brannock noticed that the RITZ stick didn’t measure some important aspects of human feet, and knew that in addition to being a shoe-selling accessory, the measurement tool helped his customers avoid foot pain and injuries caused by ill-fitting shoes. As a humanitarian (he would certainly have won a Nobel if there was an appropriate category), he felt duty-bound to improve the fit of shoes for everyone.
He worked on his appliance for two years, and finally received US Patent 1,682,366 in 1925. His instrument soon became the shoe-industry standard, and he founded the Brannock Device Company to manufacture and sell it. During World War II, he performed a great service for the US military by designing special versions for use in fitting soldiers with the right boots.
Brannock had found his life’s work, and spent the rest of his life running the Brannock Device Company. He passed away in 1992 at the age of 89, and is remembered by millions of happy shoe wearers whose comfortably-shod feet enable them to, um, buy even more shoes.
The Brannock Device
