Release! History of Safety Bindings (from
Skiing History magazine)
Author:
Seth Masia
The first “safety” bindings, by Portland skier Hjalmar Hvam, weren’t all that safe. But 50 years ago, Cubco, Miller, Look and Marker began to change skiing’s broken leg image.
By Seth Masia
By the mid-Thirties, half of the great inventions of alpine skiing were already in place. The standard waisted and cambered shape for a turning ski had been established 80 years earlier by Sondre Norheim. Rudolph Lettner had introduced the steel edge in 1928, and the first laminated skis – with ash tops and hard bases of hickory or even Bakelite plastic – were produced in 1932. The Huitfeldt toe iron and Kandahar heel cable assured a solid connection of boot to ski.
Too solid. Every racer could count on breaking a leg from time to time. Some of the brighter lights in the skiing community experimented with homemade release systems. One of these brighter lights – and one of the injured racers – was an elegantly tall, slim athlete named Hjalmar Hvam. Like Mikkel Hemmestveit and countless Norwegians before him, Hvam was a great Nordic champion who emigrated to the U.S. Born in Kongsberg in 1902, Hvam won his first jumping contest at age 12, and won consistently through his teens. But he jumped in the shadow of the local Ruud brothers – Birger, Sigmund and Asbjorn – who snapped up all of the Kongsberg team slots at the annual Holmenkollen classic.
Hvam quit skiing and emigrated to Canada in 1923, arriving in Portland in 1927. He worked as a laborer in a lumber mill until joining the Cascade Ski Club in 1929. He was quickly recognized as a leading jumper, cross-country racer and speed skater, peaking at the national championships in 1932 at Lake Tahoe, where he won both the jumping and cross-country events to take the Nordic combined championship. Coaxed onto alpine skis, he won both runs of his very first slalom race, in 1933 – the Oregon state championships. On borrowed skis.
That experience led to twelve consecutive downhill victories in 1935 and 1936, including the Silver Skis on Mt. Rainier and the first running of the Golden Rose race on Mt. Hood. On Mt. Baker, in 1936, he won a four-way competition with victories in all four disciplines – jumping, cross-country, slalom and downhill. He qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team that year, but couldn’t compete because he was still a citizen of Norway.
In 1935, he opened the Hjalmar Hvam Ski Shop in Northwest Portland, with a branch at Mt. Hood. The city shop had a great location, right on the 23rd St. trolley line from downtown. Hvam saw firsthand the dozens of injuries suffered by his customers, as well as by competing racers. No one kept national records, but it appears that the injury rate was horrendous. Ski injury experts like Dr. Jasper Shealy and Carl Ettlinger estimate that in the years just before and after World War II, about 1 percent of skiers suffered an injury on any given day – so it’s likely that by season’s end, 10 percent of all skiers were out of commission. About half of these injuries were probably lower-leg fractures. The most visible après-ski accessories were plaster casts and crutches. It wasn’t a recipe for long-term commercial success.
Trained as a mechanical drafstman, Hvam began tinkering with toe irons, looking for a reliable way to release the boot in a fall. The problem then, as now, was how to make a sophisticated latch that would hold a skier in for normal skiing maneuvers – steering, edging, jumping, landing – but release in abnormal or complex falls. It was a puzzle.
Injury Leads to Invention
Hvam’s “Eureka!” moment came under the influence of a powerful anaesthetic. In June 1937, Hvam won the Golden Rose on Mt. Hood – again – and then climbed with some friends to do a little cornice jumping. The result was predictable: In the spring snow, someone was bound to punch through the crust and break a leg. This time, it was Hvam, and he sustained a spiral fracture. He was sent to Portland’s St. Vincent Hospital for surgery. “When I came out of the ether I called the nurse for a pencil and paper,” he wrote decades later. “I had awakened with the complete principle of a release toe iron.”
What he imagined looked like a simple pivoting clip notched into the boot’s sole flange. An internal mechanism held the pivot centered as long as the boot toe pressed upward against the clip. But when that pressure was removed, as in a severe forward lean, the clip was freed to swing sideways. Thus Hvam provided for sideways toe release in a forward-leaning, twisting fall.
In 1939, Hvam broke the leg again, this time while testing his own binding. He always claimed the leg had never healed properly, but it did teach the lesson that “safety” bindings aren’t always safe. Nonetheless, Hvam launched his Saf-Ski binding into the market. His release toe was received with enthusiasm by his racing and jumping friends. Jumpers used it by inserting a heel lift under the boot, thus jamming the toe iron so it couldn’t swivel. It seemed a pointless exercise, but professional jumpers from the Northwest wanted to support their friend.
Many racers viewed the idea of a release toe with intense suspicion, especially after Olaf Rodegaard released from his Hvam binding in a giant slalom. Rodegaard, however, was convinced that the release saved his leg, and kept the binding. Hvam sold a few dozen pairs before World War II broke out, and tried to talk the Pentagon into buying the toe for the 10th Mountain Division – but the troops shipped out before he could close a deal. At least three pairs of Saf-Ski toe irons went to Italy with the division, bootlegged by Rodegaard and by the Idaho brothers Leon and Don Goodman (the Goodmans would introduce their own release binding in 1952). Thus the first production release bindings found their way to Europe, screwed solidly to GI Northland and Groswold skis.
After the war, Hvam produced the binding in several versions for retail sale and rental. It was widely accepted by his buddies in the jumping and racing communities, at least in the West. He sold 2,500 pairs in 1946-47, and watched as a dozen North American companies rapidly imitated the principle. His new competitors included Anderson & Thompson, Dovre, Northland, Gresvig, Krystal , U.S. Star and O-U.
Euros Develop Release Systems
There were also European inventions. In 1948, in Nevers, France, sporting goods manufacturer Jean Beyl built a plate binding mortised into the ski. There’s no evidence that Beyl was inspired by American toe irons, and his binding was based on a completely different principle. It didn’t release the boot in a fall – instead, it swiveled to protect the lower leg against twist, without actually detaching from the ski. It did something no other binding could do: It would absorb momentary shock and return to center. The binding’s lateral elasticity was a revolutionary idea and it wouldn’t be duplicated by other manufacturers for another two decades. The plate also eliminated the flexible leather ski boot sole from the release mechanism, vastly improving reliability. Beyl wanted to give the product an American-sounding name, and settled on the title of a glossy weekly picture magazine published in New York. By 1950 Beyl had talked several members of the French team into using his Look plate, including world champions Henri Oreiller and James Couttet.
Norm Macleod, one of the partners in the U.S. importing firm Beconta, recalls that the problems with the Look plate were weight and thickness. To install the binding, a mechanic had to carve a long, deep hole in the top of the ski. “The plate was mortised into the top of the ski and therefore the ski had to be thick,” Macleod says. “It was set about a centimeter into the ski, and stuck up another 6 or 7 millimeters above the top surface. There was resistance to that. Racers thought it was advantageous to be closer to the ski.”
So in 1950 Beyl created the Look Nevada toe, the first recognizably modern binding design, with a long spring-loaded piston to provide plenty of lateral elasticity for shock absorption. Beyl was a perfectionist; in an era when most bindings were made of stamped steel, his Nevada was made of expensive, heavy cast aluminum. It was nearly bulletproof. It was a two-pivot toe unit-that is, the main pivoting body carried along a second pivot on which was mounted the toe cup, thus assuring that the toe cup would travel in parallel with the boot toe.
The rest of the story: https://www.skiinghistory.org/history/release-history-safety-bindings
