On the afternoon of 22 January 1907, a wailing chorus of steamboat whistles sent the residents of Memphis, Tennessee, running to the banks of the Mississippi river. “A great crowd assembled on the riverside, thinking some great disaster was taking place on the water,” reported the Memphis News-Scimitar. Instead, the swelling crowd was greeted by the sight of a man calmly walking on water. This was no miracle. Gliding along on a pontoon-like pair of “water shoes” was “Professor” Charles W. Oldrieve, the world’s pre-eminent “aquatic pedestrian”.
IT WAS a wild wager: $5000 if he could walk all the way from Cincinnati to New Orleans – on water. But as the self-styled “Professor” Charles W. Oldrieve deftly dodged the wake from passing steamboats, it looked as if he might just collect. He had left Cincinnati, Ohio, on New Year’s Day 1907. Under the terms of his bet with Boston gambler Alfred Woods, he had just 40 days to reach New Orleans, a 2600-kilometre walk along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As he strode downriver in “water shoes” of his own design, followed by his wife and judges in a skiff, people flocked to the riverside to cheer him on.
“As he strode downriver, people flocked to the riverside to cheer him on”
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Oldrieve was already an old hand at walking on water. As a young inventor in Massachusetts, he’d been fascinated by old-style bateaux, fur-trading boats with shallow drafts for negotiating small rivers and flat bottoms to provide stability when heavily laden with pelts. Taking his cue from the bateaux, Oldrieve designed cedar “shoes” for walking on water. Almost 2 metres long, the shoes easily supported his slim 60-kilogram body, though it took him five years to learn how to turn properly.
Although he made a successful walk on the Hudson river in 1888, strong currents could still catch him unawares: the Professor made national news in 1897 when he nearly died of exposure on an overnight walk in Boston harbour. A more successful stroll in 1898 took him across New York harbour to the army base on Governor’s Island – where, the New York Journal reported, the commandant “felt of the wonderful thigh muscles of the man who had made so wonderful a trip”.
Buoyed by this success, Oldrieve announced plans to walk across Niagara Falls. After that, he announced that he would cross the Atlantic on foot to attend the Paris Exposition of 1900. The notion of walking over an ocean came to him after he was suddenly swept out to sea on a stroll off Palm Beach, Florida. What should have been a terrifying brush with death instead became the focus of his life. “I want to make a world’s record that shall never be beaten,” he explained to a reporter from the San Francisco Call. “I have had it in mind for years.”
And then Oldrieve vanished. Some assumed he had drowned: after all, humans are poorly designed for aquatic pedestrianism. Even when supported by floats, our high centre of gravity makes us topple over. But, perhaps prodded by the emergence of water-walking rival Arthur Sadler, Oldrieve suddenly surfaced again, reappearing to walk down the Mississippi river.
Oldrieve’s quest was a surprisingly old one. Around 1480, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched a “method of walking on water” using skis made of cork and paddle-like poles. Since then there have been all manner of boat shoes, water shoes and aquatic strollers, with cork variously replaced by tin and aluminium, styrofoam and duct tape. Some designs employ crossbars or chains to keep walkers from inadvertently performing the splits; others have outriggers to prevent listing. Most feature hinged flaps underneath, which press flush against the shoe on the forward stroke, and extend out for traction on the backstroke. But Da Vinci provided the template for virtually all that followed.
Three centuries passed before other inventors dipped their toes in the water. In 1785, Parisians, impressed by the recent success of the first manned balloon flights, raised funds for a visiting inventor to demonstrate “a way to walk on water dry-footed”. On the appointed day, crowds lined the Seine, but the walker never appeared.
Instead, the first well-documented walk on water came in 1844, when Robert Kjellberg and Tonnes Balcken glided through Hanover on pontoon shoes made of thinly beaten metal. They showed that it was possible to carry a heavy knapsack and fire a rifle without sinking and taught the local army garrison how to use their invention. While no water-walking army materialised, Kjellberg was soon touring England as the “Water King”. His exhibitions captured the Victorian imagination, and imitators around the world followed in his sloshing footsteps.
“Anybody can do it. It may be, that before long… the shining path marked out upon the waters by the silvery beams of the moon will become a fashionable promenade,” declared the Toronto Globe after witnessing a local water-walker striding the Don river in 1854. “No stones will be there to vex those troubled with tender feet, no bruises can result from a fall, no danger is to be apprehended from carelessly driven cab, or viciously given dogs.”
Yet the idea of waterborne warfare was never far away. The same account foresaw “the crossing of armies over rivers”, and in 1910 inventor Luigi Rissi taught an Italian soldier to fire a rifle from “hydro skis”. Oldrieve’s contribution was perhaps more fanciful than practical: during his walk in New York harbour he calmly lit sticks of dynamite with his cigar and tossed them into the East river, where they sent spectacular fountains shooting 20 metres into the air.
Fighting is difficult enough on solid ground, but hopeful inventors were undeterred: the US alone has granted scores of water-walking patents since the by Henry Rowlands in 1858. One even employs a lighter-than-air balloon harnessed to the walker. Yet most water shoes looked much the same. As a reporter from The New York Times remarked after watching a stroll on the Delaware river, “The shoes were painted black, and looked like babies’ coffins”.
On occasion, they’ve almost resulted in real coffins. Tales abound of walkers whose shoes left them head-down in the water. In 1935, another inventor had to be rescued from Lake St Clair, en route to Detroit, on discovering, rather belatedly, that he couldn’t swim. More hapless still was Indian yogi L. S. Rao, who in 1966 tried to walk on water without any shoes at all. His mind may have been in nirvana, but his body sank like a stone. Spectators who paid $100 to witness his feat were unamused.
Water-walking, though, largely vanished with the Victorians. Engineering students at the University of San Diego keep the practice afloat with an annual and there remain a handful of more dedicated practitioners. Most notable of these is retired US army sergeant Walter Robinson. Inspired in Vietnam by children floating on a downed aircraft wing, Robinson designed walkers to stroll through the Panama canal in 1975, and across the English Channel in 1978. “The North Sea is a formidable foe,” he warns in his book The Water Shoe: A Serious Work. “The Channel is no place for the beginner or faint of heart.”
Even Oldrieve’s dream of crossing the Atlantic was eventually fulfilled by Frenchman Remy Bricka in 1988. It took him 40 days to walk from the Canary Islands to Trinidad. Israeli-born inventor Yoav Rosen has water-walked on Oldrieve’s old stamping ground off Boston, and from 2001 had, rather appropriately, a patent examiner named Jesus.
Needless to say, Jesus approved.
Modern water-walkers might never achieve such acclaim as Oldrieve, though. On 10 February 1907, just 45 minutes before the deadline, he slogged into New Orleans to a hero’s welcome. After narrowly escaping drowning in the wake of a passing steamboat, the bedraggled Professor crossed the finish line more than 10 kilograms lighter and $5000 richer.
“I wouldn’t do that again for twice the amount,” he said. And with that, the world’s second most famous water-walker sank into history.
