The early years - 1957 to 1963

Born in 1925, Robert B. Lange was a multi-faceted individual who embodied vision, invention, risk-taking, story-telling, persuasion and charisma. For a short while Bob flew a P-38 for the Air Force, before going to Harvard where he studied business, economics, mechanical engineering, tinkered with fiberglass and also took on skiing. His relationship with ski boots however was a particularly difficult one. His foot was extra wide, his boots were too soft and in 1948, he started re-enforcing them with fiberglass and polyester, the first foray into plastic boots on record. After graduating, he joined his family insurance business in Dubuque, Iowa, that was enjoying a booming business right after the war.


This is how Bob got his seed money for entering the plastic business and starting the Lange Corporation, a small plastics firm set in the basement of the old Brunswick Radio Co. in Dubuque that had gone under during the Depression. In 1955, he was officially in business when he received a contract from General Motors to make 30,000 fiberglass toy cars in the shape of the 1956 Corvette.

In addition, Bob Lange made all kinds of products from refrigerator interiors to hula-hoops, but as a hobby, kept on experimenting with fiberglass inserts for ski boots. He was still an avid skier and watched the sport grow as leather boot manufacturers were trying to keep up with an ever advancing ski technique. He already was convinced that the future for ski boots was plastic, not leather and long before the movie “The Graduate” came out, he heeded the call to plunge “into plastics.”


This is probably why, in 1958, Lange decided to make the jump and build a boot entirely out of plastic. Uniroyal was offering “Royalite,” an ABS material that Bob Lange used for making the seats of his miniature Corvettes and he thought it might be appropriate for his new product. That year, Lange patented his first thermoplastic ski boot design.
For that, he built a vacuum press and formed his first pair of boot. The initial result was an extremely stiff ski boot that could only have been used by a powerful ski racer. In 1959, a new blue and white lace-up version, with hinged cuff came out of production; in addition to forward flex, it offered more control, but still necessitated two persons to tighten-up the laces.

Fortunately this was precisely at that time that the Martin buckle developed by a Swiss inventor for Henke, started to be used widely by leather ski boot makers and is when Lange installed it on its boot, it worked much better than on leather boots, without stretching or deforming. As Morten Lund wrote: “The Lange boot and the Henke buckle had been fated to meet and marry.” Another problem that needed to be solved was the ABS behavior at low temperatures; it did crack and there wasn’t much that could be done about it, until Dupont came up with a new polyurethane product called Adiprene.

The chemical company provided Bob Lange with plenty of technical assistance and Adiprene proved to be the answer. Instead of being vacuum-molded, it was poured into a mold as hot liquid and left to cool. The first pair ever made were designed to fit Bob Lange’s 9 1/2 EEE feet, and he was able to buckled them on during the 1963 winter. The Adiprene boot held together in the cold. It flexed forward nicely and was rigid laterally but the new boot was still a far cry from what ski racers were expecting.

TECHNICAL NOTES
Before Bob Lange…
Before Bob Lange entered the sport, in all its history, no theme sounded more sorrowful notes than those struck in the literature of the alpine skl boot of the middle decades of the last century. A single page from the reams of screams set down by victims regaling their audience with the agonies of their ill-fitting, iron-hard boots (was there another kind?) would make a tyrant weep.

Every skier lay in the grip of the dilemma,. to wit, it took a new, stiff leather boot to control the ski—but it hurt like hell; switch to an older pair that felt great and the skis wobbled like a drunkard, rendering precise steering and edging impossible. The situation called for desperate measures. Some spent a small fortune importing custom boots shaped to a half- page of myriad precise measurements of each foot, a tactic usually sufficient to smooth over the otherwise brutal break-in period.

More affordably, less elegantly, others took their new stiff pair, laced them on tight, filled a bathtub, soaked the boots and feet for an hour, then walked around in them until they dried in the shape of the foot. The life of the boot was considerably shortened thereby but the fit made the boot bearable. The damnable thing, almost forgotten now, was the limitations of the boot liner. Today's thick, malleable liners can make any boot off-the-shelf feel like a custom fit.

In the Age of Agony, the boot was at lined with thin leather flaps because A thick protective lining would have made things worse—much worse—as the boot went soft. There was, however scant, a jot of time in every boot's life when it was just stiff enough to steer yet had stopped hurting so much. Of course, the boots after just so many turns down the mountain, became soft, meek, and uselessly demure as a pair of slippers.

But the all-too-short, blissful "window" of near-perfect results could be exploited, as French ace Jean-Claude Killy discovered. During the early 1960s, he employed Michel Arpin, whose feet were, miraculously, twins of Killy's, to break boots in until they reached the golden mean between rock and putty. Michel would then hand over the perfectly-broken-in pair, loyally donning another set of iron maidens to suffer through yet one more of the five-six excruciating break-ins a season endured for the cause of France.

Even at its hardest, leather, was no perfect medium, having too much give by modern standards.. The breakthrough had to come via a solution to the material problem. The material boy who resolved the problem and supplied further ingenious solutions was thirty-three year old Bob Lange of Dubuque, Iowa. The man never gave in and went through orgies of self-torture until he had the major problems of boot-making licked. Given the various evaluations floating about during Bob's short but lusty prime, he was a public relations genius turned genial buccaneer obsessed

Adapted from “The boot that Bob built" by Morten Lund