In 1971, Bill Bowerman was staring at a problem.
The legendary University of Oregon track coach and Nike co-founder wanted to create a running shoe that could grip a new artificial track without relying on traditional spikes. The solution would eventually help transform athletic footwear, but its unlikely origin wasn’t in a laboratory or shoe factory.
It was sitting in Bowerman’s kitchen.
According to Nike’s Department of Nike Archives, Bowerman was trying to figure out how to give his runners better traction after a hard, slick urethane track was installed at the University of Oregon. Spikes dug too deeply into the surface, while flat-soled shoes didn’t provide enough grip.
Then Bowerman noticed his wife Barbara’s waffle iron.
The appliance was a Model 251 made by Bersted Manufacturing Company, and it had been given to Bill and Barbara as a wedding present in 1936. Looking at its grid of raised squares, Bowerman realized a reversed version of the pattern might give runners the lightweight traction he was trying to create.
So he did something that probably wasn’t covered by the waffle iron’s instruction manual: He poured liquid urethane directly into it.
The experiment did not go particularly well.
Bowerman hadn’t used an anti-stick agent, and the urethane permanently glued the waffle iron shut, ruining the couple’s 35-year-old wedding gift, according to the Smithsonian.
But Bowerman wasn’t finished.
He bought additional secondhand waffle irons and continued experimenting with different molds and materials. Those kitchen experiments eventually helped produce a flexible, lightweight sole covered in raised, waffle-like nubs.
The idea became the foundation for one of Nike’s earliest footwear innovations.
By November 1971, members of Oregon’s cross-country team were wearing early versions of Bowerman’s waffle sole when they won the NCAA championship. More athletes tested prototypes over the following months, and Bowerman and early Nike employee Geoff Hollister assembled a small batch for athletes around the 1972 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore.
Those early shoes became known as the Moon Shoes because the impressions their soles left in the dirt reminded people of astronauts’ footprints on the moon.
The Moon Shoe itself never received a widespread commercial release, but Bowerman’s strange breakfast-table experiment was just getting started.
Nike released the Oregon Waffle in 1973, followed by the Waffle Trainer. The latter became an enormous success, with orders topping 100,000 pairs by 1975, according to Nike.
Bowerman also sought legal protection for his invention. He applied for a patent in 1972 for an athletic shoe with short, multisided studs designed to provide improved traction, and received U.S. Patent No. 3,793,750 on Feb. 26, 1974.
The waffle sole helped put the young company on the athletic footwear map.
Before Nike became a global sportswear giant, Bowerman and his former University of Oregon runner Phil Knight had operated the company as Blue Ribbon Sports, initially importing Japanese running shoes. The Nike name and Carolyn Davidson’s now-famous Swoosh arrived in the company’s early 1970s transformation.
Bowerman, who died in 1999 at age 88, never stopped tinkering with athletic shoes. His innovations also included ideas involving raised heels, nylon uppers and cushioning, but the waffle sole became perhaps the most famous symbol of his experimental approach.
And more than five decades after Bowerman sacrificed the family waffle iron in pursuit of a better running shoe, descendants of his idea haven’t disappeared.
Nike says versions of the waffle sole are still used in its footwear today. The company has also continued to reference Bowerman’s experiment in modern designs, making the distinctive tread part of Nike’s design DNA.
Even the waffle iron itself eventually resurfaced.
For decades, the original appliance was thought to be lost. When Bowerman’s son Tom renovated the family’s Oregon property decades later, however, the ruined iron was discovered in an old rubbish pit along with prototypes and molds from his father’s experiments.
Nike preserved the battered appliance in its archives.
It is an unusually humble artifact from the beginnings of a company that would become one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world: a ruined wedding present, permanently sealed by an experiment that didn’t work the first time.
The waffle iron was a failure. The idea inside it wasn’t.
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