And where there are rich industrialists, there are rich and bored children of industrialists.
In the 1860s and 1870s, some of these rich, bored folks began to head to the Swiss Alps for winter vacation. Two excellent books on luge, which delve into the history of the sport, were written in 1894. Both were penned by Englishmen, and carry a bit of English superiority, but by their accounts, Davos had become a recreational ski resort by the 1880s. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was an early Davos skier, and publicized the sport in some of his articles.) “The nature of the Englishman is competition,” writes Harry Gibson in Tobogganing on Crooked Runs. “Whether riding, driving, walking, running, or sliding down a hill he must race, otherwise the amusement palls on him.”
Sledding was done at Davos as well, but early sleds were not particularly well-suited for competitive sport because, well, you couldn’t steer them. Some of the earliest accounts of sledding are the (possibly apocryphal) use of shields as sleds by the Cimbric, probably a northern Germanic tribe, who slid down the sides of mountains to attack (and lose to) the Romans in 103 B.C. This idea of a sled as an unsteerable plank was pretty universal until the late 1800s.
Interestingly, the word used for sledding, even competitive sledding, by those in the Alps who were documenting the birth of the sport was not sledding or luging (the French term). It was “tobogganing.” That word comes from, probably, one of a couple of Algonquin languages spoken by the residents of eastern Canada and northern New England. To these late-1800s writers, the toboggan was the overall category of equipment, and there could be many types of toboggans.
This early period of winter sports creation in the Alps drew Englishmen and Americans. In broad strokes, the Americans brought the equipment, and the Englishmen brought the ceremony. It was these tourists who, when they weren’t skiing, took sleds down the picturesque mountains, often right down the main roads in town, which seems to have been very annoying for the townspeople and great fun for the tourists.
“Of all the varied kinds of sport which men in their incessant search after amusement have discovered, those which have taken the most lasting hold, and attained the greatest perfection, appear to be the various forms of rapid motion, upon earth or water, in which one man’s strength or skill can be tested against another’s,” writes Theodore Andrea Cook in the other 1894 book, Notes on Tobogganing at St. Moritz. St. Moritz is probably the birthplace of the lineage that gave us luge. According to some accounts, it was in Davos that toboggan races had been held to the great entertainment of tourists in the early 1880s. Hotel operators in nearby St. Moritz took notice, and according to the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, in the winter of 1884 through 1885, five guests at the Kulm Hotel formed an “outdoor amusements committee,” and built a sled-racing course to compete with Davos.
This course was known as the Cresta Run. As a matter of fact, it still is. The English private-school vibe is obvious in the names within this curvy downhill track. Features of the course had names like Shuttlecock, the Battledore, and the Terrace. The Cresta Run was a phenomenal success. Every season, in the early years, four men would link arms and walk through the deep, powdery snow along a predetermined path. Then they’d go back, stomp the snow flat, craft tall banks astride the curves, and clear rubble out of the way. Initially the competitors rode what they called “Swiss” sleds, with wooden runners, on which the rider sits comfortably upright. They dutifully recorded times, awarded prizes, and probably got very drunk.
But soon there was a desire to go faster, and faster still. Here’s where we get into some heavily disputed stuff. The sleds almost immediately began to evolve, with metal runners being the biggest improvement. There is no apparent consensus about who actually created or introduced metal runners, metal frames, movable seats, differe