Ian's Shoelace Site - History of the Ian Knot

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Ian's Shoelace Site

History of the Ian Knot

Here's a run-down of the various things I've done with the Ian Knot since inventing it over 23 years ago, culminating in the web site you see today.

June 1982: The birth of the Ian Knot.
Ian Fieggen, 1982

One morning, after breaking yet another shoelace, I noticed that it always seemed to be the right end of my lace that broke. Because the regular method of tying shoelaces is not symmetrical, I figured that the end that experiences the most movement simply wears out more quickly.

When I examined the knot and found that it could be made symmetrical, I discovered quite by accident that the resultant technique was also much faster, as a lot of time was saved by working with both hands simultaneously.

Having mastered the new technique myself, I then set about teaching anyone else who was interested. I guess I'm one of the few people who can claim to have taught their parents to tie their shoelaces! Mostly, it was shown to friends and relatives and the occasional shoe-shop assistant.

1992: Created an instruction sheet.
Ian Fieggen, 1992

I drew illustrations of the six steps required and desktop-published a sheet of instructions. At last I was able to give people something they could take home and study at leisure. I printed 1000 copies; this turned out to be more than I would hand out in a lifetime!

1993: Created a computer animation.
Ian Fieggen, 1993

This was still in the days before most people had software like "Windows" on their computers, making it difficult for them to handle a simple AVI or MPG movie. I therefore captured 32 frames from a video of my Ian Knot, then wrote a tiny yet powerful program to display the resultant "movie", complete with nine speed settings plus controls to step backwards or forwards one frame at a time. In fact, it turned out to be quite a good way to demonstrate the Ian Knot. This was uploaded to various computer bulletin boards around the world, as we did in those days before the Internet made such things easy.

1994: Optimised the Ian Knot program.
Ian Fieggen, 1994

In order to make it smaller and more attractive to download, I compressed the video data by creating a static background image of the underlying shoe, then painstakingly erasing the backgound data from each frame of the animation, leaving only the fingers, laces and shadows. The resultant file was over 40% smaller, quite an achievement.

2000: Created a web page.
Ian Fieggen, 2000

I took my original drawings from 1992, coloured them in for a fresher look, and created my first Ian Knot web page. I also added a decent MPG movie complete with sound track and subtitles. This one minute long movie showed the Ian Knot at normal speed and in detail as well as the two other most common shoelace knots for comparison. The resultant page was uploaded to my personal web site and thus made available to the world for the first time.

2001: Enhanced web page.
Ian Fieggen, 2001

With modems still the predominant mode of connecting to the Internet, I reduced the size of my Ian Knot movie by removing the two other common shoelace techniques. I also re-drew the original drawings to have the shoes viewed from the same overhead perspective as the movies.

2003: Redesigned web-site.
Ian Fieggen, 2003

The 20th anniversary of the Ian Knot in 2002, plus an article about shoelaces in "Nature" magazine, provided the impetus to expand my single "Ian Knot" page into a multi-paged "Ian's Shoelace Site". This allowed me to add more comprehensive instructions on all known shoelace knots, thus making it the definitive reference. The site that you see here has grown substantially and continues to expand today.

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