100 Objects #11: Brannock Device

Introduction to Brannock Device

0:00It's 1925 in Syracuse, New York, and a young man is going into the Park Brannock Shoe Store on South Salina Street. And he's about to encounter what I think truly is the greatest gadget in American history. He's going to have his shoe size measured in this newfangled metal gadget that measures the length of your foot and the width of your foot. And most crucially, the arch length of your foot.

0:30And that's the length from your heel to the ball of your foot. This arch length measurement is a brand new concept in 1925. It might seem unnecessary, but actually, it's really important. Two people can have the same heel to toe measurement, but a different arch measurement. And so they might need different size shoes or have the width adjusted slightly. And this measurement is so your shoes are going to fit better and your shoes aren't going to wear out as much because you're going to be walking in them more smoothly.

1:01And nothing like that had ever been devised before. And it basically revolutionized shoe size fitting. So this metal thing that measures the length and width and arch of a foot, it has a name. What is this thing called? It's called a Brannock device.

1:19The Brannock device. You probably stepped into one of these at some point in your life, most likely when you were a child. I remember going to the shoe store when I was a kid. And of course, I was excited to get a new pair of shoes. But I was maybe more excited at the opportunity to use the Brannock device. I love the cool touch of the metal, the slide of the knobs, the sturdiness of the device. It was a pleasing experience. And it stayed with me. I can tell you, for me, it definitely made an impression when I was a kid. And I'm pretty sure from having talked to a lot of people, I think that is a common memory that people have.

1:54That it's a nostalgic, fun memory of going to the shoe store. And also that this object, this device, seemed very specialized and official. And you felt like you were in this adult world as a child. Yeah, you were taken seriously, like in a way you were kind of cared for. Yes, it seems very professional, very official. And the Brannock device really is good for only one thing, but it's the perfect example of that thing, right, in terms of measuring the foot.

2:26So it's this singularly focused product. Similarly, Charles Brannock was a very singularly focused guy. He named his invention after himself, the Brannock device, then founded a company to manufacture it that he named after the device, the Brannock device company. And he never invented anything else. But it's not just the device or the inventor that draws me to this object. Over the last 100 years, the American financial system has become increasingly complicated and opaque.

2:58Companies are designed to benefit shareholders, not consumers or workers. And the average person doesn't really understand how all the money flows.

3:10Compare that to the Brannock device and its simple business model, which remains almost unchanged for a century. The Brannock device has no brand extensions, as they would say now. And there's no venture capital. You know, it's a very simple operation. And people can wrap their head around that. And there's something satisfying about that.

History of Brannock Device

3:34From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Brannock device. A perfect device in an imperfect world. How this object came to be, how it has endured, and just how much business in America has changed.

4:02I've wanted to tell the story of why the Brannock device is so pleasing for a very long time. And when I decided to do it, there was only one person I could call. My name is Paul Lucas, and I'm a journalist, and I specialize in writing about things that other people either don't notice or take for granted. Paul published an all-time great zine on these types of objects back in the 90s called Beer Frame. He also runs a blog devoted to the minutiae of sports uniforms called UniWatch.

4:32Today, he writes a newsletter on Substack called Inconspicuous Consumption. And the Brannock device has always seemed to me to be prototypically, classically inconspicuous. Pretty much everyone knows what it is. I think it's fair to say there's probably nobody listening to this podcast episode right now whose foot has not been in a Brannock device at some point. It's pretty much a universal touchstone in our culture, and yet nobody knows what it's called, or almost nobody. So that means it is simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous.

5:04Paul's obsession with the Brannock device began in 1992 when he read an obituary for the inventor. That was the first time he connected a name to the object, and it happened around the same time he was developing his beat. It was sort of a perfect confluence of an impulse I had with the ultimate example of that impulse. Because I've never come across anything else that really can supplant the Brannock device as my North Star. And over the years, I've written a lot about it.

5:35I even have a tattoo of it, which I realize may seem like a bit much, but it's my ultimate object. The inventor's name was Charles Brannock. He was born in 1903 in Syracuse, New York. Charles Brannock had shoes and shoe sales in his blood, you might say. His father co-owned the Park Brannock shoe store, the one from the beginning of the story. Charles worked there while he was in high school. It occurred to him that there was a need for better shoe sizing, that a lot of people complained that their shoes didn't fit properly or they were uncomfortable.

6:14The other devices at the time were just glorified yardsticks that measured only length, or just length and width if you turned it sideways. Nothing measured that critical dimension of arch length. And so while he was in college in his early 20s at Syracuse University, he sort of had an impulse to try to create such a device. And his college roommate would recall that he would wake up in the middle of the night, two or three in the morning, and there was Charlie Brannock sitting at a desk with the light on, scribbling notes and making drawings.

6:48And his roommate would say, what are you doing? You're keeping me up at night. And Charlie would say, you know, I had an idea for the invention. I'm working on this thing and I have to write it down or I might forget. So that thing that comes up with, the Brannock device, could you describe it? You have one next to you. Of course, you do. So it's a metal object. It has two sort of cupped areas, one at each end, and that's so you can put your heel to measure one foot in this sort of cupped receptacle and then turn the Brannock device around to do the other foot.

7:22It has one sliding piece that moves backward and forward to measure the width of your foot. And then it has another sliding piece to measure your arch length. And then it has yet another sliding piece for the length of your foot. So it's metal. The one I'm holding is made of aluminum, which has been the case for decades now. They've been made out of aluminum. I believe the early ones were made of steel. And it feels solid, but not too heavy.

7:52And I don't know how else to say this. It just looks like it knows what it's doing. It looks so official and professional, and it has so many calibrations and numbers on it. I mean, that could just be nonsense, right? You could just put a lot of ruled lines and numerals on things and just make it seem like a thermometer or a barometer or something like that. But it has this feel of a finely tuned, finely calibrated instrument.

8:22And it is.

Brannock Device Design

8:23It's hard to pin down the exact birth date of the Brannock device. But Paul says an early version was definitely in use by 1925. And again, that was really the point. Charles Brannock invented this not to be an industry tool, but to give his family shoe store a competitive sales advantage. But other stores did take notice. And soon there was demand from other outlets, not just in Syracuse, but out of town, around the country.

8:55So Brannock filed a patent that wouldn't be granted until 1928. But in the meantime, he got busy. He initially thought he would just need a handful of prototypes to use at his family's store. But now that there was a demand, he needed to create a company. And so he launched the Brannock device company in Syracuse to manufacture these things. It's almost a quaint idea of how invention works. Charles Brannock saw a need. He made a thing. And people wanted it. So Brannock manufactured more and sold them to people who needed them.

9:28And as demand grew, the Brannock company grew with it. Well, let's put it this way. If it was launched in Syracuse in 1925, by 1929, international sales were starting. OK, so not just around the country, but around the world or at least across the ocean in Europe. So that's a pretty big deal. Charles Brannock developed a junior model because kids' feet are not just smaller than adult feet. They're proportioned differently. Brannock took his role in shoe fitting very seriously. He had this quote early in his Brannock career where he said,

10:02the shoe salesman, like a doctor, has a distinct responsibility to his customers. A mistake in the fitting of a shoe, particularly a child's, can easily endanger a person's health. The misfitted feet of today are the crippled feet of tomorrow. The junior model came out in 1933. And that same year, Brannock got his big break. A United States Navy ship's captain noticed that his sailors were complaining a lot of ill-fitting shoes. So he knew of the Brannock device.

10:34It's not clear if he was from Syracuse or, you know, if he had just encountered it at another shoe store. And he had his sailors, when they were docked somewhere, refitted with a Brannock device. And he was so happy with the results because his sailors were no longer complaining, that he wrote an article in the July 1933 issue of a publication called United States Naval Institute Proceedings, where he described how the Brannock device had eliminated foot troubles aboard his ship. Charles Brannock heard about the article.

11:05And ever the believer in his own invention, he sent copies of it to important people around the armed forces. Pretty soon, most branches of the U.S. military were using Brannock devices to outfit their service members. Then, on December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. And the U.S. entered World War II. Suddenly, there's a huge demand because there's a huge surge in enlistment in the U.S. armed forces. And the military wants Brannock devices because they need to fit all these people. And Brannock makes a modification.

11:37Instead of the single Brannock device, which you turn around to measure each foot, you know, you put your heel in one end to do the right foot and the other end for the left foot, he comes up with a double Brannock device, which is sort of two Brannock devices mounted on a board. And I actually have one of these that was made for the Air Force. And the idea is that if you have all these new enlistees and they're sort of marching through, getting fitted for uniforms and you're giving them their crew cut and all that,

12:09you know, so that they could, you know, go off to war, you can't waste time turning the device around. Of course not. So you have this double Brannock device so that they can have both feet measured simultaneously. And it's more efficient. It's faster. I mean, there's a funny, there's like an old, I don't know where this comes from, some general that says like an army marches on his stomach, like meaning that you have to keep the troops well fed. But the truth is, is that armies march on their feet. Yeah. Like your boots and your shoes. It's a big deal. And I like to say that's how Charles Brannock helped defeat fascism.

12:42You know, it's in like, it's literally true. He had a role in U.S. military preparedness and the call to action.

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14:30The Brannock device of today is very close to the one Charles Brannock introduced in his father's shoe store in the mid-1920s. He did make small refinements over the years, but nothing major. And he didn't really need to make many changes because the Brannock device was what we would now call a category killer. You know, that term didn't exist back in his day, but it essentially wiped out the competition. Nobody ever seriously challenged it. And it really was and still is the gold standard.

15:03There are Brannock device copycats out there. The patent expired decades ago, so there's nothing the company can do. These imitations are made abroad in places where materials and labor are cheaper. But they're also made more cheaply. If you were at a shoe store and saw a knockoff Brannock, especially if it was more than a few years old, you could see the difference in terms of like the fixtures and the fittings just aren't as nicely calibrated. It's not as well made.

15:31Charles Brannock died in 1992 at the age of 89. He was a lifelong bachelor, married only to his invention, and he never invented anything else. It's really interesting to me. So many inventors, you know, they get the bug to invent something and they just keep going. Charles Brannock kind of nailed it on the first shot. He was only in his 20s, his early 20s, and it was one and done. Brannock had no children and no succession plan.

16:02But keeping in line with their founders' values, the company made a very unusual decision about how to move forward. They set a fixed price for the sale of the company, and they asked potential buyers to make their case. One requirement was that the new owner had a promise to keep manufacturing in Syracuse for at least five years. It was almost like a job application. Like, who is worthy to become the steward of this iconic American product? American manufacturing had been on the decline since the 1980s.

16:32So this requirement wasn't just unusual. It was making a statement. The Brannock device company was saying that a sustainable American-made product is still possible. And the plan worked. Half a dozen people applied to buy the company, most of them from the shoe industry. But there was this one guy named Salvador Leonardi. He was in manufacturing in upstate New York. He had a family company that was founded by his father in the 1940s. They were arguably even more specialized than the Brannock device.

17:04They made these metal frames for purses and handbags. Like, if you can imagine how a handbag opens and closes, the sort of metal frame around the flaps, that's what they made. That's a clutch purse style, I guess. That's a really satisfying snap when it comes together like a clamshell. Exactly. Exactly. But Sal Leonardi wanted to go into business for himself, sort of have his own business, something that he could call his own. And he thought, oh, this, you know, this is the perfect thing I can do.

17:35Sal Leonardi eventually passed the company down to his son-in-law, Tim Follett. And both men really seem to embody what makes the Brannock device special. They are very low-key, kind of not flashy people. And I don't mean that in a negative way. On the contrary, they really believe that if you make a quality product, it speaks for itself. And I've interviewed them and known them for a while now. And they believe strongly in the idea of you make it better, not faster.

18:07You use good materials. You hire good people. And they are not sort of publicity seekers. And I think there's a lot to be said for that. It seems almost inconceivable in today's marketplace of influencers and social media and all the rest, where everything is hype, hype, hype, and the attention economy and all of that. That is not how the Brannock device has been promoted. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's captured your attention, certainly. But it has not captured anyone else's attention.

18:41The Brannock device has captured my attention, too. And there's one story about the Brannock device company that I think encapsulates my fascination with this object, both the design and what it says about business. About 20 years ago, current Brannock president Tim Follett saw an opportunity. The discount chain Payless Shoe Source had started introducing foot-measuring devices into their stores for the first time.

Payless Shoe Source Story

19:05Here's Tim. And they were considering the knockoffs. But these knockoffs weren't very good. They are poor quality. Matter of fact, some of them send, actually, they send a little screwdriver with them and an extra screw. I don't know how you could be an owner of any establishment and, you know, it's like getting your car with an extra transmission. And as a brand that relied on selling a large volume of cheap shoes, Tim knew that Payless needed a device that would stand up to abuse. So I went to a local mall and I took a bunch of brand new devices, our brand new devices,

19:39and they actually had some knockoffs in the mall. So I traded with the manager. I took the old broken ones and gave him some of ours. Tim took those knockoff brand new devices home, figured out who at Payless headquarters was in charge of purchasing them, and sent him the broken devices. And I said, if you buy the knockoffs, this is what you're buying. And I said, in five years, this is what your store is going to be filled with. And that reflects poorly on your store. It's like going into a restaurant, a nice restaurant, and having broken chairs.

20:11It worked. We ended up getting all of Payless' business for many, many years as an investment. But you won't find a brand new device in a Payless these days, because there are no Payless stores anymore. Yeah, they went out of business. Payless went bankrupt in 2019 for a lot of reasons. Mall traffic had plummeted. They had a hard time competing with online companies like Zappos. But there's something else that contributed to the downfall of Payless, a trend that's been growing in the American financial system since the 1980s.

Private Equity Impact

20:46Private equity. Here's where I'm going to go on a bit of a digression, but I assure you I'll eventually tie it back to the beautiful simplicity of the Brannock device in the Brannock device company. You may have heard private equity linked to the fight over Taylor Swift's masters, or you might remember that 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney had been the CEO of a private equity firm called Bain Capital. And private equity encompasses a lot of things. But what most people mean when they talk about it is something called a leveraged buyout.

21:18Here's the basic idea. A private equity firm identifies a company that they want to buy, and they get a sale price for that company. But the key here is that the private equity firm pays only a portion of that sale price, usually between 10 and 30 percent. The rest of the sale is covered by a loan from a bank. So in that way, it's kind of like a home mortgage. Except with a leveraged buyout, the company being bought is taking on the debt of a loan. They're the ones incurring the risk.

21:49Private equity firms pick companies they feel have steady revenue, but room for improvement. The firm installs their own leadership to restructure the business, and the goal is to make the company stronger and to sell it again at a profit. But often, the restructuring means layoffs and other big cuts. And taking a company and saddling them with a ton of debt right away can make these turnarounds really difficult, especially if the company is already struggling. Toys R Us, Joanne's Fabrics, Sports Authority, Radio Shack,

22:20all these companies and their employees are victims of leveraged buyouts. And then, there's Payless. In 2012, a group of private equity firms purchased Payless for $2 billion. They saw an opportunity to modernize a legacy chain. Payless was turning a profit under this new ownership. But that wasn't enough. Private equity firms want to make money for their investors. Not just when they sell the company down the line, but they want to make money right away.

22:50So Payless had to pay dividends to their new shareholders, which ended up erasing all the profits they made. Any money that could have gone to their workers or passed along to the consumers in the form of better products or cheaper prices went straight to the investors. This was the beginning of the end for Payless. Payless filed for bankruptcy in 2019. They closed all their U.S. stores. They laid off thousands of workers in those stores and hundreds more in the company's Kansas headquarters.

23:22Compare that to the Brannock Device Company. You don't have to have a huge product line. You make this one thing. You specialize in it. You're good at it. You know, people know you for it. Your customers keep coming back to you for it. And it puts food on the table for you and your employees. The invention of the Brannock Device and the company's consistent production of a quality product that could stand up to years of use and abuse in a shoe store and their commitment to making that product in the U.S. In Syracuse, New York. A commitment so strong that it transcended the life of the founder Charles Brannock.

23:55And even that they didn't sell to the highest bidder. You know, that they weren't just trying to milk this product or this estate, you know, for the highest price they could get. All these things represent an array of deeply held values. Dare I say, American values. They aren't and never were exclusive to the U.S. But they are values at the center of the stories we like to tell about ourselves. That sort of worked. That vision or version of capitalism and manufacturing worked for a long time.

24:25And it's really not the economy we have now in America. The modern American business doesn't have room for all these values. The value of quality. The value of taking care of workers. The value of community. The value of honoring the wishes of the founder. In the modern world of private equity, those have all been reduced to one value. Shareholder value. I think that is a loss. And it's one of the reasons why the 100-year existence of the Brannock device company means something to me.

24:56And it makes me happy that in 2026, they're doing okay. They still make $300 or $400 a week. Wow. They tell me. Wow. The company does say it's quite a few years ago now that they sold their millionth Brannock device. So they're well past a million in terms of the lifetime of the product. I'm pretty surprised by that stat of a $400 a week. That's very impressive. I have to confess I was a little surprised by that as well. And I found it heartening. So there is still a market out there even with the knockoffs and even with really the biggest challenge they've faced

25:28is the decline in brick-and-mortar shoe stores and the decline in malls because a lot of people don't go to the shoe store anymore to buy shoes or to have their kids buy shoes. They order on the internet. But in another one of these sort of parallel developments, just as shoe sales have moved from brick-and-mortar to the internet, Brannock sales have also moved from the shoe store to the internet. Yes, you can be like Paul and have your very own Brannock device. And they say that direct-to-consumer sales are now part of their business.

26:02And that was something that was unheard of in Charlie Brannock's day. He was selling only wholesale to shoe stores. So that's an interesting thing that I like the thought that, you know, some people now have Brannock devices in their home. And that's kind of a nice thing to see.

26:19I think it's nice too. This object, essentially unchanged, without corporate backing, indoors, not because it changed with the times, but because it is still the best at what it does. And maybe it'll keep being the best, even after most of us are long gone. It'll be this exemplar of competency, as evidenced by visionary director George Miller. In the 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road, Furiosa's rig uses a Brannock device as an improvised gas pedal.

26:54There are several close-up shots of the foot, you know, depressing this Brannock device that, you know, that powers the rig. And I thought that was kind of ingenious. It's so cool because it's a testament to the fact that these things are so well-made and that they last through the apocalypse and will serve as the gas pedal. Exactly. The indestructible Brannock device, the thing that's going to, as you say, survive the apocalypse. Many thanks to Paul Lucas for knowing absolutely everything there is to know

27:30about the Brannock device. You can find more of Paul's writing at inconspicuous.info. His logo is, of course, a Brannock device.

27:43A History of the United States and 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isabel Angel. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.

28:13From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pillay. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stephen Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful, White City, West London.

28:44If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at 100objects at 99pi.org. That's 100objects at 99pi.org.

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