The History of the Brannock Device (Foot Measuring Scale)

While you may not know its formal name, chances are high that you’ve encountered the Brannock device at a shoe store during your lifetime. Its inventor, Charles F. Brannock, was the son of a shoe store co-owner in Syracuse, New York. During his college years, Brannock worked to come up with a better way to measure the shape of a foot and correlate this to shoe sizing. At the time, standard shoe sizes were still fairly new — they’d been created to equip troops during the Civil War — and the only foot measuring device was a simple wooden caliper known as the RITZ Stick, which measured foot length and nothing else. Using sketches and graph paper, Brannock created a new grid-based measuring scale and a measuring tool known as the Brannock Device to go with it. The device notably measured the foot’s length, width, and arch simultaneously. Brannock introduced the device at his father’s shop in 1927 and then patented his invention in 1929, after it became so popular that other stores began to buy the devices. In the late 1930s, he opened a factory to produce his product on a much larger scale. When the U.S. entered World War II, the military placed a massive order for a special version of Brannock’s foot measuring device that was configured so that both feet could be measured simultaneously, rather than one at a time. Brannock continued to manufacture his product in Syracuse until his death in 1993 and even arranged for production to continue there and ensured the new owner would maintain the same quality. Today, the Brannock device is still used in shoe stores throughout the United States and, since the patent has long expired, copycat versions have also entered the market.