The sliding seat was widely adopted for rowing in the 1870s. The quest for speed sought to maximise the force applied to the oar handle and to use it efficiently to produce effective, repeated strokes. A sliding seat had the mechanical advantage of attaching the oar to a moving pivot instead of a stationary hinge.
J.C. Babcock, Captain of Nassau Boat Club of New York, is generally attributed as the inventor of the slide. He was probably the first to succeed in making a reliable slider. Of his experiments with an inexperienced crew in 1870 he said:
`I am convinced that it requires more skill to use the seat properly than it does the oar, thus making it doubly difficult to perfect a crew. The tendency for a beginner is to slide too much and at the wrong time - to use it improperly is easy and pleasant, while to use it properly is difficult and fatiguing. The crew should slide together.'
Babcock's seat was a wooden frame about 10 inches square, covered with leather, grooved at the edges to slide on two brass tracks fastened onto the thwart. The tracks were of sufficient length to allow a slide of from 10 inches to 1 foot, although in rowing at that time the proper length of slide was thought to be from four to six inches. The tracks were occasionally lubricated with lard.
The Waters Balch company of New York in their catalogue of 1871 offered a seat to slide on. It was a thin plank of close-grained cherry, up to ¼ inch thick, with a highly polished and greased surface. Oarsmen wore pantaloons `reinforced with wash-leather'. With a suitable outrigger the seat could be used without the slide motion. It was 16-20 inches long by 10 inches wide.
There had been earlier attempts to slide. A surviving section of the Lenormant Relief on the Acropolis shows an oarsman bending his knee while taking a stroke in a Greek trieres. The Trieres or trireme was the state-of-the-art warship of 2,000 years ago, designed for speed. Crack oarsmen of the Greek fleet had to providing their own oars and sheepskin cushions, lending substance to the theory that the Greeks slid on their seats.
As early as 1857 there are references to partial sliding by professional oarsmen on the River Tyne in England, which was also the place where Harry Clasper and Matthew Taylor succeeded in designing boats with the keel inboard, the first true shells.
Professional scullers attempted to increase the length of the stroke by moving a short distance to and fro on a flat seat made broader than usual for the purpose, sometimes aided by greasing their breeches. Others sought what Babcock achieved. Walter Brown, an American professional, tried a slide in 1861. In 1863 Dr Schiller of Berlin made a slide using small wheels. In 1870 R.O. Birch used a slide at King's Lynn regatta. Also in 1870 Yale used slides against Harvard, who adopted them in 1872. In 1871 Tynesiders on slides beat Chambers's fixed seat men on the Tyne. In 1872 London RC and Pembroke College, Oxford, used slides at Henley, and Atlanta of New York came to Putney to race London Rowing Club from Mortlake to Putney, the first race of real importance rowed upon sliding seats. No doubt inspired by that, both crews in the 1873 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race used slides. In 1877 an American, Thomas Farron, tried wheels with out much success, although wheels fitted to the seat on runners - first in brass and later in nylon, - eventually made `sliding seat' a misnomer. In 1888 W. Sweetman used a slide which ran on ball bearings in the Diamond Sculls at Henley Regatta, a misadventure brought to an end by the ball bearings exploding, according to his opponent Guy Nickalls.
The introduction of sliding led to a change in the way boats were rowed. One of the first to use the sliding seat successfully was the professional Ned Hanlan who won the world professional sculling title several times and was Canada's first world champion - not just in rowing, but in any sport. Good as the sliding seat turned out to be in aiding rowers to move boats faster, there is evidence that Babcock suspected that the mechanical advantage that he sought was to be found by moving the rowlocks back and forth, not the seat. In a letter in the New York Spirit of the Times on December 14 1872 he wrote: `...the rowlock should be moved 6in back and forward each stroke. As this was impracticable the idea of moving the seat occurred to me...'
Eighty years later, Ted Poynter and Jack Baker of Bedford, England, designed a double sculler in which the outriggers and foot-stretchers moved while the seat was fixed. Their experiment was not altogether satisfactory, but advances in alloys and materials enabled other designers - notably the German boat-builders Empacher and the English boat-builder Glyn Locke - to make sliding rigger singles which assisted scullers to set new water speed records and win trophies until they were banned on the grounds of expense by FISA, the international rowing federation.