William Wilson had many "firsts"

Swimming Technique, Oct-Dec 1999 by Colwin, Cecil

William Wilson was an important swimming pioneer, a visionary and an innovator. He was born in London on Nov. 13, 1844 of Scottish parents who moved from London to live in Glasgow when he was a child. Had he been born a hundred years later, there can be little doubt that his thinking would still have been in the vanguard of swimming progress.

Wilson stressed the need for a scientific study of swimming, saying that a successful teacher of the art of swimming ought to devote "as much thought, application, hard work and constant practice as almost any branch of education or science."

He was a swimmer, a swimming instructor and the sport's first regular newspaper journalist. He studied the sport carefully, and concluded that swimming had "undergone very little improvement during its many years of practice." With great foresight, he announced that humans should be able to use their superior intellect to move through water at a much faster rate.

Wilson had many "firsts":

He was the first to describe and illustrate the racing start and turn.

He was the first in literature to advocate an overarm recovery for the sidestroke.

He came up with the first life-saving drill.

He invented the game of water polo.

He pioneered training methods, both on land and in the water.

With the early shortage of swimming pools, he promoted year-round cold water swimming in the sea.

In 1883, Wilson published "The Swimming Instructor," one of the l9th century's two landmark books on swimming. Along with Charles Steedman's "Manual of Swimming," published in Melbourne in 1867, Wilson's work was considered "a great advance" on the literature of the time.

Ahead of His Time

Wilson showed himself to be a man far ahead of his time when he added that there was a need "to invent and introduce some method, or methods, whereby the body would move through water at a speed far greater than our present comparatively slow rate."

This was one of the first references in literature to make a conscious effort at studying and improving methods, as opposed to relying on the hitherto natural evolution of the sport.

Wilson said that analyzing the movements of the limbs would provide better propulsion, and that "savants and learned societies" should take up a study of the sport. He said that it was necessary to "acknowledge our helplessness, and to consider how best to improve the present state of the art."

Wilson's references to resistance versus propulsion-made nearly 120 years ago-still form the fundamental basis on which present-day discussions on stroke mechanics revolve. (Wilson also several times mentions "momentum," but this important aspect of human swimming propulsion appears to remain a much-neglected study, even to the present day.)

With great prescience, Wilson said: "Granted that water is a yielding medium and is a movable fulcrum, offering no solid support to limbs or body, compared with the fulcrum of terra firma. But it is a question whether this very absence of solidity might not be the means of adding to the momentum of the body when in water, for water is resisting as well as non-resisting, everything in this connection depending on the power exerted and how put forth.

"Man's body in water may be the fulcrum in itself, and the limbs the levers. In water, when power is applied, the impetus given to some bodies is carried further by momentum than upon land, unless with perfectly rounded or rolling objects. This can be set off as per contra to the absence in water of solidity sufficient to establish or form a fulcrum."

Swimming in Victorian Times

Wilson made interesting comment on what it was like to swim in one of the indoor pools that were being built in ever increasing numbers throughout the British Isles: "It will not, we think, be gainsayed that the swimming bath serves many a good and useful purpose.

"Independent of its utility as the direct means of acquiring and practicing an art so much to be commended, it is a great sanitary, social and, we hold, moral reformer. The bather, on an early summer morning, or in the cool of an evening, enjoys, when at the side of the water, the company of his fellow-bathers unfettered and unhampered by the usual and ofttimes too stiff formalities of ordinary and everyday life.

"It is to the operative an all-important soother after a hard day's toil; the bathe cools and braces him; his flagging energy and relaxed muscular system are renewed; and, for the charge he has paid for admission to the bath, he feels that he has had value far beyond any ordinary mercantile transaction."

Wilson the Swimming Pool Innovator

At this point of the text, Wilson digresses with an idea, unusually innovative and far in advance of its time. He asks, "Why should not at least part of the roofs of our swimming baths be movable by small wheels in narrow grooves, or by screw appliances, and so be easily opened up, not for an hour or two at a time, but for days and weeks in the middle of summer?

"We offer the suggestion for what it may be worth, and we consider it no extraordinary stretch of the imagination to suppose the idea be put into practical shape, and be carried out with even greater elaboration that can, with the present order of things, be even hinted at."