What is the plastic tip that closes the shoelaces for?

Many times you will have tied your shoes or sneakers and you will have seen that at the end of the laces there is a plastic or metal tip. Well, you should know that this is called a tag. Although it seems that they are not very useful, the truth is that they fulfill a very important function, or rather several.

The most important is to keep the fabric strands of the laces together, preventing them from fraying and ruining it. Another function is to make it easier to pass the laces between the holes in the shoe. Imagine how difficult it would be to get them around without them.

The aglets make it easy to hold each lace, making it even possible to hold them with just two fingers, to make it easier to tie them. And finally, it is undeniable that it also makes the shoe look prettier. They wouldn't be pretty or as easy to handle if we just had frayed laces.

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When did laces start to be used in shoes?

They are one of the most common and daily things in the life of any person in any part of the world, although the truth is that most of the time, they tend to go unnoticed. Shoe laces are as simple as they are indispensable, as they not only keep our shoes in place but often add style to any outfit.

That is why it is so curious to wonder who invented them. Surprisingly, no one knows the answer to this question for sure, as they are an object that dates back several thousand years. The oldest cultures already made use of laces or similar arrangements, to keep the footwear in place. The Romans, for example, used straps made of leather to tie their sandals. The people of Mesopotamia, on the other hand, used small ropes to tie pieces of skin around their ankles and feet.

What is known about the proliferation of laces is that there was a man who took advantage of their immense popularity, improving their use by inserting them into eyelets and placing an aglet at the end to prevent the threads from coming loose. His name was Harvey Kennedy and in 1790 he completely revolutionized the market by selling his product. Thanks to laces, Kennedy made a fortune and revamped the shoe industry by giving us laces as we know them today.

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