In a Soho ballroom in the 1770s, a man crashed straight through a five-hundred-pound mirror in front of London's high society. He had just invented roller skates. He had forgotten to invent the brakes.

His name was John Joseph Merlin. He was Belgian, born in 1735 in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, and he had moved to London in 1760, age twenty-five, to make his name as the most ingenious mechanic in Georgian England. He built keyboard instruments admired by the composer Joseph Haydn. He built a self-propelled wheelchair. He built a skeleton clock. He built a silver swan automaton, life-sized, that bends down and catches a fish in its beak. The swan still works at the Bowes Museum in County Durham, two hundred and fifty years later. Contemporaries called him simply The Ingenious Mechanic.

In the early 1770s Merlin invented the roller skate. A pair of leather boots with a single line of small metal wheels underneath. He decided to debut them at the most fashionable masquerade in London, hosted by the celebrated Venetian singer Teresa Cornelys at Carlisle House on Soho Square. The crowd was the cream of Georgian aristocracy. Merlin made his entrance gliding into the ballroom on his new wheels, playing his violin to announce himself. He had not, however, figured out how to stop. He picked up speed across the polished parquet, lost control of the violin, lost control of the skates, and slammed straight through a vast gilded mirror at the far end of the ballroom valued at five hundred pounds. That is roughly ninety thousand pounds today. He broke the mirror. He broke the violin. He broke most of himself.

He survived. He went back to inventing for another thirty years. In 1783 he opened Merlin's Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square, where Londoners paid to watch his automatons drink tea. He died in 1803 at the age of sixty-seven. The roller skate as a usable sport had to wait until 1863, when an American named James Plimpton patented a four-wheeled skate you could actually steer. By then Merlin had been dead for sixty years.

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