Feet can sweat a quarter pint a day—socks mop it up
Socks cover feet and often ankles or calves, historically in leather or matted hair, now usually textiles under shoes. A foot may shed over 0.25 US pints (0.12 L) of sweat daily; socks wick it. Warm pairs fight frostbite risk; thin ones cool summer strides.
English sock descends from Old English socc, a light slipper, which came from Latin soccus, the low-heeled shoe worn by Roman comic actors, and ultimately from Greek sykchos. Hesiod in the 8th century BC mentions Greek piloi made of matted hair. Romans at first wrapped their feet in leather or cloth, then around the 2nd century AD began sewing fitted udones, and by the 5th century European holy people wore puttees as a sign of purity. Because making them took so long, socks were for centuries a rich person's item, while the poor bound their feet in cloth wraps that Eastern European armies were still issuing around the turn of the 21st century.
Medieval socks grew into tight, bright leg coverings held up by garters, since there was no elastic, and by AD 1000 they signalled noble wealth. An ornamental pattern at the ankle has been called a clock since the 16th century. A knitting machine invented in 1589 began the shift from handwork, and machine knitting dominated by the 19th century. Nylon arrived in 1938, replacing a trio of silk, cotton and wool and starting the practice of blending yarns. Ancient Egyptians had already made snug socks with a separate big-toe compartment for wearing with sandals, predating Japanese tabi.
Production is strikingly concentrated. Fort Payne, Alabama, once made nearly half the world's socks and employed about 7,000 people around 2000, and it still supplies roughly a quarter. The top spot now belongs to Datang in Zhejiang, nicknamed Sock City, which turns out 8 billion pairs a year.
The familiar stink comes from bacteria feeding on trapped sweat, producing a mix of ammonia, lactic acid and fatty acids, especially isovaleric acid. The same note turns up in cheeses, sausages and fish sauce, in car air-conditioning as dirty socks syndrome, and as a diagnostic sign of the disorder isovaleric acidemia. Dogs and mosquitoes find the scent irresistible, and silver-yarn treatments aim to suppress it.
Source: Sock
