Figure skating for fun was developed by 19th century English people, who had a background in Figure Dancing going back to Louis XIV and the Baroque era. A figure was (and still is) a named pattern of movement, usually involving more than one person. Everybody knows the common figures within the genre, and often a caller tells dancers which figure to perform next (think Square Dancing). Look up “Irish Figure Dancing” and “English Figure Dancing” on YouTube…
When English people took to the ice, they brought their approach to dancing with them, and created the English Style of combined figures. They were (are) VERY large, and the goal is for an entire group of people to perform figures (named patterns of movements) together, in uniform synchrony, in response to a caller. Figures to place go back to a center mark, whereas figures in the field do not. English Style Skating is noted for its straight knee and upright stance, which would be considered extreme today.
Baroque dance notation already drew lines on a page telling you where to step. But with ice skating, YOU also draw the lines on the ice as you perform the figure, and thus the word “figure” developed a dual meaning: both a named pattern of movement, AND the design you create on the ice when you perform a figure. Thus, figures became self-documenting in a way that dancing on floor was not. I the 19th century, accurate re-tracing was considerd a secondary goal to proper carriage and form while performing the figure.
Non-English people also practiced figures, including North Americans. Large expanses of ice needed for English Style Skating were not practical in 19th Century North America, and North Americans came to specialize more in all sorts of elaborate non-circular figures. There was debate over whether “kicked” figures — for example where you have to stop an change direction all on one foot — were elegant or useful for figure skating. North Americans invented loops and grapevines, among other things. North Americans skaters (and all non-English skaters), bent their knee and leaned into the edge more, as is standard practice today.
Figure skating developed as an art, and was never referred to as a sport. Not that there weren’t contests — there were — but it was still an art. That began to change with the formation of the ISU in 1892 and the desire to make figure skating into a sport. The reasons driving those decisions are beyond the scope of this comment. The ISU was formed without ANY North American participation; and at the time, pretty much nobody outside of England seemed to be fond of English Style skating. Instead, the ISU based its new sport more on the International Style, as developed in Vienna in the past few decades. Viennese skating at the time was diverse and elbaorate: it included all kinds of figures like the North Americans, waltzing, round dancing, and a growing array of emerging tricks. Most of this was discarded in the name of making skating competitions simpler and more objective to judge. Whatever was going on in North America as ignored, since no North Americans were involved.
Great Britain contributed figures to ISU skating. As with the rest of ISU skating, English style skating was greatly simplified and distilled into School Figures in 1897. School Figures were seen from the beginning to be a “grammar” of skating: not an artistic goal as figures had been for a hundred years in the past, but rather a set of exercises to put skaters through all the basics of the technique, as developed by the English in the 19th century. Unlike the rest of the new SPORT of figure skating, School Figures were set in stone in 1897 and did not change one bit for the next 90 years, until they were “abolished” through a political process. Sports are inherently political by design because, unlike art, they require everybody to agree and submit to a shared set of rules.
Back in North America… skaters continued with their tradition of elaborate figures and continuous skating, known as “Figure and Fancy Skating,” until they were the ONLY ones left out of the new sport of International Style (ISU) Skating. They threw in the towel in 1921, formed USFSA and joined the ISU. At that point it was WAY too late for North Americans to have any influence on the foundation of the sport. They simply abandoned what they were doing and started doing something else instead.
Thus is the history of “sportification” (Guttman, 1978) of Figure Skating. Sportification has seven characteristics: secularisation, equality, specialisation, rationalisation, bureaucratisation, quantification and records. The process inevitably leads to standardization and loss of diversity. Breaking and E-Sports are sportifying today, and papers are written on both (including some by Rachel Gunn, of “Ray Gunn” Olympics 2024 infamy).