The History of Wetsuits
Wetsuits are a common sight in any water activity nowadays. Wetsuits are used in diving, surfing, swimming, waterskiing, windsurfing, kayaking amongst many other activities. Wetsuits have generally allowed these activities to grow in popularity through the years because before the availability of wetsuits many of these activities took place in such cold conditions that most people did not participate in them.
The inventor of the wetsuit was a physicist named Hugh Bradner. Hugh Bradner was a physicist and worked on atomic bomb testing which took place in the Marshall Islands. Parts of his job required him to do underwater dives.
Bradner understood that it was problematic for a body to stay in cold water for long periods of time because the body loses heat very quickly in water. Water conducts heat much more efficiently than air, somewhere in the vicinity of 20-25 times more efficient.
Bradner began experimenting with several ideas on how to better retain body heat while underwater. He figured out that the body could remain warm underwater if it was wrapped in a poor thermal conducting material. This concept could even work while the body was wet, for the water near the body would become heated to body temperature by the body and as long as the layer of warm water was not replace by cold, the body could remain warm. He just needed to figure out a way to keep cold water from replacing the warm water trapped against the body. He began experimenting with neoprene, devising a way to trap the warm water against the body and limiting the flow of cold water replacing the warm water.
In 1952 Bradner invented the wetsuit and started testing prototypes of the suit at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. A patent application for the wetsuit was rejected on the grounds that the wetsuit design seemed too similar to that of a flight suit. Bradner and a few other partners founded a company called the Engineering Development Company (EDCO) to develop the wetsuit and also sell it to the consumer market. EDCO did not succeed in penetrating the consumer market with their wetsuits as well as other wetsuit companies such as Body Glove and O’Neill.
Other people that were working on early wetsuit designs and have been attributed to the invention of the wetsuit are Jack O’Neill, the founder of O’Neill, and the Bob and Bill Meistrall, the founders of Body Glove. However research by the Los Angeles Times has confirmed that the inventor of the wetsuit is Hugh Bradner.
Nowadays wetsuits are incrediably common in commercial use, sports, and recreational activities. It is because of the wetsuit that scuba diving has become the popular recreational activity that it is now. Prior to the wetsuit, scuba was largely practiced in commercial, research, and military applications. The wetsuit has made the activity less harsh and highly enjoyable. Surfing, prior to the common availability of the wetsuit was limited to the warm waters of the Pacific or by a few very hardy watermen in Southern California. With the invention of the wetsuit by Hugh Bradner water activities were made much more accessible to people and thus started the explosion in popularity of those activities.