Cold Comfort: Wetsuit Inventor Left With a Warm Feeling, but No Money
Ask a few surfers about the genesis of the wet suit. Chances are they will credit clever surfers. They may tell you surfers tried greased sweat shirts, old cashmere sweaters, plastic-coated foam suits; then an intrepid surfer discovered neoprene rubber.
The truth, however, may be a little different. Many say the first neoprene wet suit was developed in a laboratory at UC Berkeley. A physicist, now living in La Jolla, built a prototype of the suit that revolutionized our relationship to the sea.
And he made no money off it.
“I got my fun out of it,” said Hugh Bradner, a retired UC San Diego professor, when asked last week about his original neoprene suit. “We live a good life based on more professional things. . . . So what the heck! The pleasure is in the challenge.”
Since Bradner pieced together that uncomfortable black suit in 1952, wet suits have evolved into an industry with an estimated $100 million in annual U.S. sales. One of the largest firms, O’Neill Inc., makes $10 million on suits for surfing alone.
Wet suits have brought surfing to chilly northern coastlines. They have helped spawn new sports such as board sailing and body boarding. They have transformed commercial, military and recreational deep-sea diving, and advanced scientists’ understanding of the oceans.
“I would say the wet suit has had a significant impact on everybody’s everyday life,” said Dick Long, president of Diving Unlimited International in San Diego. “Without it, our knowledge of the seas would be minuscule by comparison.”
Bradner was a physicist in his mid-30s in the UC Berkeley radiation lab working on accelerators and particles when he decided to undertake, as a kind of professional hobby, developing a suit that would keep Navy frogmen warm.
Bradner was a swimmer and diver himself. He had also worked closely with the military, initially as one of the first scientists to work during the war at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and later on Navy contracts in the lab at Berkeley.
“I wanted to do something in the way of a part-time activity that would be useful and fun,” Bradner said last week. “I decided to see if there weren’t some things in the frogman business that could be improved. The obvious one that had bad shortcomings was the suit.”
Squeezed Out
At that time, the so-called dry suits used by underwater demolition teams were loose-fitting garments made of relatively inelastic rubber. Underwater, they would wrinkle and bind, producing a painful condition that some called squeeze .
It was impossible to keep air from getting trapped in the suits. It would then create instability, making swimming difficult. Sometimes, weights would have to be used to fight the buoyancy. But a tear or puncture could lead to drowning.
Bradner’s idea is simply put: “You don’t have to stay dry to stay warm.” He realized he needed a material that would hold trapped air. That air would then serve as insulation even when there was water on both sides of the suit.
Such a material would now be called “unicellular”--a material like a sponge filled with tiny, separate bubbles. The bubbles would have to be numerous enough to hold sufficient air to insulate; but they could not be interconnected, allowing circulation.
Bradner and three associates in the lab tried putting rubber sheeting on thick sweaters. Then they tried insulating different types of foam rubber. They learned a few dressmaking principles and began looking for a glue that would hold up in salt water.
But it was not until late 1951, at a meeting in San Diego on underwater swimmers, that Bradner heard about neoprene, a synthetic rubber used originally for seals and gaskets. At another scientist’s urging, Bradner bought some and made his first neoprene suits.
Those early suits are currently memorialized in the archives of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where Bradner later taught. A half-dozen black and white photographs show a sinister-looking model in a slick black suit standing by a swimming pool.
The early suits had long, straight pants and a jacket with a bib that ran under the crotch and latched in front. There were separate boots and a hood, slits in the sleeves and legs and slide fasteners for easy entry and exit.
The design respected the parts of the body that need extra insulation--the groin, spinal column and back of the neck. Bradner also worked with differing thicknesses of neoprene for the varying conditions under which suits would be used.
Bradner said he knows of no earlier neoprene wet suit. Jack O’Neill, the Santa Cruz wetsuit manufacturer often credited, said he believed Bradner’s suit came before his. James Stewart, the diving officer at Scripps, said he believes Bradner’s was the first suit.
How was it? Bradner was asked recently of one of his early test runs in the cold ocean water off San Francisco.
“Chilly,” he replied dryly.
Then it didn’t work?
“Well, it worked better than without it,” he said. “I think that would be my characterization of a wet suit right now: That I’m still chilly when I go in water like we have off (La Jolla). It’s not the ultimate solution.”
What is the solution to cold water? he was asked.
“Stay out of it.”
The Navy, however, liked Bradner’s suit. So he and his colleagues began making them for the so-called underwater demolition teams. The group set up two small companies to produce the diving suits, but according to Bradner, he withdrew to do other things.
There was also an abortive effort to patent the invention. Bradner filed an application and offered the patent rights to the government. Because he had done the work for the Navy and was a government contractor, he said he never expected any personal profit.
But neither the government nor the university wanted to pursue the patent.
“The university asked me if there was any market for it,” Bradner said last week. “I wasn’t smart enough to think of surfers. So the university said, ‘Naah, we don’t think it’s worth pursuing a patent.’ ”
The patent office rejected Bradner’s first application--an action he said is common with most patents. According to documents at Scripps, the office cited a 1942 patent for “close-fitting, insulating, water-tight underwear.”
Bradner let the application lapse.
In the meantime, surfers had begun exploring the concept.
Jack O’Neill, then an avid surfer in his mid-20s working in San Francisco, remembers lining “bun-hugger” bathing suits with unicellular foam, getting old cashmere sweaters from Goodwill Industries and trying long underwear under the rigid rubber suits used for diving.
He too had a background in physics and, during the early 1950s, discovered the advantages of neoprene. To adapt a neoprene diving suit to surfing, he covered it in plastic so the water would run off and the surfer would not catch a chill from evaporation.
After that, O’Neill recalled in an interview late last week, he opened a surf shop under his San Francisco house on Wawona Avenue, a block and a half from the beach. O’Neill says wet suits gave surf shops “a profit margin they couldn’t get in surfboards.”
Suits Have Come a Long Way
Later, O’Neill said, he pioneered in applying plastic zippers to wet suits and using Velcro for fasteners. Later came a proliferation of suits in varying styles and thicknesses--long johns, short johns, fall suits, spring suits, an entire wardrobe.
There have been innovations in the glues and stitching used to manufacture wet suits. Neoprene now comes in a wide range of thicknesses. Special heavy suits have made possible surfing in New England and along the Oregon coast, surfers said.
Now, O’Neill’s Santa Cruz-based company controls more than half the surfing wetsuit market in the United States, O’Neill said. Kelley Woolsey, vice president for marketing, estimated the national market for wet suits of all types at more than $100 million.
“Now, you can completely customize your wet suit stock for the seasons,” said Sam George, a senior editor at Surfing magazine and formerly a competitive surfer. George counts his current closet-full at half a dozen suits.
“It’s had a profound effect on the population of surfing,” George said in an interview. “In California, the beach culture sort of stops at the water’s edge. What the new, modern wet suit has done is let many, many more people start enjoying the water.”
In diving, the neoprene suit has brought similar changes, said Tom Harmon, operations manager for the Diving Locker in San Diego, who began 24 years ago “building” neoprene diving suits.
Among other things, Harmon said the newer, flexible suits have encouraged women to take up the sport of diving, which he said in the past had been dominated by men. Diving-suit manufacturers have multiplied, he said, to some 20 companies nationwide.
“The significance of this whole thing was it allowed you to dive almost anywhere along the coast, comfortably,” said Stewart, the diving officer at Scripps. “ . . . It really allowed the recreational diver to come into his own.”
As for Bradner, he moved on to other interests in the mid-1950s. In 1960, he moved to La Jolla to work as a professor at UCSD and Scripps, where he devoted much of his time to seismology, geophysics and figuring out how to detect Soviet explosives in the ocean.
Now in “nominal retirement” at age 72, he is teaching an upper division course at UCSD in such things as circuits and systems. He is also engrossed in an intensive biological study of whether a particular shell is a species or a subspecies.
Were there other inventions? he was asked.
Yes, among other things, there was the underwater contact lens. It enabled Navy divers to see equally well under water and above, he said. Unfortunately, they were too squeamish to wear it and it never took off.
“How ‘bout a suntan cream which will simultaneously give you a better suntan and better protection?” he mused. Had he developed such a thing? he was asked. “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully, then added. “Is it on the market? Nooo.”
