The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The Velzy Surfboards meltdown was a shocker, but it didn’t cause a break in the supply line—thanks in part to Alter. Hobie Surfboards, by that time, had become the sport’s runaway industry leader. Alter’s books were in perfect order, which helped. More importantly, where Velzy had the style and the hand-skills, Alter had vision. The sport grew a lot during Alter’s first three years as a commercial boardmaker—but nothing like what was coming, he believed. Building surfboards by the hundreds instead of by the dozen was the goal, and to that end Alter helped engineer a project that would change boards, literally, from the inside out.

  Polyurethane Foam: Better Surfing Through Chemistry

  On a slow weekday afternoon in 1957, three years after Hobie Surfboards opened for business, a resin salesman walked into the shop and handed Hobie Alter a small white chunk of synthetic material about the size of a cigarette pack. “It was hard and dense,” Alter recalled. “You could barely dig your fingernail into the surface.”

  Polyurethane foam was just then coming onto the commercial market. Like nearly every other petrochemical product of the time, it was developed during the war; in this case, by German engineers in search of a replacement for rubber. Unlike polystyrene foam (better known as Styrofoam), which was nearly impossible to modify or reshape once it came out of the mold, this new material could be cut with a saw and went “dusty” beneath a planer or sandpaper—almost like a very light, dry wood. Better yet, it bonded with polyester resin instead of dissolving the way Styrofoam did. Later that same afternoon, Alter dripped some resin on one side, came back later, and smoothed on a patch of resin-wet fiberglass on the other side. That night at a Laguna Beach party, he pulled the block out from his pocket, held it up like a winning Lotto ticket, and said to a few surf buddies, “This is it, boys. The future of surfboards, right here.”

  Alter wasn’t as confident as he sounded. Bob Simmons, after all, had made dozens of foam-core boards after the war without much luck. Alter had built one himself, but the foam shrunk inside its hard fiberglass skin until it actually rattled like a seed in a gourd. There were also economic considerations. The surf market was growing, true, but in fact Alter wasn’t yet sure if it was big enough to justify the cost of developing a new core material—the all-balsa board itself was still pretty new, for that matter, having hit the beaches just a decade earlier.

  But those nice, light, board-ready strips of balsa were already getting harder to find. The supply (almost all of which was shipped in from Ecuador) had always been fairly tight, and as airline manufacturers began to use balsa as an interior lining, more and more was going straight from the lumberyard to companies like Boeing and Lockheed. In Southern California, General Veneer was the boardmaker’s only source for balsa, and by 1957, as both the stock and quality dropped, the battle for wood was on. A buyer from Gordie Surfboards was standing at the General Veneer counter one afternoon when Velzy fishtailed around the corner in his Mercedes, hit the parking brake in a cloud of dust, walked in, and without so much as glance at the stock paid cash for every available stick of balsa in the yard. Another outlet was found, but the subterfuge continued.

  Alter hoped this new foam could fix his supply problem, and he talked about it with Gordon “Grubby” Clark, his newest and brightest factory worker. Clark was an odd one: a hot-rod devotee and ex-army man, with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, he didn’t pick up a surfboard until his college years. Before getting a job at Hobie Surfboards, he worked the graveyard shift in the Huntington Beach oil fields. Afterward, Clark sometimes drove his battered pickup to Dana Point and, before going surfing at nearby Trestles, slept in the Hobie parking lot. He got a lot of early-morning waves that way, and picked up “Grubby” as a nickname.

  Clark quietly suggested that Alter stop talking about foam to outsiders. If they played it right, Clark said, this was something that could change the boardmaking dynamic completely—in their favor. But it was going to take a lot of work. Polyurethane foam was temperamental stuff compared to balsa, affected by both heat and humidity, and if it shrank or expanded at all during the manufacturing process, or after, it would ruin the board. Alter ran dozens of test batches. Using empty one-quart ice-cream containers, he poured out small amounts of the polyurethane mix, each with a slightly different formula, let them rise up like muffins, then put them on the roof of his house to see how each responded to sun, heat, and fog. The results were encouraging—the material seemed to be both tough and stable enough for surfboards.

  The bigger problem was that polyurethane foam wasn’t commercially available in the shape required by surfboard makers. Christmas tree ornaments and other decorative gewgaws were made of molded foam, but to build a surfboard you needed a chunk that measured about 11 feet by 2 feet by 6 inches. That meant a big, heavy, expensive custom-built mold.

  Near the end of 1957, Alter and Clark launched a secret R&D project. They rented a small factory space in Laguna Canyon, a few miles up the coast from Hobie Surfboards, and blackened out the windows. Bankrolled with $8,000 of Alter’s savings—the better part of everything Hobie Surfboards had earned up to that point—Clark installed himself in the Laguna factory and did nothing but work on foam. He was unsalaried and living in Alter’s guest room. There was no formal business arrangement for what might happen if and when the blanks were actually in production, but both men thought of the work as proprietary to Hobie Surfboards.

  Clark’s undergrad knowledge of chemistry and engineering meant they weren’t flying entirely in the dark, but it was essentially a pair of clever and determined do-it-yourself hobbyists taking on an industrial-grade project. As Alter recalled, they began pouring foam into a scaled-down test mold and created nothing but “a huge mess.” Six months later, Clark had burned through the seed money, Alter was getting an ulcer, and they weren’t any closer to making a fullsized blank.

  They decided to continue nonetheless—mercifully unaware that the polyurethane surfboard in fact already existed, and had for over a year.

  * * *

  Dave Sweet of Santa Monica was a highly respected mainland boardmaker who never quite made it to the first rank, at least in terms of sales. The power difference between Sweet and Alter, in fact, was big enough that Sweet himself, even though he made his first polyurethane surfboard in 1956—six months, roughly, before Hobie laid eyes on that first little foam sample—actually went along with the idea that he’d tied with Alter in the race to market. “I worked on it for many years,” Sweet later told a surf magazine reporter, swallowing hard, “and came out with a foam surfboard the same month Hobie did.”

  Sweet began shaping boards on the beach at Malibu a few years after the war and helped Matt Kivlin and Joe Quigg develop the Malibu chip. In 1953, the same year he earned a USC business administration degree, Sweet painstakingly shaped a board from a thick block of Styrofoam, sealed it, glassed it, and then finished it with an opaque coat of resin in order to keep the core material a secret. The board had a nice lively feel in the water. But the project had been too labor intensive, by far, and he continued making balsa boards.

  Less than a year later, Sweet came across a chunk of polyurethane foam and recognized immediately that this was the stuff. He became obsessed, dropping virtually everything else in his life to work on a polyurethane blank-molding system. He drained his tiny savings account and put all the money into materials for a half-size clamshell mold, which he built himself and installed in the living room of his basement boardinghouse flat in Hollywood. There were no long visits to Hawaii for Sweet. No drunken Saturday nights at the surf movies. He surfed, made a few balsa boards to pay the bills, and thought about chemical ratios and reactions. He couldn’t afford to buy in bulk, so he’d order the necessary chemicals every other week or so and pour the latest formula into his mold.

  DAVE SWEET, IN HIS SANTA MONICA SHOP.

  It was a messy business. Hunkered down over a cardboard bucket, Sweet would mix the base chemicals with several catalysts, an expanding agent, and an em
ulsifier to stabilize the foam as it rose. He’d then pour the dirty-white batter into the lower half of the mold, clamp down the top, and step away. In a heat-generating rush the mix would blow out to roughly twenty-five times its original size, filling and pressurizing the half-sized surfboard-shaped interior; a half hour later, the blank was ready to pop out of the mold.

  Sweet produced about twenty blanks in his boardinghouse room—all duds. Most had balloon-sized air pockets; these went directly from mold to garbage can. Some looked good enough to be fiberglassed, but soon the foam would delaminate, shrink, or bulge. Going all-in, Sweet sold his car, borrowed money from everyone he knew, and for $12,000 had a full-sized steel-and-fiberglass mold built by an aerospace firm called Techniform Metal Curving. For about six months in 1955, while the mold was still at Techniform, Sweet and a pair of company engineers mixed and poured blank after blank and got nowhere. It was frustrating and occasionally dangerous: the mold would creak and groan when the interior pressure got too high, and on one occasion the steel latch bolts exploded from the hinges and ricocheted like bullets off the factory walls.

  The Techniform workers gave up. Sweet took the mold to a Santa Monica industrial shop and starting working alone. Air bubbles were still his biggest problem. The foam was supposed to expand evenly, but trapped air would rise to the top as the blank cooled, and each deck was filled with an assortment of craters, pits, and holes. Finally, Sweet gave up on producing a clean blank and just made a thicker blank. Then he used a power planer to strip off the top inch of air-pocked foam. Not an elegant solution, but good enough. In late 1956, deep in debt, exhausted but triumphant, Sweet was riding and selling polyurethane foam surfboards.

  * * *

  For all of 1957, and halfway through 1958, Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark continued their secret trial-and-error foam project in Laguna Canyon in the sincere belief that they were on the verge of a big, unique surf-manufacturing breakthrough. It’s hard to fathom that among the tiny guild of Southern California boardmakers Alter wouldn’t have heard about Sweet and his foam work. But Sweet admittedly wasn’t doing a lot of business, later confessing, “At that point I was selling boards on the beach.” And Alter and Clark were, of course, hyper-focused on their R&D efforts.

  In mid-1958, after trying some different molding approaches, Alter and Clark built a concrete-and-steel clamshell mold not too different from the one Sweet built with Techniform. Trapped air, again, was a constant plague, and each new blank had to be touched up with builder’s putty to fill the holes and bubbles.

  But the surf-world had cracked the polyurethane code—not once, but twice. And the next few blank-making innovations, thankfully, came a lot easier and faster. An air-absorbing paper lining was added to the mold’s interior, which left a bubble-free blank. Inserts were developed that allowed for a smaller, or thinner, or more bowed product, as needed. Finished blanks were bisected vertically, and a thin strip of wood—a “stringer”—was glued in for added strength and rigidity.

  As foam hit the market, all the disadvantages of balsa suddenly became obvious. It took hours for each balsa blank to be glued, clamped, sawed, and “hogged out” (rough-shaped) before it was ready to be crafted into a board, and wood blanks varied in weight, depending on the balsa strips. In contrast, a polyurethane foam blank took roughly forty minutes to mix, blow, and cool, and with added molds, they could be produced in multiples. Plus, foam was consistent; each blank weighed about 12 pounds. Commercial boardmakers had been using power planers for a few years, which made shaping wood surfboards a breeze compared to the hand-tool era that had just passed. But wood was wood, and foam was something close to 90 percent air. “After balsa,” Alter said, “foam was like shaping a stick of butter.”

  The two materials felt different underfoot. A polyurethane board flexed slightly and had a tiny bit of twang coming out of a turn. It took some getting used to, but most surfers thought the new boards were a little more forgiving, a bit easier to ride, and just that much zippier.

  Foam’s other great advantage, of course, was that it solved an intractable supply-and-demand problem. California lumber yards didn’t have enough balsa to service a boardmaking trade that was growing by the month. Polyurethane molds, on the other hand, were relatively easy to build, and foam-making chemicals would only get cheaper. Surfing’s first population boom was just around the corner. Plastics, not wood, would fuel the explosion.

  * * *

  Unlike Dave Sweet’s quiet rollout in 1956—consisting mostly of Sweet loaning out his new polyurethane board to friends—Hobie Surfboards’ foam debut in the summer of 1958 was big news up and down the coast. Alter believed this was a once-in-a-lifetime business advantage, and rather than introduce foam gradually, he made an abrupt switch from balsa to polyurethane, and held forth clearly and earnestly, on the beaches and in his showroom, about how this new space-age product was surfing’s wave of the future.

  Hobie Surfboards’ fast-expanding customer base mostly embraced the new product right away, but the switch from balsa to foam wasn’t going to happen overnight. Surfers had occasionally moved fast on a new development (like the pig board), but they’d also proven stubbornly resistant to change—the fin, a surfing design concept roughly equivalent to the invention of the wheel, was introduced in 1935 and ignored for the better part of ten years. Wood was the only core material the sport had ever known, and Dale Velzy, badly caught out by Alter’s switch to foam, told anyone who’d listen that the new stuff wasn’t as good as wood. (It may have been Velzy himself who first disparaged the new Hobie boards as “speedo-sponges.”) Greg Noll agreed. “It just felt shitty,” he later said about his first reaction to foam. “It didn’t have a good smell; it had no life. It was just . . . available.” To Alter’s great frustration, Phil Edwards, the best surfer in California and a longtime Hobie Surfboards supporter, refused to give up “Baby,” his favorite balsa board. “We had a saying,” Edwards recalled. “Good on wood, spastic on plastic.”

  Foam had two marketing problems. One was aesthetic. The air-bubble deck holes all had to be filled with putty, which in turn had to be masked beneath a nose-to-tail coat of pigmented resin. Because dark pigments not only highlighted the putty fixes, but absorbed heat—in extreme cases, causing a board to blister and swell—Hobie’s new foam boards were offered mostly in “Easter egg” pastels: yellow, light blue, and pale green. They didn’t look “tough,” and that was a problem for some surfers. (An alternative color option was the “swirl”: two or three additional pigments were dripped into a bucket of resin, then poured across the board in such a way that it turned into a double-sided 10-by-2-foot de Kooning-like abstraction.)

  The second problem was more complicated. Dave Sweet had sold a half-interest in his mold to his brother, Roger, who in turn went into business with actor-surfer Cliff Robertson. The blanks made by Dave Sweet were the best around. The new Robertson-Sweet company, on the other hand, produced a line of cheap “popout” boards, sold mostly in sporting goods stores, that only damaged foam’s reputation.

  But these were temporary setbacks. The Robertson-Sweet company folded within a year. Air-bubble problems were soon fixed, and boards could be glassed “clear,” or single-colored, or multicolored, or pinstriped—whatever the customer wanted. By the end of 1958, Alter and Clark had three molds working side by side in their Laguna Canyon factory and were meeting Hobie Surfboards’ blank quota without breaking a sweat. Walker Foam, Foss Foam, and a Sydneyarea boardmaker named Barry Bennett were all making blanks by the turn of the decade. Board prices were steady at about $110. Even wood-loving Dale Velzy came around and was plowing out foamies by early 1959. That year, nearly all of California’s top riders switched from balsa to foam—with the exception of Phil Edwards and some big-wave riders, who stuck with balsa for another two or three years because wood was almost unbreakable in heavy surf.

  For Hobie Alter and Grubby Clark, the switch from wood to foam was nothing less than a sweepstakes win. Alter moved fast and
consolidated his gains. In the winter of 1959–60, during what was traditionally the slowest part of the board-making season—when most shops had maybe a dozen boards in inventory—Alter quietly throttled up production until he had 170 new Hobies stacked like cordwood in a Dana Point warehouse. He took out a small “Surfboard Sale” ad in the Los Angeles Times, offered $20 off every board in stock, and in two days cleared out the entire supply.

  A year or two later, newspaper and magazines began calling Alter the “Henry Ford of Surfing.” He never embraced the tag; he had just enough residual counterculture pride not to. But he never disavowed it, either.

  Cold Comfort: The Invention Of the Wetsuit

  Polyurethane reinvented surfboard manufacturing, but it wasn’t the sport’s greatest technological development in the 1950s. The world’s best board, after all, wasn’t much good to a surfer standing on a winter beach palsied with cold. On a lot of days, in a lot of places, this was the inevitable forced end to each and every wave-riding session. Polyurethane foam was a modern wonder. The surfing wetsuit—that was a godsend.

  In yet another case of better surfing through war-related petrochemistry, MIT-trained physicist Hugh Bradner, working from his San Francisco Bay Area university lab, began piecing together the first wetsuit in 1951. It was a two-piece full-body suit made from neoprene—a spongy, vulcanized, polymer-based synthetic rubber invented and trademarked by DuPont. Bradner wanted to improve on the outfits used by the military’s underwater demolition teams. U.S. Navy and Marine Corps designers had already produced a baggy but watertight zip-up head-to-ankle latex sheath—later known as a “dry suit”—which military divers wore over thermal underwear. (For camouflaging, the suits were made in a dark amphibian-green, which is how the term “frogman” originated.) Bradner’s new idea was that the user didn’t need to stay completely dry in order to keep warm. A nice, snug layer of insulation would be fine, Bradner reasoned, even allowing for some water seepage. Neoprene—made up primarily of tiny closed-cell air bubbles—was the best human-insulating material. The dry suit depended on watertight seals at every opening, which made it hard to engineer and difficult to fit properly. Yet the wetsuit seemed totally counterintuitive. If you’re trying to stay warm, isn’t the whole point to keep water out? It was going to be a hard sell.