Newman Darby builds a sailboard in Pennsylvania

In 1964 Newman Darby, in Pennsylvania, built a floating plywood platform with a sail that the sailor held and steered by hand, standing with his back to a kite-shaped rig. It was the first sailboard to be described in public: Popular Science presented it in 1965 as a new concept in sailing.

Darby tried to turn it into a business and sold about eighty sets of his equipment, but the idea did not grow into a sport. Neither did an even earlier experiment: in 1958 a twelve-year-old Peter Chilvers had sailed a home-made wooden board with a hand-held boom at Hayling Island in England. Nobody outside his circle knew about it until it turned up as evidence in a patent case two decades later.

The people involved in these early creations, and the Californians who followed, had no knowledge of each other’s work. What was missing in Pennsylvania and on Hayling Island was the rest of the recipe: materials, a manufacturer and a beach culture to carry it.