Windsurf · Invention
1967
Jim Drake sails the first Windsurfer prototype
An aeronautical engineer and a businessman from his circle build a board with a free-swivelling rig in California; the first water trial is most often dated 21 May 1967.
21 May
1967, first water trial of Jim Drake's board (date most often given)
Jim Drake, an aeronautical engineer at the RAND Corporation, built the first versions of the equipment in his garage in 1967 and took his first board onto the water in May that year. The date most often given is 21 May; other accounts name 15 or 23 May. Hoyle Schweitzer came from Drake’s social circle; as the idea developed the two became informal business partners.
Southern California gave them what earlier inventors had lacked. Surfboard makers could shape any design to order, and Drake and Schweitzer had six different boards made, reportedly by Con Surfboards in Venice. Experimental designs followed one another until the hand-made board became the basis for a mass-produced plastic product three years later.
Drake is generally seen as the designer. He later called himself the sport’s re-inventor, acknowledging that his was the third version of the idea, after Peter Chilvers in England and Newman Darby in Pennsylvania. Without Schweitzer’s entrepreneurship, though, there would have been no product to sell.