Windsurf · Invention
1969
"New Sport – Wind Surfing": the name goes public
The first customer puts the board on the cover of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine, and the name that sticks is his, not the makers'.
Wind Surfing
Cover line, Seattle Times Sunday magazine, 20 July 1969
The best of the early designs was at first called a skate board. In 1968 Bert Salisbury bought one and took it home to Seattle, and a friend at the Seattle Times was taken with a picture of him sailing it.
On 20 July 1969 Salisbury appeared on the colour front page of the paper’s Sunday magazine, which had a circulation of 312,000, under the line “New Sport – Wind Surfing”. It was the day the astronauts walked on the Moon. Salisbury had chosen the words himself because he thought “skate boarding” would give readers the wrong idea. The name was not brand new that day: Drake had already used “wind surfing” in the title of a paper he presented in April 1969. The cover took it to a mass audience.
With his permission Schweitzer protected the name for Windsurfing International; accounts differ on whether the company was founded in 1968 or only opened for business in 1970. From then on Windsurfer was the product and windsurfing the sport, a hybrid name that joined sailing and surfing and helped the new activity catch on.