The first factory-made Windsurfer

Drake and Schweitzer’s first boards were made by hand in a garage, from foam and wood. For industrial production they turned to roto-moulding, a process refined by Elmer Good, who had made large missile containers for the US military, and to polyethylene supplied by DuPont.

The first industrially produced Windsurfer came out in March 1970. Accounts of how many followed that year differ, from 188 boards to 22 kits. From first sketch to factory had taken three years, remarkably fast for a sport built on new equipment: mountain biking, snowboarding and skateboarding each needed far longer to reach mass production.

DuPont then did the marketing no small company could have afforded. A one-minute news film in 1970 and a cover story in the DuPont Magazine in 1971, with a circulation of half a million, carried the image of the new sport around the world. Many European pioneers later named that magazine as the reason they got involved.