{"id":326018,"date":"2026-05-21T10:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T10:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/326018\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T10:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T10:34:08","slug":"the-wetsuit-changed-surfing-weve-got-a-berkeley-physicist-to-thank-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/326018\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wetsuit Changed Surfing \u2014 We\u2019ve Got a Berkeley Physicist to Thank for It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Episode transcript<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: It\u2019s a foggy day at San Francisco\u2019s Ocean Beach \u2026 just like so many before it.<\/p>\n

Everything\u2019s gray \u2026 cold and windy \u2026 but familiar landmarks stick out in the fog \u2026 seal rock \u2026 the Cliff House \u2026<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the early 1950s \u2026 and the waves are roaring.<\/p>\n

Waves crashing<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: There are a few surfers paddling out. They\u2019re wearing \u2026 shorts.<\/p>\n

Just shorts.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: When you first went in the water, your fingers would sting and your toes would sting, and that stinging would begin to increase a little bit up your arms and so forth.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: Jim Gallagher was part of a group of surfers who braved Northern California\u2019s frigid waters in the early days of surfing here. A place where ocean temperature stays in the 50s<\/a> for most<\/a> of the year.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: And then after an hour or so, that stinging would abate, and you start feeling good, well, you\u2019re about to die, so you better get out of the water fast.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: At Ocean Beach, surfers found community and creative ways to keep warm.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: We became experts on hypothermia \u2026<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: Bay Curious reporter Gabriela Glueck takes it from here.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Jim got into body surfing as a kid and soon found a community of surfers at Kelly\u2019s Cove, at the north end of Ocean Beach. It was one of the earliest board and body surfing spots in the city.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: A myth went out that somebody named Kelly died on the beach. There was a competing story that was a Foster & Kleiser sign, a big advertisement for Kelly\u2019s tires. So people had been saying, where\u2019s the beach, or go down to see the Kelly sign \u2026<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: In the early days of the sport, people surfed in wool sweaters, covered their bodies in petroleum jelly, or tried warming up from the inside with brandy.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: Guys tried almost everything. There was a theory, two or three of them started by wearing your mother\u2019s underwear was nylon and close fit, you would get have less cloth. And that got debunked pretty quick.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: The solution was quick surf sessions, maybe ride a few waves and come running back to the beach, to the bonfires.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: Typically, somebody would bring down old tires, and because tires really hold the heat. And so you could be standing 5 and 6 feet away from the fire and be quite warmed by that fire. It didn\u2019t smell too good, but it was better than freezing to death.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: While Kelly\u2019s Cove surfers were doing their best to outsmart the ocean \u2026 thousands of miles away, another group was having trouble with cold water too.<\/p>\n

During World War II, the U.S. military learned the hard way that a soldier\u2019s capacity to function in cold water could make or break an invasion.<\/p>\n

World War II music<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: For the Allied forces, one of the major challenges of the war was figuring out how to land ships and soldiers on heavily fortified enemy coasts<\/p>\n

The concrete, metal and wood obstacles could only really be dealt with by soldiers in the water.<\/p>\n

War tape:<\/a> The story of the United States Navy\u2019s frogmen is a story of adventure, of brave men against the enemy and against the sea.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: So-called \u201cfrogmen\u201d trained in warm-weather Florida, in mild surf \u2026 not the kind of conditions you typically find off the coast of France.<\/p>\n

War tape:<\/a> The weather is none too good, but the little ships are plugging onto the beaches, bringing enormous support of manpower and weapons.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: On D-Day, they deployed to Omaha Beach. And as historian Peter Westwick tells it, they were pretty poorly equipped.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: And basically, they\u2019re just wearing kind of like wool sweaters and things like that. And they suffered terribly. Their casualty rate was like 50%.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: The soldiers were left exposed to enemy fire \u2026 doing precision work in cold water for a long time.<\/p>\n

For the US military, the whole war was one big wake-up call.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: The US Navy is quickly realizing, OK, the equipment that these divers are wearing really is going to make a difference. So the Navy started thinking more about how we can improve these things.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: At the time, if you wanted to stay warm underwater \u2026 dry suits were the answer.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: And what the dry suit basically did was, as its name suggests, was it kept you dry.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: The suits were bulky. You\u2019d bundle up in wool layers and then step into a watertight rubber shell.<\/p>\n

Even today, many scuba divers use a more advanced version of this technology.<\/p>\n

While Americans sometimes used drysuits during the war, they weren\u2019t perfect.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: The downside was, you know, you stayed relatively warm, but they\u2019re really hard to move around.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: \u201cSuit squeeze\u201d was common, pinching watermen in sensitive places at the most inopportune times.<\/p>\n

Imagine trying to disarm a bomb underwater while wearing 20 leather jackets stacked on each other. Not exactly practical combat gear.<\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s a Navy to do?<\/p>\n

After the war, the Navy turned to scientists for help. One man in particular seemed like a good bet \u2014 Hugh Bradner.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: Bradner likes to dive, and has dived in cold water regions before.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Bradner got his PhD in physics from Caltech. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project\u2026 helping the United States develop the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n

After that, he got a job as a professor at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: He\u2019s diving, swimming and playing water polo around the Bay Area. So avid kind of waterman, as we would call it now, but also a top-notch physicist.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Bradner joined the project \u2026 working first on a different problem \u2026 a suit to protect divers from underwater explosions.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s tinkering with these foam materials, using them like shock absorbers \u2026 and starts wondering if the foam could also help keep divers warm.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: And then he comes in and ends up with the really fundamental contribution to this whole, this whole enterprise.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: You don\u2019t have to stay dry to stay warm.<\/p>\n

In a letter dated June 21, 1951, Bradner shared his revolutionary idea with a colleague \u2026<\/p>\n

Voice over for Hugh Bradner: Actually, I do not think it is necessary to have a waterproof suit. It should be possible to obtain adequate warmth by use of a \u201cdead water\u201d space from a furry type of porous material \u2026<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: There\u2019s this really kind of central, counterintuitive insight there, before the whole assumption was that if you\u2019re in cold water, the way you keep from getting cold is to keep the water out. The water is cold. If you keep the water out, you will stay warm. Bradner says you let the water in.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Let the water in, he thought, and your body would warm it up naturally.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: And the material acts not as a barrier, but rather as an insulator. So this is really his crucial insight.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: His other big breakthrough was identifying the kind of material needed to make that happen.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: When he\u2019s looking around for materials to test, here is this material right at hand that the chemical industry is cranking out in great quantities, especially for the U.S. military.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Neoprene.<\/p>\n

The synthetic rubber was invented in the 1930s by chemists at DuPont.<\/p>\n

During World War II, it became an important substitute for rubber, which was hard to come by. Inventors improved on the material, making it better and more widely available \u2026 just in time for Bradner to prototype his wetsuit.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: He begins testing this in 195. And he tests them in swimming pools. He tests them in Lake Tahoe, and they seem to work.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: It was a novel idea and a patentable invention. Bradner\u2019s 1951 letter describing his idea is the earliest known documentation for what would later come to be known as the wetsuit.<\/p>\n

But chances are, unless you\u2019re a physicist or history nerd, you probably haven\u2019t heard of Hugh Bradner. That\u2019s because he never patented his design.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: So he says, no, no, I want to preserve my kind of objectivity here. I don\u2019t want to be tainted with commercial bias or the perception of commercial bias \u2026 I just want to be available to advise the Navy if they want to call on me.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: He was a science guy \u2026 not a businessman. And as the thinking went, diving and surfing were destined to remain small niches, not places to make real money.<\/p>\n

Peter Westwick: And it\u2019s funny, because some of the other panel members are actually writing Bradner at this time, saying, like, Dude, you\u2019re blowing it. Like you can do both \u2026 you can be a businessman. And Brander says, like, no, no\u2026 forget it. I\u2019m not going to patent it, and let\u2019s just make it. Let\u2019s just throw it out there and let people run with it, which is what happens.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: Bradner had no idea that the suit he\u2019d invented would forever change the world of surfing and water sports. More on that when we return.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re enjoying stories like this one, consider becoming a member of KQED. We can\u2019t do this work without listener donations, so consider joining the hundreds of thousands of your Bay Area neighbors today. KQED.org\/donate<\/a> is the place to do it.<\/p>\n

Sponsor messages<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: We\u2019re talking about the invention of the wetsuit, and its Bay Area connection. Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner came up with the idea in 1951, but he never had it patented.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for the novel concept to go mainstream, thanks in part to the ingenuity and marketing prowess of a few California surfing legends.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Bay Curious reporter Gabriela Glueck again.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Just a short time after Bradner comes up with his wetsuit, a local tinkerer at Kelly\u2019s Cove stumbled upon a similar idea.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher \u2014 the guy who used to warm up by tire fires on Ocean Beach \u2014 he was friends with him: a man named Jack O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: He was a guy that was a salesman and did a bunch of different things, but he was a really curious sort of guy.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Legend has it that O\u2019Neill experimented with all kinds of interesting suit solutions. But nothing really worked. Until he, like Bradner, came across neoprene.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: He made the neoprene suit, and he made one for himself, went out and came back, and people saw that, and he said, Well, how did I get one? He said, Well, I\u2019ll make you one.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Unlike the mainstream wetsuits of today, Jack\u2019s suits were always custom.<\/p>\n

Jim Gallagher: And I remember when I went down to get mine, I went to his home. He was still living on Wawona, and his brother Bob was there. He was working for Jack, and you went in and he measured you like a tailor would \u2026 almost you know, the length of from your elbow midpoint to your wrist and up to your shoulders, around your waist or chest, arm length, legs, the whole body, and he might make a template and then cut the neoprene to that template and glue it together. And that\u2019s how the first ones were made.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: As demand for his surf gear grew, O\u2019Neill opened up a store near Ocean Beach, often thought of as one of America\u2019s first surf shops.<\/p>\n

He continued refining his wetsuit, rolling out new styles \u2026 and dove headfirst into marketing. At a 1956 San Francisco trade show, for instance, he dressed up his six kids in little wetsuits and threw them into tubs of ice water.<\/p>\n

Kelly\u2019s Cove surfer Gary Silberstein remembers this time well, when the early wetsuit was gaining traction, rudimentary as they were.<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: They weren\u2019t lined, okay, with any fabric. And \u2026 use cornstarch to or talc, something to make them slip on.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: When I met up with Gary at his Santa Cruz home, he pulled an old O\u2019Neill suit out to show me \u2026 like most early wetsuits, it\u2019s just a jacket, nothing covering the legs.<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: You are looking at Jack O\u2019Neill. This is his logo, which is now all kind of etched away from years and years of surfing. And it\u2019s a jacket. It\u2019s simply a long sleeved, long sleeve jacket, pretty heavy neoprene.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: The neoprene was rough \u2026 and cracked in places \u2026<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: You can see that the stitches hold the arm pieces. These are all pieces of neoprene that had to be cut before they\u2019re stitched together.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck in scene: And do you remember how much they cost back in<\/p>\n

the day?<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: I\u2019m guessing everything\u2019s so much cheaper, probably 35-40 bucks.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Gary\u2019s old O\u2019Neill suit ended up in a museum one day. It\u2019s well-preserved evidence of an invention that changed surfing.<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: You think of the product, and it really was the foundation of the explosion of winter surfing sports all over the world.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: These days, people are surfing in Iceland, British Columbia, the Great Lakes in the middle of winter\u2026 and of course, at Ocean Beach.<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: And so the whole culture, the whole availability of equipment, improved enormously over those years, from, let\u2019s say, 58 to 65 or 64 when I left Kelly\u2019s Cove \u2026 Wet suits became very inexpensive and available, and surfboards made of foam were mass produced.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: When Gary goes out to surf on his home waves in Santa Cruz, it\u2019s pretty much guaranteed to be packed<\/p>\n

Gary Silberstein: I can go out here on a good day and see over 100 people in the water.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Due to his commercial success, O\u2019Neill came to be known as one of the \u201cfathers of the wetsuit.\u201d Body Glove, an early SoCal surf and dive company, is often also given that accolade.<\/p>\n

Bradner, though, was largely left out of the popular retelling.<\/p>\n

But about 40 years after walking away from wetsuit development, Bradner began writing letters to try to clarify the history.<\/p>\n

Voice Over for Hugh Bradner: Dear Jack, You have lately been getting much well-deserved publicity for your invention of the surfing wetsuit. You perhaps recall that I was early in the wetsuit too, but not for surfers.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: One letter recipient? Jack O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n

Voice Over for Hugh Bradner: The enclosed xerox of my June 21, 1951, letter to Larry Marshall has the disclosure that I believe may (underlined) have been the beginning of it all. I\u2019d be interested to learn whether your wetsuit predates it.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Hugh Bradner<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Bradner\u2019s copy of O\u2019Neill\u2019s reply, if one existed, isn\u2019t in the archive.<\/p>\n

But there are a lot of other letters. All following a similar thread.<\/p>\n

Voice Over for Hugh Bradner: Dear Bill, I am enjoying very much your latest book \u2026 There is one experience in which I did participate: the wetsuit \u2026 We have there an important question of timing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I consider this very important because if your work predates June 21, 1951, I must set about recanting my claim and fame by contacting significant people and widely read publications.<\/p>\n

Please set my mind at rest as soon as you can.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: The letter recipients, all in all, seem to have been less concerned than Bradner about clearing up the timeline.<\/p>\n

Voice Over Willard Bascom: \u201cDear Hugh \u2026 History is what we remember (including you).<\/p>\n

My suggestion is that you let all statements stand \u2026<\/p>\n

Relax and have a merry Christmas. Kindest, Willard\u201d<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Like Hugh Bradner, I did some of my own due diligence \u2026 and reached out to O\u2019Neill and Body Glove for comment.<\/p>\n

Jenna Meistrell, the granddaughter of one of Body Glove\u2019s founders, told me the family does not believe the founders knew of Hugh Bradner, and that the company credits itself with the first commercially viable wetsuit.<\/p>\n

The O\u2019Neill company didn\u2019t respond to my request for comment \u2026 But they\u2019ve got this line on their company blog.<\/p>\n

Voice Over: Seeing the successful experiments of UC Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner in the early 1950s, Jack O\u2019Neill switched to neoprene.<\/p>\n

Gabriela Glueck: Versions of this neoprene suit are everywhere these days. Now complete with gloves, booties, and a hood for the cold-weather rider. It\u2019s a combination early Ocean Beach surfers could have only dreamed of.<\/p>\n

Because, as Jack O\u2019Neill would say, when you\u2019re wearing a wetsuit, it\u2019s always summer on the inside.<\/p>\n

Olivia Allen-Price: That was Bay Curious reporter Gabriela Glueck.<\/p>\n

I want to let you all in on something we\u2019ve been working on behind the scenes for the last few months! A historically-themed gaming experience at San Francisco\u2019s Conservatory of Flowers. It\u2019s like nothing Bay Curious had done before \u2026 and now, it\u2019s time to invite you to join us! Come out on June 20 and 21st and explore the history of the Conservatory and the people who created it. Tickets on sale at KQED.org\/live<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There will be no episode dropping next week because of the Memorial Day holiday. We\u2019ll be back with the freshy fresh on June 4.<\/p>\n

Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price.<\/p>\n

We get extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.<\/p>\n

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Episode transcript Olivia Allen-Price: It\u2019s a foggy day at San Francisco\u2019s Ocean Beach \u2026 just like so many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-326018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}