Inventor of the ‘endless summer’
Jack O’Neill was known as the ‘‘clown of surfing’’ as he rode the waves in his prototype wetsuit off the coast of San Francisco in the early 1950s. Many surfers told him that the sport’s ‘‘real men’’ would never wear his invention.
When they realised that O’Neill was still perfecting his technique in the near-freezing Pacific Ocean more than an hour later, the gainsayers stopped laughing at him.
O’Neill had invented the sport’s ‘‘endless summer’’, making surfing all year round feasible and opening up the pursuit to enthusiasts in colder climates - it is doubtful whether the surfing scene in Cornwall and Devon would have grown as large as it has without his neoprene wetsuit.
He spread the message with the help of his children, who would model mini versions of the wetsuit while sitting in pools of ice at trade shows and handing out marketing literature. By the end of the 1960s, O’Neill’s wetsuit had become an essential part of the surfer’s kit and today accounts for about 60 per cent of the market in an industry that is worth more than $6 billion.
In later years, sporting a piratical beard and his trademark eye patch (he lost an eye in a surfing accident in 1971) while evangelising a pseudo-religious philosophy about the surfer’s lifestyle, O’Neill would be celebrated for helping to make the sport a global pursuit.
The father of six opened one of the world’s first surf shops off the coast of San Francisco in 1952. It was a desperate move after the latest of many short-lived jobs came to an end. Most of his employers thought that he was a ‘‘bum’’ because he wanted to spend all his spare time surfing and often slept on the beach. ‘‘I’d work downtown in San Francisco and get all screwed up, and go out and I’d jump in the ocean and everything would be all right again,’’ he recalled.
In the chillier northern Californian seas off San Francisco, he could stay in the water for about 20 minutes and then had to run back on to the beach to warm his perishing body in front of a waiting bonfire. He would attract curious, not to say admiring, glances at his midriff - O’Neill’s private parts would get so cold that he took to stuffing his bathing trunks with lumps of PVC. Other surfers would wear sweaters and long johns smeared with water-resistant oil.
Inspired by the seals that used to flip-flop up the beach for the tidbits that O’Neill would feed them, he became fascinated with the idea of humans being similarly insulated and developed early versions of the neoprene vest and shorts.
The invention of the wetsuit is generally attributed to the late Hugh Bradner, a University of California professor who created a prototype in 1952.
O’Neill’s claim that he had invented the first surfing wetsuit would be challenged by Bob Meistrell of Body Glove International, who pioneered a similar bodysuit at around the same time. In the coming years, O’Neill and Meistrell would threaten to sue each other in what would be known as the ‘‘longestrunning argument in surfing’’.
What is beyond doubt is that O’Neill’s proved to be the most popular in the surfing fraternity. His eureka moment was to use elastic nylon as an inner lining that would be easier on the skin, give a snugger fit and maintain flexibility in the limbs. This lining would be embroidered with the slogan, ‘‘it’s always summer on the inside’’.
Jack O’Neill was hampered academically by dyslexia and as a teenager he fell in love with the pursuit that was brought to the shores of California in 1885 by three Hawaiian princes who were spotted surfing on redwood boards.
He eventually opened a shop in a garage in front of his favourite surfing breaks in San Francisco and sold boards, wax and neoprene vests. – The Times, London