When the Navy officially declassified the PVC insulating technology for their divers’ suits in 1951 it led to a flood of experimentation.
#Jack o neill and family surf skin#
Water could saturate the suit and the bubbles of water would heat up between the swimmer’s skin and the suit’s exterior surface. Bradner’s research was commissioned by the US Navy who were keen to find a way to keep military divers in the water longer and to keep them fighting fit and flexible.īradner realised that by using various types of rubber, PVC and other materials, a suit could achieve thermal insulation from the many tiny bubbles of air trapped in its material. Hugh Bradner, a physicist working at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1940s is widely credited with coming up with the concept central to the success of the wetsuit: namely that it didn’t have to be watertight to keep the wearer warm. That twisted silver lining transformed a million things – in surfing it helped speed up the introduction of fibreglass technology and, of course, the wetsuit, which up until that point was still a seedling of an idea, yet to manifest in Jack O’Neill’s Surf Shop. Then World War Two came and changed all that. Elegant, dry-haired paddle-outs and nonchalant, stylish kick-outs not only demonstrated surfing prowess and the stylish aesthetic of the times, but were techniques a surfer could use to stay relatively warm and dry. Duck-dives and wipe-outs – anything that kept a body submerged – were to be avoided at all costs. Hardy brethren would huddle around a fire, sipping on hits of rum and whisky while gingerly eyeing up the freezing winter sets, picking the moment with a little Dutch courage to pull on their woollen jerseys and thermal pants and run to the shore, knee-paddling out for a quick, breathtaking bump and grind. In the pre-war years surfing in cold water couldn’t have been a barrel of laughs. “We used to run down the beach to get warm before swimming out.” “We had no protection from the cold – no wetsuits or anything, and I never got much out of those wool sweaters,” remembers Jack of his early surfing days at Kelly’s Cove, San Francisco, in the 1950s. You see, without Jack’s innovative vision – which has sustained in a triumphal arc these last six decades – the colder watery regions of the world might never have been opened up for surfing’s elemental creed.
#Jack o neill and family surf archive#
Hardback-bound and coffee table-ready, Jack O’Neill: It’s Always Summer on the Inside is a gigantic archive of first-person narratives and old family-album finds that, together, retrace one of surfing’s most transformative leaps. Drew Kampion’s entertaining tome on the life and times of the Navy pilot-turned-surf entrepreneur helps explain why. And whichever consumer choice you make when planning your rubber fetish for any given surf season, you owe a debt of gratitude to the man. This year, Jack O’Neill and his crew are celebrating sixty years in the game. New book on Jack O’Neill and his entrepreneurial path explores the origins of the hand-sewn suit. Jack O’Neill and the origins of the hand-sewn suit.
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