March 27, 1968 windsurfing is born. As is often the case, it was invented before: that is just the date of the US patent application. But in this case it was invented even earlier and not by the same people who got the patent, namely Jim Drake and Hoyle Schweitzer.
This is also interesting because the windsurfing industry, which was born shortly after, did so starting from this dispute. In short, who had really invented windsurfing? Many argue that the real father of windsurfing was Newman Darby, who would have even conceived it in 1948. He was 20 years old and after a childhood in Pennsylvania during which he had expressed a passion for building boats, he had moved with his mother to Florida. Here he imagined putting a square sail on a catamaran and maneuvering it like a kite. It took several years for that idea to become a project, but then that project even ended up in Popular Science magazine in 1965 (actually Darby first proposed it to a surfer magazine, which rejected it saying it “wasn’t surfing”).
Darby and his wife Naomi then tried to launch a startup for sell the Darby Sailboard, but it didn’t catch on. Furthermore, for several reasons (not least the costs), Darby did not apply for a patent to protect the invention. But in this regard the publication in Popular Science will prove decisive. In fact, a couple of years later, the aeronautical engineer Jim Drake (who was himself a surfer) was finally fulfilling his dream of making a sailboard to go up the Potomac River: in 1966 he had talked about it at a dinner with Hoyle Schweitzer, who was a businessman and he immediately sensed the potential of that invention, which was certainly not going up a river.
The first test of a windsurf as we know them was done on May 3, 1967 in California: the engineering novelty was the attachment where to insert the shaft, which made it manageable. Schweitzer convinced Drake to present together patent application (“Wind Propelled Apparatus”) and make a company, Windsurfing International; and shortly thereafter he convinced him to sell his shares for a few thousand dollars.
Windsurfing was immediately successful, in particular in Europe, where windsurfers were produced under license of Schweitzer’s company, which therefore collected a percentage each time. Until, at the end of the 1970s, the main client of Windsurfing International, the company Tabur Marine (which would later become Bic Sport), brought the patent issue to trial by citing another clipping from an English newspaper in which there is it was a photo of a sailboard, with a mast attachment very similar to that of windsurfing, already in 1958, made by a certain Peter Chilvers. There was a lawsuit and Windsurfing lost it. And he lost a second to the Mistral, who bore the 1965 issue of Popular Science as proof with Darby’s board. On that occasion, he also lost his patent and soon went bankrupt. But windsurfing had now even become an Olympic sport.