Hugh Bradner was a UC Berkeley physicist in 1951 when he heard about bubble-filled rubber called neoprene, which he believed could be used to make underwater suits for Navy divers. He designed and built some prototype "wetsuits" (the Navy was already using tightly-sealed "drysuits"), but the military showed no interested, and Bradner never followed through on patenting his idea. A Southern California surfer-diver named Bev Morgan came upon Bradner's wetsuit blueprints in 1952, and soon brought the new product to market; in decades to come, Bradner was largely forgotten. Bradner was 72 in 1988, and teaching at UC San Diego, when Janny Scott profiled him in the Los Angeles Times.


The university asked me if there was any market for it. [Bradner was a government contractor, which meant UC Berkeley had first dibs on the patent.] I wasn't smart enough to think of surfers. So the university said, "Naah, we don't think it's worth pursuing a patent."


I got my fun out of it. I live a good life [in La Jolla, California]. What the heck! The pleasure is in the challenge.


I wanted to do something as a part-time activity that would be useful and fun. I decided to see if there weren't some things in the frogman business that could be improved. The obvious one that had bad shortcomings was the suit. They were binding. Air got trapped in the suits, which made swimming difficult, and then weights would have to be added to fight the buoyancy. But a tear or puncture could lead to drowning.


You don't have to stay dry to stay warm. The air bubbles in the rubber serve as insulation, even when water is on both sides of the suit.

HOW WAS THE FIRST TEST RUN USING A WETSUIT?


Chilly. But better than [being in the water] without it. That would be my characterization of a wetsuit right now. I'm still chilly when I go in the water! It's not the ultimate solution.

WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION TO COLD WATER?

OTHER BRADNER-DEVELOPED IDEAS THAT SURFERS MIGHT USE


A suntan cream which will simultaneously give you a better tan and better sun protection.

DID BRADNER ACTUALLY DEVELOP THAT PRODUCT?

In 1999, Eric Hanauer interviewed Bradner for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography's Centennial Oral History Project. Part of the discussion focused on the development of the wetsuit. Bradner, 84, was at the time professor emeritus at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC San Diego.

Let’s talk about how you got involved with the wetsuit.

I was interested in doing things on behalf of the frogmen, the UDTs [Underwater Demolition Teams]. It was quite evident that there were a number of things that needed improvement in their equipment. The most significant one was dive suits. If you’d ever used any of the so-called drysuits that the Navy had at that time, there’d be no question about the need for improvement. [Working with neoprene rubber], it became evident to me that heat insulation comes from the dead air that’s trapped [in the suit], and that you don’t have to stay dry, just stay warm, [which is possible once] you’ve got a layer of appropriate thickness of dead air, meaning small enclosed spaces of air. So, with that notion, we messed around.

There were several people who were making rubber and neoprene and polyvinyl chloride—a whole lot of such things. [But] what we were looking for was something that hopefully would have a bit of stiffness of its own, would be unicellular, could be cemented, would stretch an appropriate amount. turned out to be the best, although it was quite fragile for a while, was this stuff made by Rubatex. [It was oceanographer] Willard Bascom who that said, “You should try the Rubatex material.” He made a lot of very fine contributions.


In July, we were starting to mess around with materials. And by December we had built several suits.

You attended a "Swimposium" in December, in San Diego. Was that the first public presentation of your work with the wetsuit?

It ranged from people saying, “Don’t be silly” to people saying, “Hey, of course.”

Can you recall your first ocean trial with the wetsuit?

I don't recall the first one. I remember Bob Livingston and I did what might be called an ocean test of the suits at Christmas, but this would probably have been the following Christmas.

Off the Golden Gate area of San Francisco. The thing I remember most is that I put on the suit, and a face-plate, and went out in like three- or four-foot depth water to wallow around for a while, while Livingston watched. Then Livingston went back up to the car for some reason, and a very luscious woman came running down the beach, this completely deserted beach with nothing except this black-suited creature in the water, and threw off all her clothes and lay down behind a rock. That I remember.

From your initial drawings, the suits had zippers. Did you start out with zippers, or did you add those later?

We tried everything. The reason for the zippers was simply that the material was not as stretchable as you’d like, and in order to keep the water flow reasonably low—for example, around the wrists—it seemed desirable to have something that was a little tighter than you could comfortably shove your hand through. So we put a zipper in.

Without the zipper, that non-flexible material would tear.

So the Navy decided the wetsuit was not for them. Could you tell me about the Navy passing on it and the subsequent fate of the patent?

As I’ve mentioned, the morality in those days was that one was not supposed to profit by anything that he did under government auspices. So initially, we treated the wetsuit as a classified project and turned it over to the government. The government concluded that they didn't need any patent protection, so they gave it back to me to turn over to the University. Then the University looked it over and asked if I saw any significant commercial aspect to the wetsuit. In my wisdom, I said, “No, I think [it would sell to] maybe fifty people.” So we dropped the patent.

After that, the UDTs wanted them, but the Navy couldn’t put out contracts and run all the acceptance tests and so on in less than about seven years at that time. That was sort of par for getting a thing through the military. So, having gotten the wetsuit declassified, we arranged to have a couple of outfits build them commercially. That was the origin of EDCO ["Engineering Development Corporation," the first wetsuit company], and we also got some outfit down here.


Tell me about EDCO. What was your part in starting EDCO and how were you involved?

Well, it started out as an interest of mine in UDT equipment, as I've said, then I got several of my pals there at the Rad Lab [UC Berkeley Radiation Laboratory] to join in putting them together in our basements.

So these were just basically friends and colleagues of yours?

Yes. And then Dave Garbellano decided that somebody needed to go into this as a business in order to be able to make these things reliably and sell them. So Garbellano was the driving force of EDCO. I don’t think I was involved in any way with any of the business aspects. I tried in fact to avoid that.

Since you didn’t have a patent you weren’t getting royalties, so you were getting no income at all from EDCO.

No, but the Radiation Lab allowed me to spend some time working on it. And actually, a year or two later, Garbellano and a fellow named Hayden Gordon became the primary people in a little company called Applied Radiation Corporation, ARCO, whose product was going to be an electron accelerator for food sterilization. And Marge [Bradner's wife] and I gave them all the money that we could afford at that time, which was a hundred dollars, so we did have a vested interest in ARCO. Later, when it that was bought up by one of the big accelerator companies in the east, the return was a hundred and some to one. That was our nest egg; that allowed to buy a house, which was really the basis of our being solvent today.

So, yes, I owe a great deal to those guys.

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