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Nothing’s done in a vacuum. It’s all inspired, and pulled, and developed. There’s an evolution that’s happening—and then the evolution concludes with this amalgamation of what works. But people pull from every aspect that they can because it’s out there. And if you’re creative and you can start pulling, then you can develop something unique and what works for your genre.
—Spencer Croul

January 10–20, 1910: The Los Angeles International Aviation Meet, the first international air show in US history, is held in Dominguez Hills. Dubbed by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the greatest public events in the history of the West,” it draws more than 200,000 spectators who watch 16 flying machines defy gravity.

The meet marks the beginning of Southern California’s aeronautical industry. Los Angeles—and the greater Southland region—would soon become a hub of design and manufacturing. According to Peter J. Westwick, the author of Blue Sky Metropolis, a book that explores the anthropology, history, and science of aerospace technology in Southern California, this was a product of favorable weather and “the region’s long history of civic boosterism, by newspaper publishers, real-estate developers, and Hollywood moguls; the investment in local universities that supplied research, testing facilities, and technical labor; open-shop rules in the labor market; local military installations; and a culture of expansive imagination and entrepreneurialism.”

“There is going to be a Detroit of the aircraft industry,” said EJ Clapp, a local businessman, in 1926. “Why not here in Los Angeles?”

The industry ebbed and flowed in the years following the Los Angeles International Aviation Meet. Commercial flight blossomed in the Roaring ’20s, boasting government contracts to carry mail and serving a growing class of the well-to-do and wealthy. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the progress of the ’20s gave way to the austerity of the ’30s, and the industry contracted while the nation experienced unprecedented poverty. 

Then Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Nations scrambled for advantage in a fledgling, and increasingly consequential, facet of war: the air. The US was mobilized. Los Angeles’ major aviation plants—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, North American, Northrop, Vega—clanged throughout the night. Men and women streamed to and from their shifts on cue: 8 a.m., 4 p.m., and midnight. The swing shift, a product of the Allies’ desperate need for aircraft, was in full effect. “Dive bombers in the Land of Oz,” wrote Fortune magazine in March 1941.

The industry continued to grow and branch throughout the twentieth century, spurred on by the festerings of the Cold War, Korea, Sputnik 1, and Vietnam. Today, while its presence is less absolute, aeronautics remains a stalwart element of Southern California.

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There’s one thing that really spurs technology, and that’s the ability to—I mean, I hate to be so crude—but to see and kill your enemy before he kills you. That’s a really big incentive to put a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of money into the technology that allows you to do that. 
—Stanley Pleskunas

Surfing was born of the islands of Hawaii. But surfing as we know it today—polyurethane foam and fiberglass, downrails and foiled fins, Gidget and The Endless Summer—was built on the factory floors of Southern California.

“We are the Gutenberg of the surf industry,” says Dennis Jarvis, founder of Hermosa’s Spyder Surfboards. “I’m not saying we invented it—we know the Hawaiians did—but this is where most of those [modern] materials came from. They didn’t come from Florida. They didn’t come from Santa Cruz. It was all here, because this was the [seat of the] military-industrial complex.”

For most of history, surfboards were heavy wooden “planks,” often made of redwood and approaching 100 pounds, a daunting proposition. Balsa wood, valued by aircraft manufacturers and surfers alike, proved to be a breakthrough. Im­ported by Pete Peterson to Southern California in the early 1930s, it was a light and strong alternative to redwood, hampered only by its tendency to suck up water.

Fiberglass was invented in 1931 by Games Slayter, a chemist at the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Marbles were heated in a furnace until molten glass streamed out of holes in the base of the structure, like Parmesan out of a cheese grater. The glass strands were then woven into fabric. 

The defense industry made quick use of the new material, employing it in parachutes, planes, and boats. “They were putting a lot of effort into planing hull boats made of plywood to attack Japanese submarines,” says Renny Yater, famed shaper. “So that’s what brought on fiberglass—to protect the plywood boats.”

After returning from the Pacific Theater, Peterson was among the first surfers to use fiberglass, creating a hollow board with it. The material quickly became the standard, ubiquitous in both the balsa-wood planks of the ’40s and ’50s and the polyurethane-foam boards that soon followed. 

While it was first developed in the late 1930s, there was little interest in polyurethane foam until military-intelligence reports issued in the twilight of World War II noted Germany’s progress in the development of urethane. By the 1950s, Lockheed had developed “Lockfoam,” a “foamed-in-place” rigid polyurethane application. 

According to the New York Times in 1952, “The New York office of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation disclosed details yesterday of the plastic ‘Lockfoam’ which its Burbank, Calif., engineers are squirting into complex hollow spaces in airplane structural members to strengthen and stiffen them and hold the skins in true aerodynamic form under pressures of high speed.” “It looks like angel food cake,” commented Clarence L. Johnson, then chief engineer at Lockheed. 

Yater, who was a laminator at Hobie Surfboards in the mid-1950s, recalls the first notions of foam corresponding with a limited, and increasingly poor, supply of balsa wood. “The airlines wanted to buy all the wood that the balsa importer was bringing up into the US,” he says. “They wanted all the wood that they could get from him to use in their new airplanes or passenger planes, to make them lighter. So the suppliers started selling their wood to them, and Hobie [Alter] was getting a worse grade of balsa wood, which he was getting really upset about. [There were] a lot of pieces with the core of the tree in it, and wet pieces not kiln-dried all the way.”

Others, like Bob Simmons and Matt Kivlin, had already experimented with foam, making polystyrene Styrofoam-core “sandwich boards.” But it had yet to catch on. “Horrible stuff,” recalled shaper Dave Sweet. 

“We tried a few boards with that,” remembers Yater. The resin ate the polystyrene, so they had to coat the foam in glue to keep the resin from melting it. “That was so time-consuming,” he adds. “We tried two or three of them at Hobie’s place and it didn’t work, [so we] abandoned it.”

Polyurethane offered a solution. “There were engineers coming around showing a new product called polyurethane foam, which they were actually selling [as a competitor to] plywood,” says Yater. “When the urethane salesman started coming around, that caught [Hobie’s] eye.”

Sweet was the first to make polyurethane surfboard blanks. In 1954, he partnered with the company Techniform to build a mold. But the foam was initially “no good,” recalled Sweet, and Techniform soon left the partnership. It took Sweet almost two years to perfect the foaming process, and not before enlisting the help of chemical manufacturers from Reichhold.

Meanwhile, Alter partnered with Gordon “Grubby” Clark, who’d received a combined degree in math and physics from Pomona College. “A real bright guy,” says Yater. “Second highest in his class, something like that.” Clark would perfect foam under the Clark Foam label, democratizing the industry with his steady and consistent supply of foam blanks. 

As the decades marched on, surfing continued to appropriate an array of materials from the aeronautical industry—like a remora to a great white. George Greenough, ever at the forefront, was building spoons and sailboats out of carbon fiber sourced from Union Carbide as early as the 1980s. “Well, anybody could buy the material,” he recalls. “They’re there. Remember, what I was buying from Union Carbide was not woven cloth. It was yarn. You’d buy spools of the material.”

Union Carbide was, of course, a leader in the development of carbon fiber, fiberglass’s stronger (and stiffer) cousin. By the late 1950s, Union Carbide was supplying early forms of carbon fiber to the US Air Force to replace fiberglass in rocket nozzle exit cones and reentry heat shields.

Throughout the early decades of the Cold War, the USAF largely funded Union Carbide’s development of carbon fibers in search of “stiff, high strength composites for rocket nozzles, missile nose tips, and aircraft structures,” according to the American Chemical Society.

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Greenough, and others, took notice. If you look at all the modern jet fighters now, all the sharp edges and the corners and the wings and all that stuff, look at a 1974 double-winger pintail board, then look at all this aerospace stuff. And it’s like, that’s the same thing. Breakpoints and flow. 
—Nathan Pratt

Surfboards are a lot like planes—vehicles moving through a medium. The physics are (mostly) the same. Simmons, architect of the antecedent to the modern surfboard, is likely the first to have made the connection. He attended Caltech, though he dropped out before receiving his degree. “It bored him,” says Yater.

Simmons got a job as a machinist at Douglas Aircraft, building boards in his spare time. His designs were radical—a vast improvement on the pre-WWII planks and cigar boxes. His advances were grounded in a 1945 study on planing hulls, titled Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls, written by Lindsay Lord, who rose to prominence during Prohibition by advising society’s underbelly on the utility and speed of planing watercraft.

Simmons likened rails to the leading edges of wings. He employed twin-fins and bottom contours. The lineage of post-WWII surfboard shaping begins with his designs. Joe Quigg and Matt Kivlin, two of the best surfers of their day, were Simmons’ pilots. Malibu was their racetrack. Together, they uncovered the principles that underlie modern surfing. 

After his untimely death at Windansea in 1954, Simmons’ sense of experimentation was carried onward by the next generation of surfers and innovators, who came of age in the postwar period. Across Southern California, the combination of a white-hot aeronautical industry, the urgency generated by World War II, and access to world-class universities had created a highly technical-minded populace. That knowledge and inventiveness trickled into everything.

Nathan Pratt, an original Z-Boy, grew up in post–World War II Southern California, the son of an engineer. “Back then, being an engineer was the thing that all dads did,” he says. “Everyone’s dad had to leave at 7:45 in the morning, go to work, come home at 5:15. It was like a movie, watching all the cars leave at the same time. [My dad] would bring home things from work, like half a thruster rocket from the nose of something that went into space.”

“Spec metal-alloy workshop shelves were stocked with aero-surplus machinery and the like,” recalls author and artist CR Stecyk III, who came from the same milieu in coastal Los Angeles. “Engineers in our neighborhood lived next to machinists, who dwelled next to certified aeronautic welders. Everyone had serious, job-honed chops, and they devoted their off-hours to crafting their respective dreams. Boats, hot rods, surfboards, motorcycles, planes, bikes, dollhouses, scale train models, and the like were all feverishly being executed. The collective skill levels involved were extraordinary.” 

And while the best-known knowledge exchanges—Simmons’ education at the hands of Caltech and complex military scholarship, Clark’s refinement of foam post–physics degree—are well documented, these examples do not fully capture the scope of the aeronautics industry’s influence on surfing and its postwar populace.

Gordon & Smith, for instance, the famed San Diego–based surfboard label, owes much of its history to the aeronautical and defense industries. George Gordon, the father of Larry Gordon, was a chemist educated in the meager years of the Great Depression. He began his career in the shadow of Chicago, working at an industrial-coatings manufacturer. In 1943, he moved his family to San Diego, in part due to his son’s indisposition to the cold. 

The elder Gordon subsequently found a job at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (founded in part by Gerard Vultee, surfer and friend to Duke Kahanamoku), where he worked in R&D, developing high-strength fiberglass laminates and adhesives for use in aircraft construction. The plant, which was camouflaged from the air to thwart Japanese attacks on military installations, manufactured B-17s and B-24s. He later founded Gordon Plastics, a composites manufacturer. 

Meanwhile, his son, Larry, a chemistry student at San Diego State University, was beginning to make surfboards with his friend Floyd Smith. The pair took over a newly vacant Gordon Plastics building and started building a foam mold.

“A lot of the early G&S stuff happened at Gordon Plastics,” says Larry’s son Eric Gordon, who today runs G&S with his sister, Debbie Gordon. “[Our grandfather] was a chemist, so he was working on all this stuff. My dad and Uncle Floyd wanted to make foam. And my grandpa went, ‘I can get you there.’ He knew the formula, and they built a mold.”

“When all was ready for the first attempt to cast the first foam blank, I was privileged to be an observer,” George Gordon wrote of the genesis of G&S. “As I remember, the ingredients being mixed in a 5-gallon pail began reacting too quickly, and consequently the first blank looked like a huge mushroom growing out of the mixing bucket. When [the] laughter died down, some changes were made, and this time they succeeded in getting most of the mix in the mold. But again the reaction was too fast, and foaming started before the mold was properly secured. Eventually they got ‘the hang’ of it and succeeded in making some pretty fair foam blanks.”

G&S would become one of the most recognizable labels of the twentieth century, providing surf craft, derived from the outsized presence of the aeronautical industry, to a stable of surfing royalty. 

Meanwhile, Stanley Pleskunas, master designer and one of the original Sunset Cliffs locals, notes that he still refers to Theory of Wing Sections, a book published in 1949 by two NASA employees, including the future director of aeronautical and space research. “A bible of foils,” he says of the tome, to which he first was introduced by inventor, physicist, and Swamis local Terry Hendricks.

Likewise, shaper Wayne Rich still draws on his education at Northrop Institute of Technology, a college founded and operated by Northrop Aviation. “I have seen enough smoke-tunnel test stuff that I can visualize some of it now,” he says. “I won’t know the exact amount of laminar flow release in areas—when you get your angle and attack too severe and you start to detach the laminar flow of fluid. But in the surfboard world, you can estimate a lot of it because, unlike planes, we’re not going to crash and kill somebody.”

Rich’s connection with the aeronautical industry is existential. His father was crew chief on an aircraft carrier during World War II, before taking a job at North American Aviation in flight testing, a field in which Rich’s mother also worked. Rich received a scholarship from Northrop Institute of Technology in the early ’70s. “I learned about everything from Bernoulli’s principle to being able to see wind-tunnel tests and different things, and then the construction of aircraft,” he remembers. 

The link is pervasive, the fact of it so strong that sometimes the current ran backward, the technological expertise pushing upriver: In the early 1980s, Rich was offered a job at the prestigious Lockheed Skunk Works by Ben Rich, the program’s director.

“So [Ben] says, ‘I understand you might want to work at the Skunk Works. We’d love to have a new young person like you,’” he says. “‘You’re into surfboard stuff. You make things by hand. You’re a good craftsman. That’s what we’re looking for on a new project that we’re working on right now. We’re looking for somebody who understands composites, modern-day composites. We’re doing stuff that you would never dream of.’”

Rich ultimately turned down the job. Years later, he found out they were developing the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. “It’s got a lot of carbon fiber, and it’s epoxy,” he deadpans.

Stecyk, one of the founders of Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions, remembers clandestine meetings at Dave Sweet Surfboards. “Dave decided he didn’t want to deal with surfboards anymore,” Stecyk says. “He became interested in radio control. And all Dave wanted to do was make small planes for radio-control enthusiasts.”

The meetings included Sweet, Kent Sherwood (one of Sweet’s laminators, and stepfather to original Z-Boy Jay Adams), Colby Evett (a former shift supervisor at Douglas Aircraft), plus a rotating cast of nondescript men.

“There’d be two to three guys that would come in every week,” says Stecyk. “They were radio-control enthusiasts, of course. No idea what they did in the rest of their life. And they would have private meetings with Dave to see the radio-control projects. They would always be driving amorphous American vehicles. Never the same vehicle twice. The only commonality would be that of the two guys who came last week, one of them would return with another guy the next week, then the third week after that, then one of the guys would return with another unmarked car and he would be common to the last meeting. So there was a chain of possession. Very interesting people. One could only imagine what they must have done for a living.”

Sherwood later founded Foam Matrix, “the leader in wings for unmanned aircraft,” which specializes in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Foam Matrix also designed and manufactured the fins for the Pegasus missile, the first winged vehicle to accelerate to more than eight times the speed of sound, as well as the wings and control surfaces for the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and the Boeing X-45A Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle.

“Fins and wings are basically surfboards, but they require much higher standards of quality control,” Sherwood told Surfer in 2010.

Not all of surfing’s innovations were cloaked in short-sleeved white shirts, black ties, and horn rims—particularly those created just beyond Southern California’s orbit. Greenough, whose logo evokes a WWII fighter plane, scoffs at the notion of aeronautical influence on his work and groundbreaking contributions to materials and design. 

“I had nothing to do with the aerospace business,” he says. “Most of what I’ve done is done off common sense.” (Greenough, of course, developed the Greenough Advanced Rescue Craft, or GARC, a vehicle used by the US Navy.)

The Campbell brothers, and their designs, are also instructive. “For whatever reason, we stumbled upon a combination of a principle that still performs at an extremely high level,” says Malcolm Campbell, who, along with his brother, Duncan, invented the Bonzer, one of the first tri-fin surfboards. “We came upon the idea, it worked, and then we had to, in a sense, kind of reverse engineer and be able to understand for ourselves and then also be able to explain to other people about why it works.” 

The brothers developed the first Bonzer in 1970. Prompted by the inefficiencies of short, wide single-fins, they were searching for ways to retain drive. “I mean, I was 18, Duncan was 15,” Campbell remembers. “It was trial and error. Basically, we were sitting with my dad, we were talking, and he just said, ‘What about three fins?’ We pretty much came from left field. [Our dad] was a sailor, so he was interested in boats. He just had an overall general interest in crafts, cars, boats, planes, and so forth. He knew a lot of just the basics—basic aerodynamic and hydrodynamic principles. But that’s really the extent of our interface with any actual technology.”

Test pilots and mathematicians. Greenough and the Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls. Missile tips and engineers. Surfboards and attack angles. 

“I think all that really does is confirm the beauty and cleanliness of physics in general,” says Pleskunas. “Physics, I mean, you can feel it, right? When it works, it works. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

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In the early ’50s, everybody was still riding varnished balsa-wood boards. And then, all of a sudden, that stuff sort of filtered down to the common man, or at least the very curious people. Once these smart kids got their hands on it, it went nuts. And they’re still doing it. They’re doing carbon and epoxy and printing surfboards. The legacy and the tradition of pushing the limits and trying new technology is really at the core of surfing. It’s part of it. It’s as part of it as a board and a bar of wax and a pair of trunks is. 
—Stanley Pleskunas 

Justin Ternes of Dark Arts is one of many who carry on surfing’s relationship with the aeronautical industry today. His shop, nestled in a naval enclave of San Diego, is littered with rolls of alien-looking fabrics and weaves, space-age stuff sourced from Graphite Master. 

“They work with NASA and all those industries,” he says. 

Ternes has normalized the use of carbon fiber in surfboards, employing the likes of John John Florence and Filipe Toledo to test-pilot his signature black vessels. “It’s a surfboard,” he says, “but it’s way more technical than you would think.” He’s also constantly tinkering with different carbon weaves, materials, and foams. 

“So, a Styrofoam core is faster than PU,” he explains. “And then you’re going to add a faster outer layer of carbon to Styrofoam. It’s going to make that response time more rapid. If you add carbon to a PU, it’s going to raise that response time up on that PU. But when there’s wood in the PU, now you’re hindering the carbon’s movement because you have carbon to wood, which is extremely stiff. It might move in different areas, but you’ve lost that sensation of the trampoline because it’s not fiberglass. So you’re like, ‘Okay, well, now you’ve got to get rid of the wood.’ Then you just go down these rabbit holes of marrying the materials.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ternes’ stepfather, who’s been in his life since he was a small child, is a physicist for Northrop Grumman. Lately, Ternes has been adding Kevlar to his boards—“a slower material than carbon,” he says—in an attempt to give Florence a little more control while retaining carbon’s inherent speed. 

A little black rocket, made of Kevlar, carbon fiber, and foam, piloted by the best surfer on the planet, a craft that is a far cry from the wood and cloth of the early flying machines yet, like its jet-age cousins in the sky, is also a direct descendant.