KQED61%
The Wetsuit Changed Surfing — We’ve Got a Berkeley Physicist to Thank for It 33%
By Gabriela Glueck0%
5/21/2026, 10:00:28 AM
Keywords: Bay Area History, Bay Curious, Beaches, Berkeley, California, California History, Culture, Ocean Beach, Surfing, Swimming, Uc Berkeley
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Hasty Generalization, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 12.6% saturation with 223 hits. Analysis detected 2,116 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,767 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 41.2% and a BS Rank of 33% (11,384 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 67.70% of the article peer group.
Kelly’s Cove is located at the northernmost curve of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.
Tucked right below the Cliff House, it was one of the earliest surfing spots in the city.
The now quintessential California sport was late to arrive in San Francisco, only coming into its own in the 1940s.
If you’ve ever dipped your toes in the ocean here, you’ll know why.
It’s cold.
“The water temperatures would creep below 50 degrees at times,” longtime surfer Jim Gallagher said.
Gallagher was part of the Kelly’s Cove community.
They were a select group, willing to brave frigid waters for the chance at the perfect wave.
And in the early days, they did it without wetsuits.
Before neoprene suits were invented, surfers like Gallagher had to rely on their senses to keep them safe.
“We became experts in hypothermia,” Gallagher said.
Surfers kept sessions short and experimented with creative ways to stay warm.
“Guys tried almost everything,” Gallagher said.
People surfed in wool sweaters, covered their bodies in petroleum jelly or tried warming up from the inside with brandy.
Surfers near Ocean Beach in San Francisco in an undated photograph believed to date to the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Photographer unknown.
The image is from a collection of photo negatives belonging to Dennis O’Rorke.
(Courtesy of Dennis O'Rorke)
Left: Surfers check out a wetsuit at Kelly’s Cove on Ocean Beach, circa 1970s.
Right: Beach goers lie out to enjoy a warm day at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, circa 1970s.
(Courtesy of Dennis O'Rorke)
“There was a theory that two or three of them started by wearing your mother’s underwear, which was nylon and close-fit, you would have less cloth,” he said.
That particular hypothesis was debunked quickly.
Bonfires were the most reliable way to warm up.
A surfer walks in the water to surf at Ocean Beach in San Francisco on Feb.
10, 2025.
(Beth LaBerge/KQED)
“Typically, somebody would bring down old tires because tires really hold the heat,” Gallagher said.
“It didn’t smell too good, but it was better than freezing to death.”
Nearly 75 years later, everyone at Ocean Beach is wearing a wetsuit, not to mention neoprene hoods, gloves, and booties.
How that happened has roots in Kelly’s Cove and a whole lot to do with a Berkeley physicist.
Designing a suit for the military man
One of the major challenges for Allied forces during World War II was figuring out how to land ships and soldiers on enemy coasts.
The shorelines were heavily fortified, rigged with concrete, metal and wood obstacles that could only be dismantled by soldiers in the water.
On D-Day in 1945, Naval Combat Demolition Units — better known as frogmen — deployed to Omaha Beach.
“They’re just wearing wool sweaters and things like that,” historian Peter Westwick said.
“And they suffered terribly; their casualty rate was like 50%.”
Left: Hugh Bradner at the California Institute of Technology around 1941.
Right: Hugh Bradner at his desk at the California Institute of Technology around 1941.
(Courtesy of UC San Diego Library)
The soldiers were left exposed to enemy fire, doing precision work in cold water for a long time.
For the U.S., it was part of a larger wake-up call.
“The U.S.
Navy [is] quickly realizing the equipment that these divers are wearing really is going to make a difference,” Westwick said.
“So the Navy started thinking more about how we can improve these things.”
Post-war, the Navy turned to the National Academy of Sciences for help.
They convened a panel to tackle the problem and tapped Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner to join the group.
After completing his PhD at Caltech, Bradner had worked on the Manhattan Project, helping the United States develop the atomic bomb.
Perhaps more importantly, he was an avid diver and waterman.
One of his first projects with the panel was trying to design a suit to help divers survive underwater explosions.
But he soon realized the foam materials he was working with could help tackle the cold water problem, too.
It was then, Westwick said, that Bradner came up with his fundamental contribution.
You don’t have to stay dry to stay warm.
It was a concept that flew in the face of accepted knowledge at the time, when the best option for watermen was a dry suit.
Dry suits, as the name suggests, keep divers warm by keeping them dry.
They’d bundle up in wool underlayers and step into a bulky rubber shell.
“You stayed relatively warm, but they’re really hard to move around [in],” Westwick said.
Bradner’s “wetsuit” idea wouldn’t depend on layers of wool underwear.
“You let the water in and then let [the divers’] body warm them up,” Westwick said.
“The [suit] material acts not as a barrier, but rather as an insulator.
So this is really his crucial insight.”
In a letter dated June 21, 1951, Bradner shared his revolutionary idea with a colleague.
It’s the earliest known documentation for what would later come to be known as the wetsuit.
The other innovation in Bradner’s design was the use of neoprene, a synthetic rubber that became widely available during World War II.
Left: Two men in diving gear with small, round raft.
These diving suits predate the neoprene wetsuit.
Right: John S.
Foster modeling wet suit designed by Hugh Bradner around 1953.
(Courtesy of UC San Diego Library)
Westwick said Bradner started testing his neoprene suit in 1951.
“He tests them in swimming pools.
He tests them in Lake Tahoe, and they seem to work.”
It was a novel idea and a patentable invention.
But Bradner wasn’t interested in becoming a businessman.
“He says, ‘No, no, I want to preserve my objectivity here,’” Westwick said.
“‘I don’t want to be tainted with commercial bias or the perception of commercial bias … I just want to be available to advise the Navy if they want to call on me.’”
In the end, Bradner never patented his design.
“‘Let’s just throw it out there,’” Westwick paraphrased, “‘and let people run with it.’”
That’s exactly what happened.
The wetsuit goes mainstream
On the other side of San Francisco Bay — back on foggy Ocean Beach — a local surfer and tinkerer at Kelly’s Cove was working on his own suit.
After experimenting with other materials, Jack O’Neill also stumbled across neoprene.
Jim Gallagher, the guy who used to warm up by tire fires on Ocean Beach, was friends with O’Neill.
“He was a guy that was a salesman and did a bunch of different things,” Gallagher said.
“But he was a really curious sort of guy.”
Left: Jack O’Neill as a young man wearing a pre-wetsuit in the 1950s.
Right: Jack O’Neill and sons Pat and Mike demonstrating Jack’s supersuit he invented between 1970 and 1979.
(Courtesy of Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Library)
O’Neill has long been considered one of the fathers of the wetsuit, along with the Southern California company Body Glove, a distinction both were happy to cultivate.
But this line on the O’Neill company blog raises questions about those claims: “Seeing the successful experiments of UC Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner in the early 1950s, Jack O’Neill switched to neoprene.”
I reached out to the O’Neill company to get a better understanding of the degree to which O’Neill was aware of Bradner’s discovery, but the company did not respond to my request for comment.
Jenna Meistrell, the granddaughter of one of Body Glove’s founders, said the family does not believe the founders knew of Hugh Bradner, and that the company credits itself with the first commercially viable wetsuit.
Gallagher said the O’Neill suit was a game-changer for surfers at Kelly’s Cove.
When they saw the inventor in his neoprene suit, “[they] said, ‘Well, how do I get one?’
He said, ‘Well, I’ll make you one.’”
Gallagher was lucky enough to get one of the early models.
It was custom in every sense of the word, carefully measured and tailored to his body.
Gary Silberstein sits in the back of his car next to his surfboard at his home in Santa Cruz on April 14, 2026, before heading out to surf.
(Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Left: Gary Silberstein holds a Jack O’Neill wetsuit he has owned since the 1960s.
Right: Silberstein surfing at Ocean Beach in the 1960s.
(Left: Beth LaBerge/KQED.
Right: Courtesy of Gary Silberstein)
These early suits weren’t lined.
Surfers like Kelly’s Cove local Gary Silberstein used cornstarch or talc to help them slip on.
Silberstein has held on to one of O’Neill’s later models.
The neoprene is thick and inflexible by today’s standards, but it still looks warmer than a wool sweater.
Over the years, Silberstein has put the suit through the wringer.
“The wetsuit has 18 holes; it’s real leaky and cold,” he said, pointing out the tears.
“You can see this has been repaired, but this would still be a functional wetsuit 50 years in.”
Left: Jack O’Neill’s first surf shop on Wawona Street in San Francisco with Jack’s children, Cathy, Mike and Pat, standing in front of shop in 1957.
Right: The site of the first Jack O’Neill surf shop on Wawona Street in San Francisco on April 14, 2026.
The shop opened in the early 1950s and later moved to Santa Cruz in the late 1950s.
(Left: Courtesy of Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Library.
Right: Beth LaBerge/KQED)
A surfer stands at Ocean Beach in San Francisco in 1972.
(Courtesy of Dennis O'Rorke)
As demand for his surf gear grew, O’Neill opened up a store near Ocean Beach, often thought of as one of America’s first surf shops.
He continued refining his wetsuit, rolling out new styles and diving headfirst into marketing.
Today, O’Neill is one of the biggest surf companies out there.
That’s why you might know his name, while Bradner has largely been left out of the popular retelling.
How the wetsuit changed surfing
These days, people are surfing in Iceland, British Columbia, the Great Lakes in the middle of winter, and of course at Ocean Beach.
“You think of the product, and it really was the foundation of the explosion of winter surfing sports all over the world,” Silberstein said.
When he goes out to surf on his home waves in Santa Cruz, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be packed.
“I can go out here on a good day and see over 100 people in the water,” despite the cold.
As Jack O’Neill used to say, “When you’re wearing a wetsuit, it’s always summer on the inside.”
Analysis
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