I think Newman had the elements of that in mind. I don’t know how he derived it, but he did. You can’t say that he was the best athlete in the world, but of course, neither am I. Also you can’t say that he was the most skilled technical person in the world in fields that I am expert in, but that doesn’t really matter either.
What matters was that at a point in the history of Western civilization, Newman Darby put together a mechanical device that combined the two features that have made windsurfing popular, namely standing, holding the wind in your hands.

All right. There’s that. Now. The next subject one wants to address is: Where was windsurfing born—windsurfing the way we know it today? And that’s a little different question. That’s a question of parentage and development and how things went on.
I

would claim, with humility, that the birthplace of windsurfing was on Jamaica Bay in California, in May of 1967. Not because that could not have happened in some other way, in some other world, but it did happen there. And you can draw a clear lineage from that moment to all that we see around us.
JC: Mmhmm, I understand.
JD: Well, now why did Jamaica Bay happen? Well, Jamaica Bay happened because of me and because of Hoyle Schweitzer. If either of us had not been present, Jamaica Bay would not have happened. [Jamaica Bay is where Jim Drake tried the first windsurfer prototype. See the historical footage in AW’s Test 2000 video]

I would argue that the sport was born on that day. It was fathered by me and, if Hoyle is listening, mothered by him and Diane. The father turned out to be a neglectful father, and while his children grew, he didn’t spend as much time in the interest of his children as Hoyle and Diane. They recognized what this sport could be. It was they who were completely responsible for its publicity, development and promotion.
Without either of us, Jamaica Bay never would have happened.

Now, back to Newman. Newman did not participate in that point in any way. None of his ideas and principles had any effect on what Hoyle and I did, because we simply didn’t know what he had done. He indicated there was some contact from California at that time. Well, not with me. Had we known, well, who knows what would have happened?

The first time I heard of Newman Darby was in the early ‘70’s, when the Germans came over, interested in breaking the patent, trying to find out what I thought about Newman Darby, who had published these things in Popular Science years and years earlier. That was the first time I ever heard of Newman Darby. I don’t think Hoyle had either, or if he did, he never mentioned it to me, or any of the things that Newman did.
JC: Who’s idea was it to put a sail on a surfboard?
JD: Mine. This decision was made after a conversation much earlier in ‘62 with another friend of mine, Fred Paine, perhaps I told you about him.
JC: Yes. (See interview in Volume 4 Issue 4)
JD: That was the time when the surfboard was introduced as the platform on which this unit ought to be made. The decision to take the kite out of the sky and put one edge of it on the surfboard was mine. Once you put one edge on it, it sounds like a mast, so it was not fully formed then, when I decided to put the kite on the board.
JC: Right! I’d forgotten the idea started with kites.
JD: Yeah. Well, we never played around with it. We never built anything. That’s an important distinction between thinking of something and actually doing something. Can think of a lot of things, but unless they do them, it doesn’t mean anything. Fred and I thought and thought about a handheld kite which, standing on a surfboard, would propel it.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think more carefully about it, but I concluded, because I think, of my bias toward sailing craft which want to go upwind, I didn’t think the kite would work well because it would weigh a lot and most of its forward thrust is bled off because of the amount of upward forces that are needed to keep the kite up. A handheld kite seemed to me like not as good as putting a corner of the kite up on the board.
JC: That’s amazing! Let’s go back to Newman.
JD: Good idea.
JC: It’s amusing to me that Newman’s sail looked exactly like a traditional kite and that his first board looked like a big door. At the time it was—what did they call it?
JD: A scow.
JC: Yes! A scow. It was the fastest watercraft of the time. Very wide and very stable.
JD: Yes.
JC: Then you guys came up with the surfboard, a narrow sleek long board. It’s amusing to me that in the 80’s, the leading designers were snickering at Newman’s wide “door” like board and now every board designer has gone into these extremely wide boards.
JD: [Laughter] Well, a little bit of crow never hurt the diet. Newman’s board did not fail because of its width, which was a good idea. It failed because of its weight and because of the hydrodynamics which are a part of it and because of the technology of the sail that he used.
JC: And the marketing.
JD: And the marketing. He didn’t go around to all these stupid expos and get all the jibes and the very unpleasant responses that anybody gets trying to put something new on the market.
That’s an absolutely agonizing, humiliating experience for anybody to go to show after show after show and try to argue for this new product that never had a market before and looks like the silliest thing in the whole world.

I think that’s the environment in which Hoyle and Diane found themselves in these exhibitions throughout the world. I think it was a very difficult time for them to keep their composure and their self-respect when faced with the ridicule of the then–standard yachting crowd in whose shows they found themselves.

Now, that goes to the question you mentioned earlier—Newman’s marketing. For whatever reason, and I certainly can well imagine it’s a tough one for Newman or his brother or anyone else around them, to put the time and the energy and depreciating selflessness into trying to promote something that was at that time, and still is, as ridiculous as it was.
JC: How do you feel, to see the Smithsonian embraced Newman Darby instead of you and Hoyle?
JD: The Smithsonian also embraced Professor Langley as the first successful airplane. Professor Langley, a very competent and capable scientist, flew something at the point which was in contention with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. The world has mostly accepted the Wright brothers’ explanation of being the first, rather than Professor Langley. However, both are widely held and widely respected for their contributions to the early beginnings of aeronautical science.

I don’t think there’s any difference there between Newman and what we’ve done, too. As I said earlier, Newman had the right idea, standing, holding the wind. His mechanical implementation of that principle wasn’t as educated as later happened. I think that’s the same as was true of the Wright brothers versus Professor Langley. Langley’s idea was to use forward propulsion, but the Wright brothers’ airplane worked better.
JC: You very graciously admitted that you are the reinventor of windsurfing.
JD: I don’t think that’s a gracious matter. I think that’s the truth of the matter.
JC: That in itself is very gracious of you....
JD: Baloney.
JC: Tell me, in saying that . . . Is this conclusion a correct conclusion?
JD: Yeah. Facts are facts. When you see what Newman did and what Peter Chilvers said he did. [Peter Chilvers was a 15–year–old boy from England who also claimed of prior art.] I have every reason to believe that he did what he said, or something very close to it. And, as I said, there could be others that will be uncovered later on that also had not only the idea—and that’s the key to it—not only the idea but actually did something. That’s where the invention takes place.

So reinvention is the correct interpretation of what has happened.
JC: What would you say to Newman Darby, if he were sitting next to you today?
JD: OK. What would I say to Newman? If he were here today? That’s a really interesting question. I’ve never thought about what I would say to him. Well, the first thing I’d try to do is to make as much common ground with him as I possibly could, because I think I know much of what is going on in his mind and how he feels about things. I think the first thing I would want to do is to assure him that under no circumstances do I feel jealous or possessive about what he did or anything of that sort.

The next thing I’d like to find out from him is how his mind works, because he obviously has an inventive and creative mind. And it would be fascinating for the two of us to share little things that we’ve done and why we came to whatever conclusions we came to. ‘Cause he’s an inventor, all right. He’s also a very gracious person like yourself. It comes with age. Wisdom comes with age—sometimes.
JC: What would you say to Hoyle?
JD: Oh dear. That’s different, since I know Hoyle very well and since there’s a lot of history that preceded all of this. I haven’t fully forgiven him for his inability to “do the right thing” when windsurfing began to take flight.
JC: What was that?
JD: About what was happening on the patent with regard to the agreement with Ten Cate. Had I known about the agreement which he had previously arranged with Ten Cate, I probably would not have sold [his shares to Hoyle]. So he wasn’t very open with me on that. .... people are that way.

While it’s true that I don’t entirely forgive him for that lapse in given human practice, I understand it. That sort of mental adjustment to maybe do something that you don’t think is quite right but it’s not so terrible after all, considering all the contribution one has made and on and on. I can easily understand how he brought himself to the conclusion that he could and should, and perhaps deserved to take the bulk of this emerging—or possibly emerging—he really didn’t know that it was going to be huge then—and take it as being his really, because he had put in all the energy.

Still, I think there was a lapse in his judgment. And it may be that there was just a tiny, little lapse because there wasn’t very much to take at that point. As years went by, the stakes turned out to be a lot more than anybody ever imagined. Millions of dollars and all that. And maybe it could have been easily resolved but once he had made the small mistake in judgment early, it could be that it became ever more difficult to admit it to himself or to me, and do something about it. That can very much happen to people. They can get themselves caught up in a small event and then this event grows to be much more important.

Now you asked me a question, which I haven’t answered yet. All right, what would I say to Hoyle if he were here tonight?
Well, with a new millennium one can’t help but be generous toward a new millennium, and I would be generous. I would try to be generous.
JC: Tell me, with the new millennium—what are your goals? What do you want to see happen?
JD: I’d like to see the sport grow to a point that almost everybody would really want to go windsurfing. In the same sense that today, almost everybody would like to spend some time skiing during the wintertime.

I’d like to see it develop to a point where almost anybody can, even if they don’t have a whole lot of skill. They see that the sport of windsurfing, like the sport of skiing, provides an important distraction from work, an important relief from focusing on day-to-day efforts —which is called recreation. Because both windsurfing and skiing, in their elements, can have the power to take the personal individual and focus his attention so totally, in the case of skiing, getting down a hill, making that turn just right. Often it’s kind of a little scary act, and it certainly can be scary in windsurfing as well. Scary in the sense that it’s tense and you have to wipe everything off your mind and you have to do what you have to do right at that moment. It’s a great feeling. Wavesailing has that same quality, as does skiing.

Well, not everyone likes to go to the brink like that. Many just want to go to have fun. I would like to see windsurfing have the same sort of following that skiing now has.

There is a colleague of mine that back at Rand Corporation during the time I wrote an article which you published, which was a highly objective/technical article. His name is Bill Graham. He turned out to be eventually the director of NASA and did a number of high level things in the U.S. government.

I remember talking with him about what we were all doing then. We were young men at the time, and I said, “Well, we’ve done a lot of important things. We’ve put, for example, cruise missiles on bombers. You guys have put miniature warheads on ICBM’s. But for my part, what I think may well be the most important contribution to the human race is the invention of windsurfing.”
“
Well,” Bill said—he was kind of a stuffy guy but charming in a way but also wise, ‘You know, Jim, that could well be right, but the most lasting contribution we in the physics department of Rand Corporation have made to the stability of the human race is the development of the windsurfer.’ [Laughter]