American surfer, entrepreneur, adventurer, and inventor, Jack O'Neill was born On This Day, March 27, 1923.
O’Neill is widely credited with inventing the wetsuit. Wanting to surf longer in the colder waters of Northern California, he popularized the neoprene wetsuit. He established the O'Neill surf wear and gear company in 1952. He was widely known for his eye patch, which he wore due to a surfing accident.
Although O'Neill is widely perceived to be the wetsuit inventor, an investigation concluded that UC Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner was most likely the original inventor.
Jack O'Neill was a Denver native who grew up in Oregon and southern California, where he began body surfing in the late 1930s. He received a degree in business from University of Portland in Oregon.
During World War II, O’Neill was a pilot in the Naval Air Corps before moving to San Francisco, CA, where he worked as a taxi driver, fisherman, lifeguard, longshoreman, traveling salesman, and draftsman. During that time, he earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts at San Francisco State University.
He also pursued his passion for an impractical, unknown sport called surfing.
In the early 1950s, he met Marjorie. They married and moved to San Francisco's Ocean Beach neighborhood.
By the early 1950s, O’Neill was going to the beach daily for pre-work surf sessions. One day, the surfer, working as a draftsman then, stained a document with seawater from his sinuses. O’Neill lost the office job but found his calling.
With time on his hands, he bought balsa wood and began shaping surfboards for sale in his garage.
In 1952, O’Neill opened one of the first surf shops in the US near Ocean Beach off The Great Highway in San Francisco—close to his favorite bodysurfing break at the time. Friends predicted he’d go out of business quickly.
In fact, often, O’Neill did not have the money to pay his bills in full, and he worked as taxicab driver around the area.
Because he wanted to spend longer in the water in the frigid Northern California ocean, he began experimenting with various materials and different ways to stay warm while surfing chilly waters. Previously, surfers wore oil-soaked wool sweaters to keep in heat and repel wetness.
O’Neill began experimenting with ways to insulate swimwear so he could stay in the frigid Northern California waters longer. Surfers at the time were using sweaters sprayed with oily water sealant
His first attempt was with PVC foam, which he put inside his bathing bottoms. Next came a vest. He put plastic on the outside so the water would run off the surface instead of getting suctioned into the foam, but the creation wouldn’t last long in the ocean. Another problem: The fit was suffocating and restricted movement.
A friend working in a lab suggested using a material called neoprene. O’Neill experimented with the product using WWII diving vests, and came up with the first wetsuit vest.
In the ’50s, though, there wasn’t a big market for this new creation, especially in Northern California, where you often could go a month without seeing another surfer in the water.
O’Neill later expanded the vest to a beavertail jacket and long johns, then to a spring suit with a vest top and short legs — and, finally, the full suit.
The neoprene wetsuit was the result. And yet, at the time, his friends—or anyone else for that matter—didn't have much faith in his invention.
"All my friends said, 'O'Neill, you will sell to five friends on the beach and then you will be out of business,'" he would remark, according to his family.
Already known for his colorful personality and marketing genius, O’Neill got creative about spreading the word, dressing his children in his wetsuits, positioning them on top of ice blocks and dunking them in ice baths in front of sports trade shows to show how they would withstand the cold. It was an innovative approach, as no surfing magazines existed at the time.
An entire industry—and the famous O'Neill brand— was born.
In Northern California, O’Neill is widely credited with being the inventor of the wetsuit. In fact, it’s a claim Jack O’Neill and his company have made since 1952.
O’Neill claimed that he got the idea for neoprene vests, which later led to full-body wetsuits, from the neoprene carpeting of the aisle of a DC-3 passenger plane. O’Neill then started gluing together neoprene vests and was selling them by 1952.
Who actually invented the wetsuit has been described as the longest-running argument in surfing.
Further south, other surfers disagreed with O’Neill. Los Angeles surfers and twin brothers, Bob and Bill Meistrell had created another California surf company, Redondo Beach-based Body Glove International, and also claimed to have invented the neoprene wetsuit. But their company was formed in 1953, a year after O’Neill went into business.
In fact, despite their decades long dispute, neither O’Neill nor the Meistrells invented the neoprene wetsuit. It was, in fact, invented in the late 1940s by Hugh Bradner, a University of California-Berkeley physics professor, who tested his first prototype—initially conceived for military purposes—in 1950.
The Navy found Bradner’s invention novel: it could get wet and still maintain body temperature with an insulating layer of air between water and flesh. Nonetheless, the Navy passed and Bradner never patented his design—when he tried to sell it, the response was lukewarm, and he didn’t imagine there would be much demand for the product.
There’s evidence that Bradner’s ideas about neoprene were already circling amongst surfers when O’Neill and the Meistrells got started.
Nonetheless, it seems that the origination of the idea was even then and still remains an open secret—that the Meistrells had talked to another early surfer, Bev Morgan, who explained learning about Bradner’s neoprene suits and shared the news with his friends the Meistrells after seeing a report written in 1951 for the US Navy and the National Research Council at the Scripps library.
When O’Neill was asked if he knew of Bradner’s earlier invention, O’Neill wouldn’t concede. “I’ve talked to Hugh [Bradner] and I told him what I had done and how I got started. We didn’t conclude anything.”
Bradner never made any money from his invention—nor did he jostle for credit. Nor did he ever patent his wet suit. Bradner recollects that he abandoned the idea when he “foolishly” indicated that he saw no large commercial application. His reasoning was there were only a few hundred divers and surfers in the world at that time.
So, although it’s clear O’Neill hadn’t quite invented the wetsuit as he’d often claimed, one thing is certain: he contributed significantly to its evolution, introducing the nylon jersey lining that made neoprene more comfortable against bare skin.
In 1959, Jack and Marjorie moved their growing family 75 miles south to Santa Cruz’s Westside—before it had become a well-heeled residential area. Mostly, it was a place frequented by surfers who braved the heavy winds. Marjorie and Jack raised their six children there.
In order to cater to the city's growing surf scene, O’Neill opened his second surf shop at the foot of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. O’Neill, who used to sell fire equipment, slung a fire hose down the cliff for surfers to scale to the cliffs near what is now known as Steamer Lane.
Today, the area's famous breaks, such as the world-renowned Steamer Lane, draw surfers from the world over.
He moved aggressively into the wetsuit business, expanding his O’Neill line to feature different styles and a women’s fit. This led to the establishment of a company that dealt in wetsuits, surf gear, and clothing.
O’Neill’s company developed the split-toe surf bootie, allowing for a more natural feel on a surfboard, becoming a standard design that would be copied for decades to follow. They followed that up by inventing the rash guard, which becomes just as prominent, allowing for a more comfortable surf experience.
Experimenting with the Supersuit wetsuit and surf leash, O’Neill further pushed the boundaries of innovation within the surf and diving communities.
O’Neill did not gain his signature eye patch until 1972, when he lost an eye after a surfboard snapped while he tested a leash prototype.
The consummate marketer, O’Neill managed to make the accident work for him, of course, turning crisis into opportunity: He donned the black eye patch that would become his trademark of sorts. It suited his seaman and surf-pioneer persona perfectly, giving him the mythical air of a fairytale pirate and fueling the legend he invented.
His trademark slogan further captured his brand’s cool, surfer culture: “It’s always summer on the inside.”
Jack’s wife, Marjorie, died in 1973.
By the 1980s, O'Neill had become the world's largest recreation wetsuit designer and manufacturer and the O'Neill surf brand had gone global—reaching Australia, Europe, and Japan.
An avid environmentalist, in December 1996 O’Neill partnered with his son Tim O’Neill, to launch a non-profit organization called O'Neill Sea Odyssey which provides students with hands-on lessons in marine biology —placing them in the “Team O'Neill” catamaran and brings them to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and teaches them about the relationship between the oceans and the environment. It’s mission is to cultivate “the development of the next generation of ocean stewards.” It has hosted more than 100,000 children since it started.
"The ocean is alive and we've got to take care of it," O'Neill said about the program. "There is no doubt in my mind that the O'Neil Sea Odyssey is the best thing I've ever done."
Ever the adventurer, O’Neill was also an accomplished sailor and aviator who flew hot-air balloons and invented the sandsailer, a sailboat on wheels that skirts the sand.
O'Neill resided at his oceanfront home at Pleasure Point, in Santa Cruz, California, from 1959 until June 2, 2017, when he died peacefully of natural causes. He was 94.
Images of O’Neill were hung on trees, and flip-flops were nailed to tree-trunks to commemorate his signature laid back beach dwelling style.
Today annual wetsuit sales worldwide are estimated at about $120 million.
O’Neill still holds the trademark to “surf shop,” but he never sought legal action after throngs of other surf shops opened through the decades.
Jack O'Neill played a major role in ultimately changing the sport of surfing forever, enabling people to surf in places previously impossible, such as Scotland, Iceland and Norway.
Until the end, the beach bum with business acumen claimed not to be into commerce, only “into the ocean.” That played well into the mythical surfer image O’Neill had always cultivated in marketing his sport, his business, and ultimately the legend that defined him.
O’Neill’s legacy stands tall as a permanent 55-foot mural on a Dream Inn retaining wall at Cowell Beach, near where his first Santa Cruz shop once stood. The family name has become a globally recognized wetsuit and foam board brand in the decades since those shops first opened.
Jack O’Neill always claimed to have no plan, yet he left behind a surf empire, an enduring legacy, and countless adoring fans worldwide.
“It’s always summer on the inside.”
—Jack O’Neill
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