Jim Drake (engineer)

Jim Drake (1929 – 2012) was an American aeronautical engineer who invented and patented Windsurfing in 1968. Drake conceptualized, engineered, hand built and personally tested the first windsurfer. He started the sport's first company, Windsurfing International. He produced multiple championship winning windsurfing board designs throughout his career, as well as created a popular offshoot of windsurfing with the world's first un-masted wing sail. Drake is known as the father of windsurfing.^[1]

Drake earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with an option in aeronautics from Stanford university in 1951. He began his aeronautical engineering career at North American Aviation in his hometown of Los Angeles, California. There he worked in the advanced design group as a principal engineer on a number of top secret record breaking experimental aircraft. Notable among his aircraft designs at North American were the X-15 rocket plane, which still holds altitude and speed records for manned flight, and the B-70 high altitude bomber. He later worked for Rockwell and their division RAND Corporation. He helped found the think tank R&D Associates (RDA), a technical studies firm. His career took him to The Pentagon for various periods both directly and indirectly, part of which was associated with the development of improved Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Tomahawk missiles during the Cold War of the 1960s and 70's.^[2][3] Drake retired from his aeronautical engineering career in 1998 after 47 years of groundbreaking, elite level design work.

Jim Drake first began conceptualizing the idea of windsurfing in 1962 along with close friend, sailor and fellow aeronautical engineer Fred Payne.^[4] They wanted to combine the portability and ease of skiing with the joys of sailing. In their spare time together, while away from their high level aerospace engineering jobs, they played with the idea for fun. Drake's career as a successful aeronautical engineer was thriving by this time, in part, because he enjoyed the mental challenge of "solving a technical puzzle." Then in 1966, at a small dinner party in Santa Monica, California, Drake casually mentioned his idea of creating a sail powered surfboard to a friend of his named Hoyle Schweitzer, who was a businessman, not an engineer, but had a surfing background. He shared with Schweitzer his idea of creating a new type of portable sail craft, whereby the sailor stood upright on a large surfboard while holding directly onto a small sail.

Drake's question came down to simple operation of how a standing person could control both the power of the sail as well as the direction of the craft without a rudder. Drake discovered that one's ability to rotate the sail's position relative to the board could allow control of both power and direction. Experimenting with a rotational design, he incorporated the concept for the universal joint. Drake completed his engineering concept with a wishbone boom, a daggerboard, mast, mast foot, triangular sail and fin.

Schweitzer was enthusiastic about the profitable business potential in Drake's invention. From the outset, the two men were motivated by different forces. As the owner of a small, struggling computer software marketing company, Schweitzer sought to partner with Drake to financially benefit from the engineer's brilliant sailboard concept. Once a partnership was forged, Schweitzer quickly moved to secure a joint patent on Drake's invention. Schweitzer and Drake started a company together called Windsurfing International. As a partnership, Drake was the inventor, Schweitzer was the salesman.

Years later, in 2002, the Professional Windsurfing Association (PWA) upon inducting both Drake and Schweitzer into the inaugural class of the Windsurfing Hall of Fame, called Drake "The father of windsurfing" and Schweitzer "The man who brought windsurfing to the masses." Windsurfing's origin story has long and often been misconstrued through the lens of popular media and personal bias. The convenient and romanticized storyline of a sailor and a surfer, combining their two respective sports into a single new sport is idealized and not historically fact-based. More accurately, it was the combination of an intrepid, highly skilled engineer and a motivated, out of work businessman that together created the modern sport of windsurfing. Drake stated repeatedly, in various interviews, that although he alone can be credited with the entire invention, without Schweitzer playing a key motivating role he may never have completed the engineering design phase and moved forward with building and testing the original prototype. Patent disputes in the 1980s uncovered earlier sailboard designs by Peter Chilvers and Newman Darby such that Drake accepted that he was the third inventor of the concept.

Drake was an elite engineer as well as talented craftsman throughout his lifetime. Drake first engineered the mathematical simulation for his windsurfer concept on paper then crafted nearly all of the windsurfer prototype components by hand in his Santa Monica, California home garage in January 1967. He built the wishbone boom, daggerboard and mast foot from laminated teak wood. He designed and built a custom wood press jig for shaping the curve into the wishbone boom. His universal joint design was created by reconfiguring a commercially available sailboat swivel joint; constructed from heavy duty marine stainless steel with a teflon core component. Drake custom engineered the first sail, which was made of Dacron sail cloth. It formed a triangular Bermuda rig cut and was sewn by sailmaker Bob Broussard. The custom board, the size of a large tandem surfboard, was designed by Drake and shaped from an oversized foam blank by shaper Gary Seaman at the Santa Monica-based surfboard factory of Con Surfboards. A repurposed hollow fiberglass mast from a small racing dingy was used to support the sail. Schweitzer's contribution to the project was primarily financial and non-technical. Drake was the concept's sole design engineer who knew what specifications the sail craft required and what materials were needed to build it.

On May 21, 1967, Drake, along with his wife Wendy and daughter Stephanie, went to Marina del Rey, California to make history sailing the world's first modern sailboard session. The Drakes were met by Broussard, the sailmaker, who happened to be passing by on his bicycle. Drake admits he had carefully thought through many of the complex ideas of control, but overlooked the simple need of raising the sail out of the water to begin sailing. He had always imagined the rider standing on the board with the sail in their hands and hadn't thought about how he would raise the sail from the water, so on that historic first day got Broussard to wade into the water to lift it out from the water and hand it to him.^[3] Complicating his first day's test run further was that Drake forgot the board's skeg at home. Returning to Marina del Rey one week later, this time with the skeg and an uphaul (to pull the sail from the water), Drake succeeded at sailing the craft the way he designed it to be used. With his confidence buoyed from two days of practice in the protected boat basin, Drake took his sailboard onto the open ocean at Will Rogers State Beach in Santa Monica, California.

Drake was impressed enough by early tests of the prototype to allow a launch party for he and Schweitzer had unofficially named the "Skate."^[3] However, they found another company had already used the name "Skate" and were preparing to copyright it, so decided on the name "Baja Board" based on the location where Drake and Schweitzer often used the new craft. In early 1968, while demonstrating the "Baja Board" in Seattle, a public relations man named Bert Salisbury stopped his car to have a look, and commented: "Gee, I have the perfect name for it! Windsurfing!"^[3] The sport thereafter became known as Windsurfing and the first brand was called the Windsurfer.

The details of Jim Drake's original designs are available in Drake's elegant, scientifically prepared Rand publication: Windsurfing - A New Concept in Sailing^[5][6] Despite over 50 years of subsequent development, the design is still remarkably similar to today's windsurfing equipment.

In early 1968, Drake and Schweitzer founded the company Windsurfing International to manufacture, promote and license Drake's Windsurfer design. Drake's Santa Monica home address was listed as their business's first address. However, soon Drake was asked by his employer to temporarily relocate himself and his family to the other side of the country to serve as a top level air and space engineer at the Pentagon in Washington DC.

Unfortunately Mr. Drake, never signed a formal business agreement with Mr. Schweitzer, which opened the door for Schweitzer to legally incorporate Windsurfing International as a firm without including Drake as a partner.^[7] Drake believed that because he and Schweitzer were joined on the patent that they also were partners at Windsurfing International, and he further believed that because his relation to Schweitzer and his family was warm, cordial and trusting that Schweitzer would act in good faith to protect and foster Drake's interests while he was away for two years on other important business. Drake learned the hard way that business can quickly erode relationships. Schweitzer soon signed lucrative contacts and collected royalty fees to license the production of over 100,000 Windsurfers in Europe without ever informing Drake or sharing any of the proceeds.

Building Windsurfing International became Schweitzer's full time career. Schweitzer, as co-patent holder, wanted sole control of the patent, and wanted Drake's half. Drake's full attention was being given to his family and engineering career when Schweitzer started aggressively pressuring him to sell his half of the patent. Drake was surprised by the situation and did not want to sell his interest in the sailboard he had alone invented, however being extremely busy with his engineering career and raising 6 children, in addition to feeling sympathetic to his former friend, Drake reluctantly sold his half of the patent to Schweitzer for the sum of $36,000,^[3] and in doing so kindly allowed Schweitzer to create a profitable business opportunity for himself.

Although Drake sold his half of the windsurfing patent Schweitzer, he never stopped innovating. He continued to design cutting edge windsurfing equipment throughout his entire lifetime. During the late 1990s and 2000s he produced a wide range of custom board shapes that disrupted the status quo and introduced revolutionary short and wide as well as long and narrow board concepts to the sport.

Drake is also the person who invented an explosively popular offshoot of windsurfing now called "wingingfoling.^[8]" In 1981, Drake and European windsurfing pioneer, Ullrich Stanciu, invented and patented the world's first handheld wing used on a sailboard.^[8] Their concept was based on the symmetrical shape of the flying fish. Unlike windsurfing, their wing rig was handheld and not fixed to the board via a mast.

In 1998 Drake met Svein Rasmussen, olympic windsurfer and owner of the windsurfing manufacturing company Starboard. The two began a productive, successful and award-winning design collaboration. At Starboard, Drake and Rasmussen developed an entirely new class of board design known as "formula". The formula board is a short and wide light wind race design that uses a very long and narrow skeg. When combined with a large sail, the formula board allows a sailor to reach relatively high planing speed with only a minimal amount of wind. Drake's advanced aerodynamic and hydrodynamic engineering ability provided the needed skill set to produce Starboard's world leading boards such as the Formula 175, Apollo, Gemini, Serenity, Hypersonic and Fish among others. Most recently, Drake helped develop the short, wide race designs that led directly to the Starboard IQ foil class boards being used in the 2024 olympic games.

Drake produced a number of "outside the box" new designs that provided World Champions as well as the average windsurfing participant with better options for their needs. Many say he once again "re-invented" the sport of windsurfing with his tandem, short and wide as well as long and narrow board designs.^[3]

Early in the Stand Up Paddle board evolution, Drake was highly influential through his contributions to Starboard with a number of highly successful shapes in both recreational and racing SUP design. Jim Drake lived a richly rewarding and influential life. His contributions to aerospace, windsurfing, SUP and winging will have a deep and lasting impact.

Drake died peacefully on June 19, 2012, from complications of lung disease, at his home in Pfafftown, North Carolina.^[9]

• Early video taken by Jim Drake's wife at Marina del Ray of Drake teaching himself how to windsurf