Hugh Bradner, Inventor of Wetsuit, Dies
Hugh Bradner, a UC physicist whose love of the ocean and curiosity about everything in it led him to revolutionize diving by inventing the neoprene wetsuit, has died at his home in San Diego at the age of 92.
"All his life, he had been interested in diving," Cornet, who is a faculty member of UC Berkeley's school of social welfare, said the other day. In the early part of World War II, Dr. Bradner had talked to Navy frogmen about the problems of being immersed in cold water for long periods of time. "He was looking at the notion that you didn't have to stay dry to stay warm," Cornet said.
In 1951, experimenting with neoprene, a synthetic rubber-like substance, he found that it "would trap the water between the body and the neoprene, and the water would heat up to body temperature and keep you warm. He developed this in the basement of our house on Scenic Avenue in Berkeley," Cornet said.
The wetsuit was officially invented in 1952. Dr. Bradner and a few of his colleagues created a small company to market what was called the "EDCO Sub-Mariner" suit, $45 for the short version and $75 for the "full suit," as an ad in a 1954 edition of Skin Diver magazine put it, according to the archives of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla (San Diego County)...
