Read Wet Suit Pursuit: Hugh Bradner's Development of the First Wet Suit

Neither time nor tide has eroded the debate around who invented the wetsuit — since the mid-1950s, when the neoprene outfits became common among divers, argument has raged over who was the originator. However, Hugh Bradner, a physicist who worked on atomic bomb testing in the Pacific, has the strongest claim to the title.

Hugh Bradner was born in 1915, in Tonopah, Nevada. His father, Donal Byal Bradner, was briefly director of the Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and in 1918 taught his son to swim by throwing him into the Gunpowder River. Bradner graduated from Miami University in 1936 and received a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1941.

From 1941 to 1943, Bradner worked for the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington in the area of naval mines. In 1943, he went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to work on the Manhattan Project, the joint undertaking by the US, Britain and Canada to develop the first atomic bomb. There, under the directorship of J. Robert Oppenheimer, he did research on the high explosives necessary for the implosion of the bomb and also did work on the bomb’s electronic detonators.

His work involved close co-operation with eminent mathematicians and scientists such as John Von Neumann, George Kistiakowsky and Luis Alvarez. Bradner was an observer at the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, the first test of nuclear weapons technology, which came just weeks before the Nagasaki bombing. “I was raised to love my country,” Bradner later said. “I had no compunction about bombing an enemy.”

At Los Alamos, Bradner met Marjorie Hall, who was to be his wife for 65 years. They married at the laboratory site in 1943, where security was so tight that their parents were not allowed to attend the ceremony, although it was attended by Oppenheimer.

In 1946, Bradner took a post in high-energy physics under Alvarez at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until 1961. He worked on the Pacific atomic bomb test of 1951 at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific.

While there he did a number of dives that later prompted him to spend some “weekend time” improving diving equipment for Navy frogmen. In spring 1951 Bradner sent ideas for a diving suit to a Berkeley physicist involved in a navy panel on underwater swimmers. Bradner wrote that diving suits did not need to be watertight if air trapped in the material of the suit could insulate heat. The evident advantage of this was that the existing “dry suits”, waterproof garments of heavy rubberised cloth under which divers wore thick, usually wool, underwear, would lose their thermal insulation if so much as a little water displaced the air in the underwear.

Bradner was invited to a conference on swimming in Coronado, California, in December 1951, where he focused on the design of a wetsuit for Navy swimmers. He tested several designs and materials at the Scripps Institutions of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and, on the advice of Scripps engineer Willard Bascom, decided to work on a suit made of unicellular neoprene. He applied for a patent for this, but his application was eventually turned down because the design was deemed to be too similar to flight suits.

In 1952 Bradner formed a company with other engineers at Scripps — the somewhat unimaginative Engineering Development Company (EDCO) — to develop the suit. The company sent prototypes to the US Navy in the hope of supplying them with the suit. The tardy response was that while the suit had attractive new advantages, there were worries that neoprene might make the swimmer a better sonar target.

EDCO went on to make wetsuits for the civilian market, but the company failed to make anything like the impressions of the companies of Jack O’Neill — founder of the O’Neill company — and Bob and Bill Meistrell — of Body Glove — which started production at about the same time and continue to dominate the market. (Folk history frequently has it that these, variously, invented the wetsuit, but the paper trail refutes this.)

In 1961, Bradner became a research geophysicist at Scripps’s Institue of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He became a professor in 1964 and remained at the institution until 1980, while continuing to publish extensively in the fields of physics, seismology, geophysics and diving.

Hugh Bradner, physicist and inventor of the neoprene wetsuit, was born on November 5, 1915. He died on May 5, 2008, aged 92