Undersea divers would still be shivering and facing a high risk for hypothermia if it weren't for Hugh Bradner, inventor of the first wetsuit. Bradner, a renowned physicist and professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography died May 5, 2008, in San Diego after a prolonged illness. He was 92.
Bradner had a lifelong passion for the ocean. He enjoyed diving and sailing and was one of the first Americans to make a deep-water SCUBA dive. In 1951, while working at University of California, Berkeley, he decided to spend some weekend time improving diving equipment for Navy frogmen, which began his pioneering research on the wetsuit. Bradner focused on the design of a wetsuit for military underwater swimmers and developed a foam wetsuit using a unicellular material known as neoprene...[Live Science] and [Scuba America Historical Center]
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