Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Big Idea
The Outside Innovators

	Home surf: O'Neil in Santa Cruz

Jack O'Neil
Taking the Cold Out of Wet
Back in the 1940s, surfers tried everything to stave off hypothermia in San Francisco's 50-degree water: stuffing their little bun-hugger bathing suits with foam insulation, smearing themselves with petroleum jelly, flopping around in rubber frogman suits. One guy even sprayed a Navy jumpsuit with Thompson's Water Sealant. "I remember him sitting off by himself in his own little oil slick," recalls entrepreneur Jack O'Neill, the man who eventually offered a shivering tribe of surfers—and the world—the first fully functional wetsuit.

Using his own handyman skills and some college physics, O'Neill, then an itinerant surfer from SoCal, deduced that thermal salvation lay in unicellular foam, with its air spaces that trap heat from the body. He settled on a synthetic-rubber pipe insulator called neoprene and went to work in his garage, cutting and gluing sheets of the stuff to make the first short johns, with Bermuda-length legs and vest tops. He'd begun experimenting with board making, and in 1952 he opened the world's first "surf shop"—a phrase he coined and then trademarked.

Alas, wetsuits did not immediately take the mucho-macho surfing world by storm. "It was slow and steady for a while," O'Neill says with a chuckle. "The Southern Cal guys used to drive up and say, 'Well, maybe you clowns need 'em here, but we're too cool.'" But for every blue-lipped, barrel-chested son of an abalone diver who scorned the rubber, a legion of eager shiverphobes awaited.

O'Neill's company was soon swept up in the leisure revolution of the 1960s. Frigid waters became the year-round playgrounds for skinny-legged, towheaded grommets, as well as kayakers, windsurfers, wakeboarders, waterskiers, and millions of recreational divers, whose collective will-to-chill now accounts for $100 million in annual wetsuit sales in the United States alone. In pursuit of the perfect skin, the O'Neill Company, which holds a commanding 50 percent market share in wetsuits, is experimenting with computer-aided laser-scanning for unique custom fitting, and a new hollow nylon thread for extra-toasty insulation.

O'Neill, 79, semiretired but still at it, can be found paddling a longboard out to his local Santa Cruz breaks. Does he regret his role in opening the oceans to every Shane, Seth, and Cory? "Nah," he says. "It just means more friends to go surfing with." —Bucky McMahon

Wheel hoss: Kozo Shimano at the company's California HQ

The Shimanos
Perfecting the Art of Parts
At the risk of sounding like a geezer who hoofed five snowy miles to school, I'd wager that two-thirds of you whippersnappers have never friction-shifted the gears on a bicycle. Half of you don't even know what I mean. You have a Japanese company called Shimano to thank for that, and thank it you should: For idiotproof shifting, for the whole notion of mountain-bike components, and for click-in mountain-bike pedals, road-bike brake levers that also shift gears, and a host of esoteric advances in bicycle metallurgy and whiz-bang minutiae that have changed the way we ride.

Understanding the Shimano saga requires crawling around in a big family tree, but here's the short version: In 1921, family patriarch Shozaburo Shimano entered the bike biz by developing a ratcheting freewheel for the Japanese market. His son Shozo took over in 1958, and the company's pleasantly functional components started showing up stateside on Huffys, Schwinns, and Murrays. In 1973, though it seemed laughably quixotic for Shimano to enter the high-end racing-bike market (taking on Campagnolo, the much-worshiped Italian company), its Dura-Ace group, a superb cluster of components, hit the stores and gradually overcame the "made-in-Japan-equals-junk" mentality.

Throughout that decade, Shozo's brother Yoshizo, dispatched to America, was monitoring trends between our shores. In the late seventies he noticed that fat-tired frolickers in the hills north of San Francisco were grafting road-bike components onto cruisers, and that the parts broke down under off-road duress. He proposed a line of tougher components in 1980. "The phenomenon had been strong for several years," says mountain-bike pioneer Gary Fisher, "but Shimano was the only company that really paid attention." Shimano introduced its Deore XT mountain-bike group in 1982, which led to what Fisher calls "a beautifully worked-out system of components."

Then came a series of innovations spearheaded by a third brother, the late Keizo Shimano—among them SIS, the Shimano Index System, in 1984, and dual-control brake levers in 1990. Both debuted in the pricey Dura-Ace line. But their subsequent ubiquity represents Shimano's most impressive trait: trickle-down technology. Within a couple of years, even entry-level riders were blithely click-shifting. And as road-racing bikes progressed from ten speeds to 12 to 18 (and mountain bikes from 15 to 27), everyone soon got to share in the bounty of gear ratios.

Today Yoshizo runs the show in Japan, while 39-year-old Kozo Shimano (pictured) serves as president of Shimano American. Lately they've introduced pneumatic shifting for downhill mountain-bike racers, plus components for "comfort bikes," which perform tricks like automatic shifting. On the drawing boards: high-performance components with tiny CPUs controlling suspension and shifting. Kozo calls it "intuitive riding—so you don't have to think as much."

The $1.5 billion Shimano empire has critics, who claim it rules the components market the way another well-known, little-loved behemoth rules computer software, that its "total integration" approach—parts made to work exclusively with other Shimano parts—often bigfoots the little guys' innovations. Fans counter that Shimano's size and R&D clout move the whole bike industry forward. Count me among the latter. I'd rather ride than tinker, and the last time I even adjusted my Shimano mountain-bike derailleurs was two years ago. —Robert Earle Howells

Mark Thatcher
River Walker
Frustration is Mark Thatcher's muse. In 1982, stuck lugging toilets and scrubbing dishes for a whitewater outfitter in Flagstaff, Arizona, he fantasized about creating a river shoe that wouldn't get waterlogged or pebble-infested—and that would stay on his feet better than flip-flops. A former geophysicist, Thatcher, now 47, hit the workshop and secured nylon ankle and toe straps to a sturdy rubber sole, naming his shoe and company Teva, the Hebrew word for "nature." Teva took in $81 million last year. Imitations and knockoffs, available everywhere from Wal-Mart to Niketown, are common, but at least 15 million bona fide Tevas stride the earth in pursuit of Thatcher's mantra: "You go, you do, you be."

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