Jim Drake (engineer)
There he worked in the advanced design group as a principal engineer on a number of top secret record breaking experimental aircraft.
Jim Drake first began conceptualizing the idea of windsurfing in 1962 along with close friend, sailor and fellow aeronautical engineer Fred Payne.
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 family friend named Hoyle Schweitzer.
As a struggling computer program salesman, Schweitzer eagerly sought to partner with Drake in order to capitalize on the engineer's brilliant sailboard concept.
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 probably 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.
On May 21, 1967, Drake, along with his wife Wendy and daughter Stephanie, went to Marina del Rey, California's Jamaica Bay to make history with the world's first modern sailboard session.
Returning to Marina del Rey one week later, this time with the skeg and uphaul, Drake succeeded at sailing the board the way he designed it to be used.
With his confidence buoyed from two days of practice, Drake took his sailboard onto the open ocean at Will Rogers State Beach in Santa Monica, California.
Soon after their "gentleman's handshake deal" 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.
Schweitzer 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.
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 Windsurfing International for the sum of $36,000,[3] and in doing so kindly allowed Schweitzer to create a profitable business opportunity for himself.
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 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.
