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.
Dr. Bradner died May 5 of the effects of pneumonia, according to his daughter, Bari Cornet. Dr. Bradner's wife, Marjorie, died April 10. They had met during World War II, when both were working at the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. Dr. Bradner was one of the first employees of the nascent atomic bomb experiment, and his wife was the secretary of Robert Oppenheimer, the project's mastermind.
Born in Tonopah, Nev., Dr. Bradner was raised in Findley, Ohio, and graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1936. He received his doctorate from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1941 and, along with several other bright young scientists, was recruited by Oppenheimer to come to New Mexico and work on the plan to develop the bomb. He did everything from laying out the design of the new town to working on the bomb's intricate triggering mechanism.
After the war, Dr. Bradner joined the faculty of UC Berkeley and taught physics. He also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on high-energy physics, and in his spare time he started noodling around with ideas on how to improve the lot of divers, who spent much of their time in a cold and clammy clime.
"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).
Cornet said, however, that her father never patented the invention and the wetsuit business venture foundered. The wetsuit was eventually adopted by divers and surfers all over the world. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times examined a half-century dispute about who was the real inventor of the wetsuit - the other two contenders for the title were two California-based firms that have made a fair amount of money from wetsuits.
"In our little world, these were the guys who had produced the first surfing wetsuits," Matt Warshaw, author of "The Encyclopedia of Surfing" and former editor of Surfer magazine, said of Body Glove International and O'Neill Inc. Nonetheless, Warshaw added, "Bradner was the father of the wetsuit." This was corroborated in a lengthy paper by Carolyn Rainey published in 1998 by Scripps.
By 1960, with his interest in oceanography well known in the scientific community, Dr. Bradner was recruited to UC San Diego, where he was on the faculty of Scripps and worked on several ocean-related projects, including experiments with scuba underwater breathing devices.
In 1961, he persuaded Scripps to let him make a seismic expedition across the Pacific aboard a 106-foot schooner, dropping seismographs to study seismic shaking of the ocean bottom, and also "as a way of detecting bomb tests in other parts of the world," Cornet said. In the Bradner family, it was called "Seismic Summer."
Dr. Bradner, who was known to his colleagues as Brad, retired in 1980 but continued his diverse interests, which included scuba diving, hiking, skiing and collecting shells.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. A memorial celebration of the lives of Dr. Bradner and his wife, Marjorie, will be held at 3 p.m. May 25 at the UC San Diego Faculty Club.
The family suggests donations to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 8602 La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037.
Online resource
For Carolyn Rainey's paper on Hugh Bradner's invention of the wetsuit, see links.sfgate.com/ZDIB.
