Other than the great Hawaiian waterman Duke Kahanamoku, no other surfer did as much to help the sport grow and develop in the first half of the 20th century than Wisconsin-born Thomas Edward Blake, inventor of the hollow paddleboard and surfboard. Kahanamoku, of course, is universally acknowledged as “the father of modern surfing” and by an amazing coincidence the two men met in 1920 at a cinema in Detroit after a screening about the recently-held Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium, where Kahanamoku had earned two gold medals. Kahanamoku encouraged Blake to move to Los Angeles to pursue his own career as a competitive swimmer and that connection led Blake to come to Waikiki for the first time in 1924 where he developed a serious interest in wave riding and paddleboard racing. For the next several years Blake split his time between California and Hawaii. There, in 1926, Blake got the idea that boards would perform better if only they were not as heavy as the solid wooden “planks”— many of them 100 - 150 lbs—that were being surfed and raced at the time. He first tackled the problem by drilling hundreds of holes into a 15-foot, four-inch thick board, and sealing it with a thin sheet of wood veneer, reducing its weight by 30 percent. Back in California in 1928 Blake won the inaugural Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships on another version of the same concept. The ultimate solution came to Blake after he’d been shown around the Douglas aircraft factory where fellow surfer Gerard Vultee worked as a designer. Seeing how aircraft wings were made gave Blake the idea of hollow boards built around a ribbed, wood frame and covered with sheets of mahogany or marine-quality plywood, screwed, glued and clamped into place and waterproofed with varnish. In 1932 Blake was awarded U.S. Patent 1872230 for his “water sled” concept, and this board is a classic example of a square-railed paddleboard design.

Waikiki Surfing from Tom Blakes Time