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Invention of the Skateboard
Origins The actual date as well as the inventor remains unknown and unproven due to the fact that the skateboard was a spontaneous idea made by multiple different people. All that is known for sure is that it all started in the sometime in the 1950s when some surfers from California decided to attach their rollerblade wheels to the bottom of wooden crates. These crates, of course, were switched out for boards instead. -
Mass Production
(No exact day) It was around this time that skateboarding had begun to take off and become increasingly popular. A company by the name of "Roller Derby" started making wooden boards with wheels attached. This began the real skating craze because of professionally made boards being readily available to anyone who wanted one, -
Better Quality
(No exact day) By this time, major surboard companies decided to pick up skateboards and make them at a better quality. These companies included big names at the time such as Makaha and Hobie. Also, it was these companies that changed the old metal wheels to a newer clay wheel. In this same year, the first skating competition was held. -
The Kicktail
(No exact date) It was around this time that skateboarding began to become less popular with parents fearing the safety of their kids. Boards stopped being sold and produced for a while. It then that Larry Stevenson createed the kicktail, the little angled end of the board allowing the rider to elevate the opposite end of the board while maintaining balance. This sparked new interest in the sport and more improvements. -
Urethane Wheels
(No exact day) Those clay wheels that were being used up until this point were hard to control and quite dangerous so a man by the name of Frank Nasworthy came up with a formula to make wheels out of urethane as an alternative to clay. These new wheels could grip the concrete much nicer and therefor made the sport as a whole safer. Urethane wheels are what's primarily used today.
