Who is the founder of skateboarding

Some of the wheels were metal and others were similar to the wheels on opens in a new window pedal cars. In the s and s, opens in a new window crate scooters made popular sidewalk vehicles. Most crate scooters were handmade. They were relatively inexpensive and simple for kids to construct by using a milk crate or wooden fruit box and metal roller skate wheels attached to a wooden 2 x 4.

Eventually kids started removing the boxes and handlebars and just started riding the board with wheels, reminiscent of the famous skateboard scene in the film opens in a new window Back to the Future.

By , the first mass produced skateboards emerged from the factory of Roller Derby Skateboards in La Miranda, California, and were sold in roller derby rinks throughout the United States and eventually through mail-order companies opens IMAGE file such as Sears. By the early s, skateboarding started luring participants from the surfer scene. In a southern California surf shop, Val Surf, began making its own brand of skateboards and struck a deal with Chicago Roller Skate Company for the wheels.

More on the evolution of skate culture in the s can be traced through the skateboard that Tony Hawk donated to the National Museum of American History.

In August , the Anchorage Museum and Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center hosted a program to provide Anchorage-area teenagers with an opportunity for creative, athletic expression through skateboarding. Innoskate research and public festivals spark the imaginations of young people through skate demonstrations, discussions with skaters and inventors, films, hands-on invention educational activities, art collaborations, and the acquisition of skate objects for the national collections of the Smithsonian.

The earliest models had handlebars attached, like modern scooters but eventually the boxes were replaced by wooden planks and the handlebars scrapped for an experience more akin to surfing. Before commercial skateboards began appearing in , the only way you could skate was by making your own board.

These home-made skateboards would seed the DIY mentality ingrained in skateboarding today. In a raw and beautiful way, skateboarding began not from an industry but from the intense desire for one's own self expression. To understand this simple yet profound truth is our first glimpse into "what is skateboarding" and ultimately, what it means to be a skateboarder. It would be even more difficult to imagine how much skateboarding would change since its conception. By , Makaha formed the first professional skateboarding team competing in the first ever skateboard competition later that year in Hermosa, California.

While the remnants of early s downhill skateboarding competitions take the form of death defying San Francisco hill-bombs, the freestyle competition formats and most tricks performed at the Hermosa competition are now but a distant memory to contemporary skateboarding.

Even with its novelty in American sports, skateboarding popularity ultimately crashed by People were more likely to go to a roller derby competition than a skateboarding competition. Skateboarding in the media began advertising skating as a dangerous activity, while the clay wheels and handstands grew as tiresome as watching a hula-hooper for hours on end.

To understand how skateboarding nearly perished is to understand ultimately why its earliest forms are no longer seen. But more importantly, comparing where skateboarding is today from these times, we see one of the greatest transformations of a sport and performance art in the 20th to 21st century.

Read Story. Reinventing the Skateboard Wheel. Not figuratively—but literally. The skateboard wheel was reinvented by Frank Nasworthy, who introduced the urethane wheel to skateboarding in The new wheel, replacing the clunky clay wheels of the and s, gripped the asphalt and pool walls like cleats to the grass. With the invention of the kick-tail alongside it, a raised back end of the skateboard , a new definition of a professional skateboard was born.

Skateboarding magazines sold at the local surf shop now had a horse to promote as a new craze of skateboarding began to expand world wide.

Just three years after the new skateboard wheel, the first skatepark sprouted in Florida in