How Does A Wetsuit Work?
How Does A Wetsuit Work Exactly? Fitting Is Key
Have you ever wondered, how does a wetsuit work? In a nutshell a wetsuit keeps you warm by trapping a very thin layer of water against your body. To work properly, a wetsuit should fit very tightly against the body. In addition, the thicker it is, the warmer it will keep you. The trapped water is rapidly warmed up by your body heat, and becomes an insulating layer. Neoprene is the material used in making wetsuits and it’s what acts as the insulator. Neoprene contains thousands of tiny air bubbles that act as insulators, trapping heat inside the wetsuit rather than releasing it into the water.
Wetsuits come in a wide variety of designs. Some are full body suits, sometimes with a hood. Others consist of shorts and short sleeves. Many wetsuits have thicker layers around the torso to keep core temperature up, while the extremities are covered in thinner layers to allow greater ease of movement.
The thicker the wetsuit neoprene (e.g. 5/4mm or 6/5/4mm, etc.), the warmer you will be. You can expect a small amount of water to get into the suit, however, you don’t want lots of water to get into the suit. This is why it’s important that your wetsuit fits like a second skin, not loose or baggy. If your wetsuit doesn’t fit correctly, you’re going to get flushed with water and you clearly won’t be warm or comfortable.
Wetsuits with fleece linings reduce the amount of water against your skin. With a fleece lining, your body doesn’t have to work as hard to stay warm. The less water against your skin, the warmer you will stay and the longer you can surf, kitesurf etc. You can find fleece linings in most wetsuits on the market now. In low to mid price ranges, the fleece is usually found on the chest and/or back panels. Higher end wetsuits (mostly cold water wetsuits) typically have a fleece lining throughout most, if not all, of the wetsuit.
Who Invented The Wetsuit?
Most histories of surfing and diving credit this superb invention to Hugh Bradner (1915–2008), a University of California at Berkeley physicist who developed the idea in 1951 while working for the US Navy. Dr Bradner was responsible for the modern-style neoprene wetsuit—but he didn’t invent neoprene (that was one of the synthetic fabrics developed by Wallace Carothers, pioneer of nylon) or come up with the idea of an insulated suit you can wear to save your life in the water.
Four years before Bradner’s invention, on January 31, 1947, Harvey L. Williams of Hadlyme, Connecticut filed a patent application (US Patent 2,582,811: Garment) for a “one-piece, step-in and slip-over-the-head” diving suit with elaborate mechanisms to keep the water out and multiple layers to keep the diver warm—and, as Williams’ patent notes, there were earlier suits too.
The earliest example of a waterproof diving suit I’ve found is US Patent 1,706,097: Life-saving suit, filed on February 23, 1927 by Thomas Edgar Aud of Herndon, Virginia. Much more like a modern dry-suit than a neoprene wetsuit, it was “made of some suitable strong and durable water-proof material, such as soft vulcanized rubber or any suitable combination of rubber and fabric” and designed as “a suit for life saving, swimming, and analogous purposes, which may be applied with great ease and speed and which will effectively seal the entrance opening against the intrusion of water.” It’s important to remember that inventors like Aud didn’t have access to neoprene, which was only discovered in 1930.
Where Hugh Bradner deserves real credit is for figuring out that the cellular structure of neoprene makes it a superb wetsuit material. Like many great inventors, he chose not to patent his idea, wrongly believing that only a few hundred people might wear wetsuits. How wrong he was! Popularised by people like Jack O’Neill, who started his famous wetsuit-making company in 1952, Bradner’s invention made it possible for millions of people to take up cold-water sports such as year-round surfing, swimming, and diving. Many people got rich off the back of this great idea, but Hugh Bradner’s reward is ultimately greater: his name will always be honored as the inventor of the wetsuit.
