Thomas Edward Blake (March 8, 1902 – May 5, 1994) was an American athlete, inventor, and writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential surfers in history, and a key figure in transforming surfing from a regional Hawaiian specialty to a nationally popular sport. Assessing Blake's significance, sociologist Kristin Lawler wrote that
Tom Blake is a legendary figure; he's considered the founder of California surf culture. He personally innovated most of what's associated with surfers to this day: he was the first to experiment with making better surfboards, revolutionizing board design in the process with lightweight materials and the fin; he was the first to build a waterproof camera housing and inaugurated the tradition of surfers documenting themselves and their friends; and he was the first among countless surfers to come to write a book on the history and pleasures of surfing. In addition, his personal style became the prototypical beachcomber look, still in effect today.Lawler 2010
Early life
Blake was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eleven months old, and his father left him in the care of relatives in Hibbing, Minnesota; Ashland, Wisconsin; and finally Washburn, Wisconsin on the Lake Superior shore, where he spent most of his childhood. He attended Washburn's St. Louis Catholic School, where, he later recalled, an educational film provided his first awareness of surfing.Lynch 2001
Blake attended Washburn High School, but the 1918 influenza pandemic closed the school during his senior year, and local records are inconclusive as to whether he graduated.Mackreth, Bob, "Tom Blake- Pioneer Surfer From Washburn, Wisconsin," Ashland (WI) Daily Press, 2017 Homecoming Edition, July 2017 After leaving school, Blake embarked upon the nomadic lifestyle that would characterize most of his life, working a succession of jobs in Detroit, New York, and Miami. One episode from that period that presaged his later career occurred in Detroit in 1920, when he encountered the legendary Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku at a movie theater. He shook hands with Kahanamoku and later reported, "I felt that somehow he had included an invitation to me to come over to his own Hawaiian islands... As I look back now I realize how much I was influenced by this first contact with the man who has become the best-known personality in the history of surfing."Lynch 2001 Blake and Kahanamoku later became good friends.Lynch 2001
By 1921, Blake was living in Santa Monica, California, where he supported himself as a lifeguard and occasionally worked as a stuntman in films. Over the years he served as stunt double for stars such as Ramon Navarro and Clark Gable.Lynch 2001 During this period he became active in competitive swimming. In 1922, he traveled to Pennsylvania to enter a ten-mile race on the Delaware River and triumphed over a field of the East Coast's top swimmers, breaking the existing record in the process.Lueras 1984
Surfing and surfboards
Blake first attempted to ride a wave in 1921 on an old board he found while working at the Santa Monica Swim Club. According to his account, he wiped out badly and waited several years to try again. By 1924, however, his interest returned, to the point that he traveled to Hawaii to learn more about the sport. Upon arrival, Blake attempted to seek out Kahanamoku, only to find that he was not on the island. However, he quickly became friends with Duke's five brothers, all skilled surfers in their own right, and became immersed in the study of surfing and Hawaiian culture. For the next thirty years, Blake would divide his time between Hawaii and the mainland, shuttling back and forth every year except when interrupted by the Second World War.Lynch 2001
Over the next decade, Blake rose to eminence in a sport that had until then been largely the province of native Hawaiians. Back on the mainland, in September 1927, Blake and his friend Sam Reid became the first to surf Malibu Point, and in 1928, he organized, and then won, the first Pacific Coast Surfriding Championship. In 1930, he entered the Hawaiian Surfboard Paddling Championships using a lightweight board of his own design. He overwhelmed all opposition, setting eight new records in the course of the match. However, his victory sparked some resentment among his native Hawaiian friends, feeling that the new board had given him unfair advantage, and Blake stopped entering races after this. Nonetheless, he continued to compile an extraordinary record of athletic feats. In 1932, Blake, with two friends, made the first successful attempt at paddling the 26 miles from mainland California to Catalina Island. Then on August 1, 1936, he set a milestone that still stands: entering the waves at Kalehuawehe near Waikiki, he made a run estimated at 4,500 feet, the longest recorded surf ride in history.Lynch 2001
While in Hawaii, Blake became fascinated by the traditional surfboards preserved at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu. These included a variety of styles, from the shorter alaia to the heavy, 16-foot long olo boards traditionally reserved for royalty including one owned by High Chief Abner Pākī. On his 1926 visit, he was able to secure permission from the curators to study the boards' construction and restore several of them. He then began his own experiments in improving surfboard design. Up until that point, most modern surfers, even Duke Kahanamoku, used the shorter alaia boards due to the immense weight— up to 200 pounds— of the solid olo boards. Blake initially sought to build lighter olos by drilling hundreds of holes in the board, then covering the openings with a thin outer layer. This was the style of board he used to win the 1928 Pacific Coast Championship. Then after three years of experimenting, in 1929, Blake constructed a hollow board with transverse bracing. In 1932, he received a patent for his hollow surfboard design "and opened the sport up to hundreds of people who weren't able to muscle the heavy plank boards down the beach and into the water.""Blake, Tom" Encyclopedia of Surfing
One historian remarked: "Blake changed the whole scene by working on these boards. He single-handedly, without really giving it much thought, changed surfing in a massive, huge way. It was because of this we are doing what we do on boards."Lynch 2001
Blake's internally braced hollow wooden surfboards were eventually superseded by laminated boards with an interior layer of balsa, then by foam-and-fiberglass designs, but another of his innovations remains a fixture of modern surf- and paddleboards, the "skeg" or fin. Traditional surfboards were flat-bottomed, but in 1935, Blake experimented by tearing the keel off an old speedboat and attaching it to the bottom of a surfboard. Blake later remembered, "I finally put the fin on the board and went out in the surf, paddled out. In paddling out, the board had an entirely different feeling with the skeg on it, it wasn't entirely a likeable feeling... But I got a pretty good wave and right away found the remarkable control you had over the board with the skeg on it. It didn't spin out, it steered easy, because the tail held steady when you put the pressure on the front. You could turn it any way you wanted it. I knew right from that moment it was a success. I consider it as my good solid contribution to the sport. It gives me a lot of pleasure when I see the kids drive by in their cars with a fin on their board."Lynch 2001
(According to at least one source, the San Diego surfer Woody Brown independently came up with the idea for the skeg shortly afterward, but Brown himself gave Blake precedence: “(I made my first surfboard keel) about '36 or '37, somewhere in there; about the same time. But, I didn't know anything about (Blake) and his experiments with adding fins to surfboards. See, we were all separated out. I was in San Diego and he was in L.A., way up there."Gault-Williams 2003)
Other inventions
Blake's inventions and innovations were not limited to surfboards. He was particularly interested in improving lifesaving equipment, and he adapted his hollow surfboard designs into paddleboards for rescue use. He built the first aluminum “torpedo” rescue buoy, basing it on the steel buoy created by California lifeguard Harry Walters in 1919. His contributions to the field of water rescue were recognized by the National Surf Life Saving Association, which presented Blake with an achievement award noting, “the thousands of lives saved because of his inventive contributions in the interest of fellow human beings."Lynch 2001
In the early 1930s, Blake experimented with the idea of attaching a sail to one of his surfboards. As one author wrote, "The modern sport of windsurfing can be traced back to the 1930s when a surfer named Tom Blake, whose arms became particularly tired one afternoon from paddling his board out to catch the waves, thought he should be able to use the wind for propulsion.” For his first experiment, he simply used an umbrella, but subsequently refined the design, adding a proper sail and a foot-controlled rudder. By 1935, he had a version usable in competitions, and in 1940, the L.A. Ladder Company produced them for sale.Windsurfing's History https://www.angelfire.com/extreme3/windsurfing/history.html retrieved Feb. 13, 2015
Blake also contributed substantially to the field of underwater photography. In 1929, he purchased a Graflex camera from Duke Kahanamoku, then built a waterproof housing that allowed him to take photographs underwater or while surfing. Although it is often stated that Blake "built the first underwater camera,"e.g. Lawler, (2010) p. 153 in fact, there had been sporadic attempts to do so since as early as 1856.The World's First Underwater Photographer: Louis Boutan retrieved Feb. 17, 2015 Nonetheless, Blake's innovations were significant, and a photo spread of his work that was published in 1935 in National Geographic magazine helped call attention to the potential his device offered.Lynch 2001
An indication of the significance of Blake's work came in 2025, when he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame for his numerous contributions to the sports of surfing, paddle boarding, and windsurfing, and to his achievements in the field of water rescue.
Writing
In addition to the 1935 National Geographic photo-essay mentioned above ("Waves and Thrills at Waikiki"), in the same year Blake also published what is said to be the first book on surfing, Hawaiian Surfboard, a comprehensive study which treated the history and tradition of the sport, board construction, and surfing technique. He also wrote articles on surfboard construction for Popular Mechanics (1936) and Popular Science (1939). In 1961 he published his second book, Hawaiian Surf Riding.Lynch 2001
Later in life, Blake devoted a great deal of his thought to matters of philosophy, and in 1969, published an essay, "Voice of the Wave," which approached surfing from a metaphysical perspective. He then revised and greatly expanded this essay into a book, Voice of the Atom, completed in 1982. Offering acknowledgments to "Descartes, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Socrates, Aristotle, Gautama, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Zeno, Mohammed;... Swedenborg, Spinoza, Emerson, Thoreau, Bacon, Schweitzer, Galileo, Copernicus, Albert Einstein" and many others, the book explored topics as diverse as immortality, vegetarianism, and the nature of God. Much of the work is presented as a conversation with a young man named "Anthony," a mysterious hitch-hiker.Blake 1982 It is clear that the book is the culmination of a long process of contemplation: some eighteen years before its publication, he carved its essential message, “NATURE=GOD”, into a secluded rock face on the Lake Superior shoreline near his hometown of Washburn.Lynch 2001
Later life