Few people watching the 2022 Winter Olympics will be aware of the significance of the name, but Jake Burton effectively invented the snowboard, or indeed the sport of snowboarding. Like every other groundbreaking development, most or all of the parts were already there to the extent that what remained was ~ as it had been with every other form of locomotion ~ for someone to come along and demonstrate the possible.
What the HBO documentary Dear Rider makes clear, however, is that the earliest years were in the words of the inventor, decidedly lonely as he investigated various forms of manufacture and shipped in dozens a product that would come to be sold in millions. In truth, the sport never really took off until such time as he collaborated with a small ski manufacturer in Austria called Kiel, who could apply conventional fabrication when every other ski manufacturer had dismissed the notion of the sport going mainstream.
There are parallels now in the polarisation between moneyed air-taxi developers and the comparatively impecunious of personal air vehicles. But what developments like the snowboard demonstrate is that the public at large rarely see which of them might succeed, except in retrospect. Donating prototypes to museums has therefore closed one phase of development, yet at the same time calls for the next.
For what is life after all, without a project?
