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Ralph Samuelson Water Skiing

August 11, 2013 by · Comments Off on Ralph Samuelson Water Skiing 

Ralph Samuelson Water Skiing, Ralph Wilford Samuelson (July 3, 1904-August 28, 1977) was the inventor of water skiing, which he first performed in the summer of 1922 in Lake City, Minnesota, just before his 19th birthday. Samuelson was already skilled at aquaplaning-standing on a board while being pulled by a powerboat-but he hoped to create something like snow skiing on the water. Lake Pepin, a wide portion of the Mississippi River between Minnesota and Wisconsin, was the venue for his experiments.

Samuelson did not patent his invention, nor was his work sufficiently publicized at the time to prevent U.S. Patent 1,559,390 for water skis from being subsequently issued, on October 27, 1925, to prolific inventor Fred Waller of Huntington, New York. Waller marketed his product as “Dolphin Akwa-Skees.” Waller later invented the Cinerama wide-screen motion picture system, and in 1952’s “This is Cinerama,” the first feature film released in the panoramic format, water skiing at Cypress Gardens, Florida, was a prominently-featured subject. Famed journalist Lowell Thomas was an early investor in Cinerama, and in his introduction to the book “Water Skiing” (1958, Prentice-Hall), by Dick Pope, Sr., creator of Cypress Gardens, Thomas described the connection between Waller and water skiing’s prominence as a subject in the motion picture. In several instances in the book, Pope reiterates-erroneously, we now know-that Waller was the first to invent water skis.

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