Howard Head

Howard Head (July 31, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – March 3, 1991) was an aeronautical engineer who is credited with the invention of the first commercially successful aluminum laminate skis and the oversized tennis racket. Head founded the ski (and later tennis racquet) making firm Head in 1950. Later he became chairman of Prince Manufacturing Inc. The U.S. patents for the laminate skis and oversized tennis racket are in the name of Howard Head.

In 1947, Howard Head was an aircraft engineer for Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, and went skiing for the first time. Head was frustrated with the quality of the clumsy and heavy wooden skis, which made skiing very difficult for beginners. He decided to develop a lighter and more efficient ski that could make skiing much easier for everyone. He left his job and devoted all his time and energy to developing the skis and supported himself with earnings from poker.

The skis developed by Head were based on the structural principles that he had learned during his experience as an aircraft engineer. In a warehouse he rented from Albert Gunther Inc in an alley off of Biddle Street in downtown Baltimore, he used a technique known as metal sandwich construction. The first skis he made consisted of two light layers of aluminum bonded to sidewalls of thin plywood, with a center filling of honeycomb plastic. Although these skis were very light, they all broke quite quickly during trials. Head did not give up on his idea, and was encouraged by several professional skiers, including 1939 World Champion Emile Allais and ski instructors Clif Taylor and Neil Robinson, who assured Head that he would love to use his skis if they did not break. Throughout that winter Head would make a ski pair and send it out to Robinson, who returned it to Head after it broke. Head figured out the flaws of his design, came up with modifications, sent the new ski pair to Robinson, and the process repeated. By the end of the winter of 1947, Head came up with skis that were as strong as wooden skis but were half the weight.

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