In 1928, Don Ibsen, a graduate of Seattle's Roosevelt High School and an avid sportsman, co-invents waterskis in a series of experiments on Lake Washington. He is one of three inventors of the sport, who were unknown to each other. Ralph Samuelson invented waterskis in 1922, on Lake Pepin in Lake City, Minnesota, and Fred Waller thought he was inventing the sport on Long Island in 1924. Ibsen, a showman and entrepreneur, was a leading enthusiast and popularizer of the sport.
Inventing the skis was Ibsen's preoccupation during the summer of 1928. As Adam Woog writes in his Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats, Ibsen tried attaching himself to motorboats with a rope and standing on boards made of wooden boxes, which didn't work terribly well, then snow skis, which didn't work either. Finally he carved two slabs of cedar, eight inches wide and seven feet long. He bent, sanded, and shellacked them and spent the summer on various Seattle beaches bumming rides from people with motorboats.
For the next few years, while working as a hardware salesman, he made numbers of pairs for friends and in 1934 sold his first pair of waterskis for $19.95. He married in 1935, and he and his wife Dottie pooled resources from their day jobs to make skis in their basement.
He was a master marketer and an entertainer. He quit the hardware business and thereafter devoted himself to Ibsen Water Skis and related equipment and water-entertainment events. He was the first to use costuming in his act, and in 1954, Life magazine featured him waterskiing in a business suit, with a hat and briefcase, commuting to work.
