Hugh Bradner, 92, a physicist and oceanographer known for blending his research with a sense of fun and adventure and who was widely credited with inventing the wet suit worn by divers, surfers and cold-water swimmers, died of pneumonia May 5 at his home in San Diego.
Bradner contributed to the development of nuclear weapons and was part of a small group of scientists selected by J. Robert Oppenheimer to set up the Los Alamos atom-bomb laboratory in New Mexico.
He had a doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology and studied not only the constituents of the atom but also the floor of the ocean.
“He had more dimensions than just a scientist,” said his daughter, Bari Cornet. “He was truly a teacher.”
Competing claims as to who invented the wet suit have been entered on behalf of several people. A variety of published accounts make strong claims for Bradner, although his assertions on his own behalf appear modest and self-effacing.
It was Bradner, according to an account by veteran surfer Mike Wallace, who “first solved the riddle of keeping mankind both wet and warm in the ocean.” Others followed, he wrote, and commercialized the suit.
The neoprene wet suit, which Bradner developed in 1951 to aid U.S. Navy frogmen, permits its wearer to get wet. Water seeps beneath the wet suit and absorbs some heat from the wearer’s body. But the insulating properties of the suit, which stem from gas bubbles trapped in the neoprene, prevent that small amount of lost heat from escaping.
Bradner was born Nov. 5, 1915, in Tonopah, Nev. The family moved east, and he graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
He met his future wife, Marjorie Hall Bradner, when she was Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos.
