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BRIEF HISTORY OF FIN DEVELOPMENT
One of the first types of fin design dates back to Borelli’s “claw-like” fin in 1690. Some of the earliest fins were actually pieces of wood strapped to the feet. Sheet metal was brought into the picture in the very early 1900s and people were still filing patents for fins made from sheet metal as late as 1949. It wasn’t until the mid-1900s that rubber and rubber-type products were used in the production of fins filling the need for flexibility. |
| FIN TESTING EVOLUTION
Fin testing developed from a method using tethered swimming. This consisted of swimmers tethered to a rotating drum that released lengths of rope at a given velocity. In 1965 Christianson, Weltman, and Egstrom, professor of Kinesiology at UCLA, were credited with one of the first true fin studies. In this study they took the subjects’ heart and respiration rates. They used underwater ergometers that evolved from these earlier tethered line swimming systems. In 1979 Nawrocki was credited with conducting dive fin research using the largest group of divers (five females and nine males) in a circular current generating diving tank. |
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Since then, there have been machines developed to test fins’ performance. Scuba Labs, beginning under the direction of the late Jon Hardy, began conducting fin studies by using videotaping of the divers. They began to observe how fins reacted during the kick cycle and to test for speed using underwater speedometers. |
| During the videotaping, they noticed that certain fins were rotating on the foot and slicing the water, keeping the individual from getting the full potential from the fin blade and still making them feel every kick. They also found that certain types of vented channeling systems stabilized the fin blade during the kick cycle. The divers were tested swimming parallel to the shoreline so that they were not affected by tide movement. |
In the early days of fin design, it was believed that blade surface area transferred into more power. However, current fin studies show that when pushing some of these bigger, longer fins that the body will start to feel fatigued and/or rock during the kick cycle which creates drag and overworks the muscles.
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