Who really invented the sails you just bought, and does it matter? Part 1

Part one of two. Part two looks at who owns whom today, what a small loft is actually selling, what is genuinely new, why quotations vary so widely, and how to run a sail tender rather than simply collect three numbers.

Why I know it’s still complicated to buy a sail

In 1999 and 2000 I was buying racing sails for two boats at once.

One was Barking Mad, the Swan 40. The other was 2XL, the Farr 40 I had bought with a partner. We raced them hard: RORC, the Farr 40 European circuit and the Commodore’s Cup. The sail inventories came from John Brinkers at UK McWilliam Sailmakers, working from Swanwick on the Hamble.

At the time, the name seemed perfectly straightforward.

UK did not mean United Kingdom. It came from Ulmer and Kolius, an American sailmaking organisation whose origins went back to Charles “Buster” Ulmer’s New York loft in 1946. McWilliam was Irish, from the family loft at Crosshaven. The man selling the sails to me was English. The construction system was Tape-Drive, introduced under the American UK Sailmakers organisation in late 1984.

Multi- national, one purchase, and a badge that told me almost none of it.

That was the line I used later. Strictly, the story is even less tidy. The immediate sail transaction gives three national connections, American, Irish and English, before the Finnish Swan and New Zealand Farr lineages of the two boats enter the picture. A truely international game, but I didn’t really even think about it then.

Even that is not the whole answer, as I have discovered while researching this article. The product was sold as Tape-Drive by UK Sailmakers, but some of the underlying structural-sail intellectual property belonged to Peter Conrad and Sobstad. UK Sailmakers became a licensee.

So who made my sails?

John Brinkers sold them. A local loft measured, finished and supported them. UK Sailmakers supplied the product and construction system. McWilliam supplied part of the identity and organisation. Sobstad sat behind some of the patents. Different people had designed the shape, specified the laminate and mapped the loads.

There is no single-word answer, and it was amazing how the finished product actually got to the boat on time and almost always worked well, well at least for the first few races and regattas. Let’s face it the didn’t really want them to last forever!

That is the central point of this article. In sailmaking, the inventor, patent holder, brand owner, designer, manufacturer, finishing loft, salesperson and service loft can all be different and its wise to know a bit about it before, as I did, just jump in!

What I thought I had bought

They were Tape-Drive sails. My understanding was roughly the same as that of most owners: a grid of very strong tapes stuck to a lighter sail underneath. They were lighter, held their shape better and cost more.

That description was not wrong. It was simply incomplete.

Tape-Drive separated two of the sail’s jobs. A broadseamed skin of laminate panels provided the aerodynamic surface and its designed three-dimensional shape. High-strength, low-stretch tapes radiating between the corners carried much of the primary structural load. The two systems worked together, but they could be engineered separately.

Tape Drive - 2000

Mylar was the polyester film used within the laminate skin. The early structural tapes were Kevlar, with carbon and other fibres used later.

The modern racing sail did not descend in a straight line from one brilliant invention. There were several revolutions running at the same time: better cloth, better control of shape, computerised design, better alignment of fibres, structural load paths, moulding and finally composite manufacture. Some ideas were invented inside sailmaking companies. Others were licensed, acquired or fought over in court.

To understand that, we need to go back to the point when the sailmaker first took control of the cloth.

Ted Hood and the material

Sailmaking was once an intensely local trade. Cotton or flax cloth was laid across a loft floor, cut into panels and shaped by broadseaming and edge curves. Much depended on an experienced eye. In Cowes, Ratsey and Lapthorn traces its history to 1790. The sailmaker, the yacht, the crew and the water on which they raced could all be within a few miles of one another.

In Cowes, Ratsey and Lapthorn traces its history to 1790

Woven polyester changed that world. It absorbed little water, was lighter and more consistent than cotton and retained its useful shape for longer. Dacron was DuPont’s trade name for polyester fibre.

Ted Hood understood the difference earlier than most.

Ted Hood racing in the America’s Cup in a 12metre, flying his own sails, and wearing a pretty neat outfit!

Commercial Dacron stretched more than he wanted. The weave was not sufficiently stable or consistent. So Hood, helped by his engineer father, began producing cloth to his own specification. Hood’s own history dates the establishment of Hood Sailmakers in Marblehead to 1955, although his sailmaking and cloth development had begun earlier in the decade.

The Hood loft was the first sailmaker to weave Dacron to his own specifications. They produced a denser, tighter and more predictable cloth when most sailmakers still bought what the textile trade offered them.

That gave him control of the material as well as the cut.

It also gave him an extraordinary run of results. Hood sails were used aboard every America’s Cup winner from 1958 to 1977. In 1974 Hood made the sails, stepped aboard Courageous as helmsman and beat Southern Cross four races to nil.

It is tempting to make the story even neater and award Hood the invention of the narrow-panel Dacron sail. I do not think the evidence allows us to do that.

Sails had always been assembled from panels because woven cloth came in finite widths. Several sailmakers used narrower panels, and photographs of the period show great variation in panel number and orientation. More seams could provide more places to introduce shape through broadseaming, while different cloth widths and cuts could help control stretch. But I have found no reliable contemporary evidence establishing that Hood alone invented narrow-panel construction, or that narrow cloth was chosen principally because it could be woven more tightly.

Hood’s documented breakthrough was the cloth. That is quite enough.

This matters to me because I remember the tightly woven, narrow-panel Hood sails of the period before Kevlar, Mylar and Tape-Drive took over the conversation. My Father was a Hood man and his C&C 39 ‘Thumper’ had Hood upwind sails and Banks downwind spinnaker including the new Starcut design for close reaching. I can remember him winning the Morgan Cup in the 1970s in her.

There is one other Hood memory worth separating. The famous blue Hood sails were not the Dacron sails of the 1970s. Hood introduced Spectra as a sail fibre in 1986, and it was those later sails that carried the familiar blue.

Courageous racing with Ted Hood helming in the America’s Cup - The high water mark for dacron sails

Two different laboratories

What came next was Lowell North. He approached the same problem from another direction.

Lowell had been an aerospace engineer. When he opened North Sails in San Diego in 1957, he did not pretend to possess the inherited judgement of a long-established sailmaker. He measured things instead.

Lowell North’s North Star and the reason he started thinking about sails - he was slow and blamed the sails - so he made his own

Around 1962, North and his production manager John Rumsey began testing cloth stretch and fatigue. One of the early methods was wonderfully basic: attach samples to a car aerial and drive until the cloth had been flogged by the airflow. They later built machinery to reproduce the test under controlled conditions.

Hood’s advantage was an exceptional sailmaker controlling his own cloth. North’s developing advantage was a system: test the material, retain the data, design from it and make the result repeatable.

Interesting the English were also involved, of course, Britain had its own kind of ‘laboratory’ on the Hamble.

Bruce Banks opened his Sarisbury loft in 1962. Ken Rose joined in 1964 and developed the Banks Starcut, a tri-radial spinnaker whose panels radiated towards the loads rather than simply crossing the sail in horizontal bands. Banks’ published company history also says that in 1969 it became the first sailmaker to install a computer for sail design, using a Stantec Zebra valve computer.

North’s better documented digital transformation began in 1977. Working from New Zealand, Tom Schnackenberg developed software that generated two-dimensional broadseam curves from a library of agreed sail shapes. The same design logic could then be used across several lofts.

The word that mattered was consensus. North’s designers debated which curves entered the library because the objective was not simply to design one fast sail. It was to reproduce that sail through an international network.

Schnackenberg also developed three-dimensional design software known as the Tin Sail programme. Initially the calculations were run by dialling into a mainframe. North’s first in-house computer arrived in San Diego in 1979, a Cromemco. A machine was subsequently carried to New Zealand as checked luggage so that the software could be ported and used there.

By 1987, North’s Flow and Membrain programs could apply pressure to a modelled surface and calculate the resulting loads and deformation. Design files increasingly drove plotters and cutting tables directly.

It is less important to decide whether Banks or North deserves one sentence containing the word “first”. Banks appears to have used a design computer earlier. North built a shared design and production system that could reproduce and improve sails across a global group. Those are different achievements.

And scale bought something real. Data from more boats fed back into the models. Material testing became systematic. A successful shape could be repeated. A local sailmaker’s eye still mattered, but it was now competing, and sometimes working, with an engineering organisation.

What is really interesting is that these men and their companies believed the market for racing sails was big enough to justify years of investment in computing, at a time when banking was one of the very few industries treating computers as core to the business. The impetus came, once again, from America, and it focused on the one trophy everyone in the yachting world wanted to win.

Freedom was not a clean handover

The temptation is to make 1977 the end of Hood and 1980 the beginning of North.

Hood’s winning Cup run did finish in 1977. Lowell North also skippered the fully North-equipped Enterprise in the American defender trials that year, but Enterprise was not selected. Ted Turner’s Courageous, carrying Hood sails, defended successfully.

Three years later Dennis Conner’s Freedom won with North sails. North’s run of winning Cup boats had begun.

America’s Cup 1980: Freedom wins with Dennis Conner

But Freedom was not a simple changing of the guard. The official America’s Cup history records that its sail programme began with Hood, switched to North and also used some Sobstad spinnakers. Three competing schools contributed to one winning campaign.

That makes Freedom much more useful historically. It was a crossover boat.

Woven polyester remained important. Mylar film and aramid fibres were arriving. Radial and load-oriented panel layouts were developing. Computer-generated shapes still had to be translated into panels and assembled on a floor. The new technology did not arrive on a Monday morning and sweep the old loft away by lunchtime.

The period from 1977 to 1983 was an overlap, not a handover.

And the overlap did not stop at the Cup. Burns Fallow, who has spent a career designing sails at North, has described how quickly the new materials came down the fleet:

“If you go back to the early 1980s, Kevlar or even laminate Mylars were brand new then and only on America’s Cup yachts. But by the end of the 1980s club racers were getting panelled Kevlar sails.”

Ten years is nothing in a trade that had spent a century working in cotton. It is also the answer to why any of this history matters to an owner. What is developed for a Cup boat reaches your boat inside a decade, and by the time it does, nobody can remember who invented it.

Newport: software at one end of the room, a batten at the other

I saw that overlap from inside Peter de Savary’s British Victory challenge.

I was the mast man in Newport during the early part of the 1982 to 83 campaign. We had Victory ‘82 designed by Ed Dubois, and the later Victory ’83 by Ian Howlett. The team reached the final of the challenger selection series before losing to Australia II.

The campaign had its own sail loft in Newport. That detail matters.

We were working with Kevlar and Mylar. Kevlar is an aramid fibre with much lower stretch than polyester at a comparable weight. Mylar is polyester film. They did different jobs and should not be bundled together as two generically “stronger” replacements for Dacron.

Victory’83

What I remember most clearly is not a particular fibre. It is the way the sails were made.

The shapes were being developed with new computer tools. The cloth or laminate was still cut into panels. Those panels were broadseamed, joined and finished by sailmakers working on their knees on the Newport loft floor.

Software at one end of the room. A pencil, batten and sewing machine at the other.

That was modern sailmaking in 1983.

Our sail designer was Angus Melrose. North’s archive later includes Melrose in a photograph of Lowell North’s design group. What it does not establish is whether he was employed by North, had left, or was working under some other arrangement during the Victory campaign. I therefore cannot describe him simply as “a North man” in Newport.

North team - Angus kneeling in centre right

What I can say is that he designed our sails, and that knowledge moved around the industry far more freely than the badges suggested.

The eventual Cup match underlined that point. Both Liberty and Australia II carried North sails. North later described Australia II’s upwind inventory as a development in warp-oriented, tri-radial construction, with polyester panels towards the luff and woven aramid towards the leech. The layout was developed by Tom Schnackenberg at North in New Zealand.

You know the boats - but the sails are just as interesting

An Australian boat, with a famous Australian keel, carrying a sail structure developed by a New Zealander inside an American sailmaking group.

The nationality printed beside the result told only part of the story.

1984: When the product and the patent separated

The next step was to make the fibres carry the loads more directly.

UK Sailmakers dates the introduction of Tape-Drive to late 1984 and describes it as the first commercial construction to reinforce a sail with continuous high-strength load-path tapes. The load-bearing tapes ran between the corners and across computer-predicted high-load areas. Beneath them remained a three-dimensionally shaped, broadseamed laminate skin.

That is the product history.

The patent history is more complicated.

On 14 December 1984, Peter Conrad filed a US patent on behalf of Sobstad Sailmakers covering a method of distributing stress through structural members within a sail. Later Sobstad patent documents identify U-K Sailmakers as a Sobstad licensee. Contemporary reporting of the eventual North to Sobstad litigation also described Tape-Drive as licensed under Conrad’s patents.

That does not prove that Conrad thought of every aspect of Tape-Drive before anybody at Ulmer-Kolius. Patents rarely settle the entire human history of an idea so neatly. It does prove that we cannot write “Tape-Drive was Ulmer’s invention” and leave it there.

The accurate version has several parts.

UK Sailmakers introduced and sold Tape-Drive. Ulmer-Kolius developed the product within its loft network. Conrad and Sobstad owned important structural-sail IP. UK Sailmakers used that IP under licence.

My 1999 sails therefore carried an American product name, were bought through an Englishman and an Irish-associated loft, and used ideas whose patent trail led to another American sailmaker.

3DL: Invention, litigation and acquisition

North then developed a very different way of building a load-path sail.

The patent for what became 3DL was filed in August 1990. It names the Swiss sailmaker Jean-Pierre Baudet as inventor and describes a one-piece, three-dimensional laminated sail with uninterrupted load-bearing yarns. The patent was assigned to North Sails.

Instead of creating the flying shape entirely through broadseams between flat panels, the main yarn-and-film body was laminated over a full-size mould set to the required three-dimensional form. Yarns could be laid in the directions required by the predicted loads.

Early North 3DI Manufacturing machinery

The distinction needs careful language. A good panelled sail does not rely on hope. Its designer converts an intended three-dimensional form into shaped two-dimensional panels, then recreates the depth through broadseams, luff curve and edge shaping. A moulded sail establishes much of the static shape during lamination over the mould. It removes load-bearing broadseams from the principal body, although finishing work, reinforcements and attachments remain.

North loft - checking a 3DI moulded sail

Nor is there a useful argument about which 1992 boat was “first” unless we define first very tightly. Contemporary accounts say Stars & Stripes tested a 3DL sail during the defender trials. North’s own history describes the innovative moulded sails of the winning America³ campaign as the 1992 coming-out party for technology that was developed and commercialised as 3DL. North then took seven 3DL-equipped boats to Key West Race Week in 1993.

The safe chronology is therefore: Baudet’s patent in 1990, Cup testing and development in 1992, and commercial introduction immediately afterwards.

But 3DL did not sit in a clean, separate branch from Sobstad’s earlier work.

Sobstad sued North in July 1992, the same year 3DL appeared at the America’s Cup, arguing that it infringed three of Sobstad’s structural-sail patents, the ’639, ’953 and ’205, together known as the Airframe patents.

The case ran for most of a decade while North sold the product. On 31 March 2000 Judge Dominic Squatrito found infringement and ordered a seven per cent royalty plus interest on all 3DL sales going back to 1992. He also ordered production to stop, then granted a stay so that manufacture could continue pending an appeal expected to take about a year.

The dispute settled in September 2001. North took ownership of the ’639, ’953 and ’205 Airframe patents and all their counterparts. Sobstad retained full ownership of its ’080 Genesis patent, which the settlement statement is careful to note was never a patent in suit.

This is the missing chapter in most sailmaking timelines.

Baudet invented and patented the 3DL method. North developed, manufactured and commercialised it at scale. Sobstad held earlier structural-sail patents broad enough to defeat North in court. The settlement then moved those patents into North’s ownership.

Inventor, developer, patent holder and eventual owner had converged, but only after a decade of litigation.

There is no single family tree

Once the patent history is restored, the claim that every modern membrane descends from either Tape-Drive or 3DL becomes impossible to sustain.

There are related ideas, but several distinct manufacturing families.

A conventional panelled sail may use woven polyester or a manufactured laminate. Its flying shape comes principally from broadseams and edge curves. A radial layout turns specially engineered cloth so that its strongest direction better follows the principal loads.

Tape-Drive and the later X-Drive retain a broadseamed skin and add an externally bonded structural tape grid. X-Drive came much later than 3DL, roughly three decades after the original Tape-Drive system, and used many more, narrower tapes to achieve much denser fibre coverage. It was a later refinement of the taped-panel approach, not the cause of North’s moulded development.

Other membrane systems laid custom yarn paths between films or protective surfaces, often producing the sail in sections that were subsequently assembled. Sobstad’s Genesis technology followed its own patent route. Elvstrøm acquired Sobstad Genesis in 2002 and developed that inheritance into EPEX, launched in its modern form in 2008.

New Zealand produced another important route. Doyle Sails New Zealand developed Stratis in 2001 and manufactures its custom membranes in Auckland. Quantum’s Fusion products, the D4 process and other string or membrane systems belong within this broad custom-engineered family, but their exact manufacturing processes and IP histories are not identical.

France then developed its own filamentary answer. Incidence bought a D4 production unit in 2013, established Incidence Technologies and launched DFi in 2015. The membranes are made near La Rochelle and have become particularly important in French offshore racing.

Italy’s OneSails commercially introduced 4T FORTE as a continuous-yarn composite system in 2013. Again, it should not be described merely as Tape-Drive with different branding.

And then there is 3Di.

North’s own account credits Gérard Gautier and Eduard Kessi with bringing the early concept to the company in the form of Amalgam sails. Their patents, with a 2002 priority date, covered spread-filament tapes and reinforced, shaped fabrics. The early Amalgam system used flat panels, broadseaming and spread PBO filament tapes.

North says its engineers subsequently changed every major component except the basic idea of spreading yarns back into very thin filaments. They combined that material architecture with full-size three-dimensional moulding, automated tape placement, heat and vacuum pressure, and North’s structural and aerodynamic software.

That is why describing 3Di as “3DL taken further” is incomplete.

3Di inherited full-size moulding from North’s 3DL experience. Its spread-filament structure came from Gautier and Kessi’s different concept. The product was a convergence of the two. North trialled the developing structure around the 2010 America’s Cup period and completed the transition away from 3DL production in 2018.

The real modern history looks less like a family tree than a river system. Ideas divide, run alongside one another, cross through licences and acquisitions, and sometimes rejoin downstream under a different name.

The order things actually happened

X-Drive arrived after 3DL but belongs to the Tape-Drive product line. 3Di followed 3DL in North’s range but also incorporates a separately developed spread-filament idea. EPEX carries Sobstad Genesis history through Elvstrøm. DFi grew from Incidence’s acquisition and development of D4 capability. Stratis was developed in New Zealand.

What the America’s Cup scoreboard really tells us

The Cup records remain impressive.

Hood supplied every winning boat from 1958 to 1977. North powered the winners in 1980, 1983 and 1987. North also says that every defender and challenger from 1988 onward has used North sails.

That last claim needs attribution because it is North’s corporate account. It also needs explanation.

Supplying every syndicate in the most technically demanding event in sailing is an extraordinary achievement. It reflects design resources, security, manufacturing capacity, embedded personnel and accumulated data. North did not achieve that position through a logo.

But once the same supplier is working with almost every team, the scoreboard stops being a clean comparison between sailmaking brands. The designs and programmes may remain fiercely separate and confidential, but the result cannot tell an owner that North sails beat some alternative brand when the alternative was not there.

The distinction became still sharper in the hard-wing Cups. North supplied the soft sails; it did not necessarily design or manufacture the rigid wings that replaced the conventional mainsail on some boats.

Results pages are useful. They tell us which companies operate successfully at a level where failure is exposed very quickly. They do not tell us that the winning product is automatically the right sail for a forty-foot IRC boat, a cruiser or an owner with a limited annual programme.

If one brand supplies everybody, it is guaranteed to win. That does not make the achievement false. It changes what the achievement proves.

So who made my sails?

I return to Barking Mad and 2XL, because their sails now seem a very good way of understanding the industry.

They were bought locally. That relationship mattered. John Brinkers knew the boats, the programme and the people. If something needed changing, repairing or explaining, there was a person to call.

They also belonged to an international product system. The construction knowledge, design tools, materials, trademark and patents did not all live in Swanwick. Some did not belong to the same company.

That is normal now.

The badge on a modern sail may tell you who accepts responsibility for the finished product. It may tell you whose design system was used. It may indicate the loft network that will support it. What it rarely provides is a complete history of the ideas inside it.

Three conclusions follow.

First, the badge is not the invention. Tape-Drive’s product history and Sobstad’s patent history overlap. Baudet’s 3DL patent became a North product, then North acquired earlier Sobstad patents after litigation. 3Di combines North’s moulding experience with spread-filament work brought by Gautier and Kessi.

Second, scale buys something real. Global design data, material testing, repeatable manufacture, specialist engineers and large production facilities have genuine value. North built an organisation capable of turning those advantages into consistent sails. Doyle, Incidence, Elvstrøm, Quantum, OneSails and others have built different combinations of technology and network.

Third, none of this tells you which loft should make your next sail. The most advanced construction can still be the wrong purchase if it is badly specified, poorly measured, delivered too late or unsupported locally. A less glamorous material, correctly designed and looked after by a sailmaker who understands your boat, may produce the better season.

That is the next part of this story.

Who owns the major brands now. What a small loft is genuinely selling that a large one cannot. What has actually changed in the last few years, from flying-shape measurement to the fact that most old sails still go to landfill. Why apparently comparable quotations can differ by thousands of pounds. And how to decide whether you are buying a sail, a technology platform or a relationship with a loft.

Part 2 looks at all these points and explains where I went and how I tailored sails for my classic half tonner and One ton rebuilds of Silver Shamrock and Morning After plus the current market landscape and what the future may hold

Preparation. Decisions. Execution.

Stuart Greenfield FirstShift — Yacht Racing Intelligence From first shift to first place.

Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.

It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.

That is where races are won and lost.

At FirstShift, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.