The first skateboard
Accordingly, skateboarding was originally denoted sidewalk surfing and early skaters emulated surfing style and moves.
A number of surfing manufacturers such as Makaha started building skateboards that resembled small surfboards,
and assembling teams to promote their products.
The popularity of skateboarding at this time spawned a national magazine, Skateboarder Magazine,
and the 1965 international championships were broadcast on national television.
Yet by 1966 skateboarding wasn't as popular as the previous year and Skateboarder Magazine had stopped publication.
The popularity of skateboarding dropped and remained low until the early 1970s.
Second generation
In the early 1970s, Frank Nasworthy started to develop a skateboard wheel made of polyurethane,calling it the 'Cadillac' .
The improvement in traction and performance was so immense that from the wheel's release in 1974 ,
The popularity of skateboarding started to rise rapidly again, and companies wanted to invest more in product development.
Many companies started to manufacture trucks (axles) especially designed for skateboarding,
and the modern design was reached in 1976 by Tracker Trucks.
As the equipment became more maneuverable, the decks started to get wider,
reaching widths of 10 inches (250 mm) and over in the end, thus giving the skateboarder even more control.
Banana board is a term used to describe skateboards made of polypropylene that were skinny, flexible,
with ribs on the underside for structural support and very popular during the mid-1970s.
They were available in myriad colors, bright yellow probably being the most memorable, hence the name.
Manufacturers started to experiment with more exotic composites and metals, like fiberglass and aluminum,
but the common more popular skateboards were and sill are made of maple plywood.
The skateboarders took advantage of the improved handling of their skateboards and started inventing new tricks.
Skateboarders, most notably the Z-Boys, started to skate the vertical walls of swimming pools that were left empty in the 1976 California drought.
This started the vert trend in skateboarding.
With increased control, vert skaters could skate faster and perform more dangerous tricks, such as slash grinds and frontside/backside airs.
This caused liability concerns and increased insurance costs to skatepark owners,
and the development (first by Norcon,then more successfully by Rector) of improved knee pads that had a hard sliding cap
and strong strapping proved to be too-little-too-late.
During this era, the freestyle movement in skateboarding began to splinter off and develop into a much more specialized discipline,
characterized by the development of a wide assortment of high flat-ground tricks.
As a result of the vert skating movement, skate parks had to contend with high-liability costs that led to many park closures.
In response, vert skaters started making their own ramps, while freestyle skaters continued to evolve their flatland style.
Thus by the beginning of the 1980s, skateboarding had once again fallen into obscurity.
With the evolution of skateparks and ramp riding, the skateboard began to change.
Early skate tricks had consisted mainly of two-dimensional maneuvers (e.g. riding on only two wheels (wheelie, a.k.a. manual),
spinning like an ice skater on the back wheels (a 360 pivot),
high jumping over a bar (nowadays called a Hippie Jump), long jumping from one board to another (often over a line of small barrels or fearless teenagers lying on their backs), and slalom.
In 1976, skateboarding was transformed by the invention of the first modern skateboarding trick by Alan Ollie Gelfand,
the Ollie (skateboarding trick).
It remained largely a unique Florida trick from 1976 until the summer of 1978, when Gelfand made his first visit to California.
Gelfand and his revolutionary maneuver caught the attention of the West Coast skaters and the media where it began to spread worldwide.
The ollie was reinvented by Rodney Mullen in 1982, who adapted it to freestyle skating by ollieing on flat ground rather than out of a vert ramp.
Mullen also invented the ollie kickflip, which, at the time of its invention, was dubbed the magic flip.
The flat ground ollie allowed skateboarders to perform tricks in mid-air without any more equipment than the skateboard itself.
The development of these complex tricks by Rodney Mullen and others transformed skateboarding.
Skateboarders began performing their tricks down stair sets and on other urban obstacles -
they were no longer confined to empty pools and expensive wooden ramps.
Rodney Mullen is seen as one of the main founding fathers of modern skateboarding, inventing most of the tricks used today.
He invented over 30 tricks, such as the kickflip, heelflip, and the ollie impossible.
Jason Lee was the person to influence the 360 flip or (tre-flip) later.
The act of ollieing onto an obstacle and sliding along it on the trucks of the board is known as grinding, and has become a mainstay of modern skateboarding.
Types of grinds include the 50-50 grind (balancing on the front and back trucks while grinding a rail),
the 5-0 grind (balancing on only the back truck while grinding a rail)
the nose grind (balancing on only the front truck while grinding a rail),
and the crooked grind (balancing on the front truck at an angle with nose touching while grinding) among many others.
There are various other grinds that involve touching both the trucks and the deck to the rail, ledge, or lip.
The most common of these is the smith grind, in which the rider balances over the back truck while touching the outer middle of the board to the grinding surface in the direction from which he or she ollied.
Popping and landing on the back truck and touching the inner edge of the board,
i.e. popping over, is known as a feeble grind. Slides such as boardslides, lipslides, noseslides, and tailslides are on the wooden deck of the skateboard, rather than on the trucks.
One trick that doesn't fit these categories is the Darkslide (Invented by Rodney Mullen) which consists of sliding on the top (griptape side) of the board.
The bluntslide, when performed on a ledge, which basically means the wheels are sliding.
Another slide/grind trick that does not conform to the ordinary categories is the primo slide, invented by Primo Desidero;
it consists of sliding on the board (albiet a flat surface rather than a ledge, rail or lip) while it is on its side, sliding on the ends of the axle bolts and the thin dimension of the board,
pointing and moving the same way as one would ride it.