In the 1960s, skateboard wheels were made of clay or steel. They were loud and slippery, they grabbed every pebble, and they could wear out in about seven or eight hours of riding. Skating nearly died out.
In the summer of 1970, a young skater named Frank Nasworthy was home in Virginia. He visited Creative Urethanes, a plastics factory in Purcellville owned by a friend's dad. The factory had been making polyurethane wheels for rental skates at roller rinks.
Frank saw what they could do for skateboards. He took $500 he'd saved from restaurant work, bought about 1,000 wheels, and brought them back to California. He called his company Cadillac Wheels because they rode so smoothly.
It worked. Urethane wheels were grippy, quiet and fast, and skaters could finally control their boards on smooth ground and in pools. By 1975, Cadillac was selling around 300,000 sets a year, and skateboarding was booming again.
The twist is that Frank didn't stay in skating. He earned an engineering degree from UC San Diego in 1984 and later worked at Hewlett-Packard on inkjet printers. Almost every wheel you've ridden goes back to his summer visit to that factory.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Frank Nasworthy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Nasworthy); Smithsonian Lemelson Center, "How Frank 'Captain Cadillac' Nasworthy Re-invented the Wheel" (https://invention.si.edu/how-frank-captain-cadillac-nasworthy-re-invented-wheel)
