I am Bruno Legaignoux.  For those who don't know me, I, together with my brother Dominique, invented the inflatable kite.

We were junior french champions, instructors, surfers, windsurfers, etc....

We used to experiment and try to improve sails and boats to make them more efficient, and finally we became intersted in kites after seeing "Jacob's Ladder", a catamaran powered by flexifoils (very flexible sails) even though we had never flown a 2 line kite.  This was in 1984.

After several investigations, we realised that there was no kite that could be re-launched after having fallen into the water, and so we tried to create a system for this.

After a very busy year, and using water skis, we demonstrated a prototype at the Brest International Speed Week (1985).  We registered the patent and after that began to look for sponsors, but windsurfing was at it's height, and there were no businesses from the industry interested in our product.

We had 10 years very hard work, but always believed in this sport.  We continued with our project without any money, looking for sponsors, new markets, etc.  We started our own company and started to produce in france in 1993-94, but with very high costs.

With a slight decline in windsurfing, kiteboarding was arriving on the scene.  I'm proud to look back and see that we were the pioneers of the birth of kiteboarding, however we were not alone.  For example, Cory Roeseler with his Kiteski, and Andreas Kuhn with a paraglider and a type of wakeboard, helped significantly to present this as an international sport.

In 1995-96 we were in discussions with Neil Pryde (one of the most important manufacturers of windsurf sails in the world), and they agreed to produce small quantities of kites for us, which we began to sell in July 1997 under the brandname of Wipika.  Shortly after this we found another manufacturer in Asia.  In 1998 Don Montague and Robby Naish asked us for the liscense.  As it was our original objective, we agreed and stated that we all needed computer software to work on our designs more quickly.  

I went to Hawaii, and passed all my knowledge on to Don Montague and his programmer.  One year later the software up and running, and we were working with it.  In this way it was possible to make good kites in 30 seconds, just by changing a few parameters.

Why the protection of a patent? - Some people hate that.  I think that when you are a well organised business in a market where products progress very quickly, the patent is just a waste of time and energy.  But if you were a "small time" independent inventor with no possibility of competing with big companies, you have to protect your ideas.  In fact, you could lose much.

Our patent was maintained for 10 years.  Obviously i had problems with infractions on my ideas, and am still fighting some of these.

Some people had done things very similar.  We started in 1984 with windsurf boards because we were windsurfers and surfers, but not wakeboarders.  We tried various different types of boards, and the kites were very unstable.  We started with water skis because the water starts were easier, but the patent includes types of boards for windsurfing also.

We tried all kinds of things related to kiteboarding that you could imagine.  One design on the patent shows a man on two 40cm "water skates".  It was a lot of fun.   In 1985 we made a 17m inflatable kite with 100% double skin.  We used it in wind of 6 - 12 knots, and during the Brest International Speed Week in 1986 we reached a speed of 14.5 knots (recorded over 500m).  We also made kites with 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% double skin, included in the patent of 1984.

 We used 2 methods for the inflated types: hermetic material (water tight), and material with internal inflated tubes.  Both types were written into the patent.
Later, we realised that we needed to advance much more to make the kites simple, stable, and safe.  In 1998, 100% of the users were novices,- there aren't many markets like that!  In 1999, 90% of the users were novices, and the rest were already asking for more efficient kites.  From then we started to produce with 3.3, which entered the market at the start of 2000.
In the following years, we made extremely efficient kites, meanwhile learning that they should always be simple, stable, and safe.