Origin
The Optimist was designed in 1947 by American Clark Mills, inspired by the Soap-box Derby program that is sponsored by Optimist International service club to encourage father/son construction of gravity powered cars for down-hill competition. Mills home town of Clearwater, Florida has no hills so he designed a simple pram that could be built from a single sheet of plywood, and donated the plan to the Optimists. The design was slightly modified and introduced to Europe by the Dane, Axel Damsgaard, and spread outwards across Europe from Scandinavia. The design was standardized in 1960 and became a strict one-design in 1995.
The International Optimist is sailed in over 120 countries by over 160,000 skippers and it is one of only two yachts approved by the International Sailing Federation exclusively for sailors under 16. At the London Olympics, nearly 80% of all boat skippers were former Optimist dinghy sailors, most of them having reached international level in the Class.
Read more about this topic: Optimist (dinghy)
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)