The name DUKW derived from military equipment coding: D stood for the year of production (1942); U denoted its amphibious quality; K indicated front-wheel drive capability; W rear-wheel drive. Unsurprisingly, they just became known as “ducks.”

These days, Boston is one of several cities that operate such tours. But they got their start in rural Wisconsin. After the war ended in 1945, the military made surplus supplies available for public purchase. Bob Unger, a veteran from Milwaukee, snapped up a DUKW, which he had learned to pilot during the war. Where he saw an army relic, his fried Mel Flath saw a business opportunity. Flath convinced Unger to bring his DUKW to the Wisconsin Dells—the scenic landscape surrounding the southern portion of the Wisconsin River. They launched their first tour as the Wisconsin Ducks in the summer of 1946, says Dan Gavinski, now the general manager of company.

By the next season, the tour company operated 37 DUKWs. Today, the Wisconsin Ducks, Gavinski says, has the largest fleet of DUKWs in the country, and their 91 vehicles still date from the Second World War.

The Wisconsin Ducks take pride in the label “original”—the company can lay undisputed claim to the first amphibious tour in the country. But the relaxed vibe of the backcountry routes is a far cry from the rambunctious, arguably more notorious tours that wind their way through at least 30 cities worldwide.

In that respect, the Boston Duck Tours, which launched in 1994, were the first. “A lot of people think that we’re the original,” says the CEO Cindy Brown. “But we always make sure to yield to Wisconsin.”

The move to an urban setting was not exactly smooth sailing. According to the company, bringing DUKWs to Boston “took nearly two years, ‘100 halls of government,’ and fierce determination by an ex-banker [the founder Andy Wilson] who felt that there was more to life than the standard 9-5, corporate world.” Securing the 30 municipal permits necessary to operate the tours was a veritable nightmare “due to the infamous bureaucratic red tape, but also because most people had never heard of Ducks and simply thought the idea of a land/water tour in Boston was crazy.”

The tours turned out to not be so crazy after all; during peak season, they now ferry around 4,500 passengers per day. But they are, Brown says, decidedly quirky. The drivers are encouraged to cultivate distinctive personalities, often so effectively that Brown says she sometimes finds herself calling them by their aliases around the office.

Other cities soon followed. Ride the Ducks was founded in Branson, Missouri, in 1977 and operated a rural route, but in 2003, it launched in Philadelphia and Stone Mountain, Georgia, a town outside of Atlanta, where the company is now headquartered. Many urban duck tours, like those in Seattle and Austin, operate independently, but Ride the Ducks is a franchise, complete with a production subsidiary called Amphibious Vehicle Marketing, which provides modern iterations of the WWII DUKWs to companies like Boston Duck Tours.