"America's most famous swimmer of the time [late eighteenth century] was none other than Ben Franklin who excelled at swimming as he did at just about anything else. Franklin invented the first swim fins and even wrote a short essay on the possibility of water skiing, theorizing that a man attached by a rope to a large kite could be pulled across the water by wind power." - excerpt from the book, The Ocean Almanac, by Robert Hendrickson, Doubleday, 1984, pg. 359.