2019-02-01_Popular_Science

THE LASER

IN FIVE

EASY PIECES

Sound. It had a deepwater dock out the back, and Kirby’s
Laser—sail number 0—was laid out on the lawn. (It’s now
at the Mystic Seaport Museum.) But recently they moved
a few blocks away, to a more modest Colonial with a two-
car garage. There are still moving boxes to unpack, yet the
walls are already hung with old photos of Kirby sailing his
designs, and boat models known as half hulls mounted on
plaques. The Laser gets pride of place. Next to the front
door, there’s a framed action shot of the “hot little boat”
at its best: in the sail position known as a reach, with spray
skirting off the bow as if it had a jet engine underneath.
The Laser’s simplicity makes it something like the pla-
tonic ideal of a sailboat, like a child’s drawing with a line
and a triangle—but enabled by the postwar innovations of
fiberglass (for its hull), aluminum (for its mast), and Dacron

SAIL

Laser sails come in three

sizes—standard, Radial, and 4.7—so

sailors of lighter weights can better

manage to keep the boat flat, and

therefore, fast.

(for its sail). It is the sort of definitive and lasting design that

comes around only rarely, such as the iPhone or five-pocket

bluejeans. Except bluejeans and iPhones are constantly be-

ing tweaked, evolving along with human taste or ingenuity.

Each change widens the aperture of possibility. The object

does a new thing, looks a new way, or serves a new purpose.

But a Laser is a sailboat. It moves by the power of the

wind along the surface of the water, a function that hasn’t

changed in millennia. Granted, Lasers rarely go any-

where, except in circles. They satisfy a basic human desire

for speed and competition, each high on the hierarchy of

pleasures. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that among

innumerable variations of small sailboats over all time, the

precise design of the Laser has ridden up on the wave of his-

tory, and stayed there, for 50 years—and counting.

MAST

The Laser always had an aluminum

mast. But in 2016, the International

Laser Class Association announced

a race-legal carbon-composite

option; it lasts longer.

DAGGERB0ARD

The Laser’s removable dagger-

board makes the boat easy to

transport on top of a car or launch

from a beach. On water, it keeps

the craft from going sideways.

VA N G

The vang holds down the boom,

the horizontal pole at the bottom

of the sail. Serious racers know

that properly adjusting the vang

can mean victory in a race.

1

2

3

4

HULL

A flat bottom helps the Laser ride

up on waves. To keep from

capsizing in heavy wind, sailors

lean, or “hike,” way out over the side

to help keep the boat level. —AB

5

5

4

3

2

1

illustration by Brown Bird Design POPSCI.COM•SPRING 2019 53