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Cruising the waters on your personal watercraft is a great experience. The ride alone is a great thrill. But have you ever wondered how the personal watercraft came to be? Here's a quick look at the history of the personal watercraft.

In the late sixties, the Bombardier family thought of a concept vehicle that would soon become the core of an extremely exciting and competitive industry. What the Bomvardier family wanted was a vehicle that would resemble the famed Ski-Doo snowmobile but would run on water. Being a family who spent their summers on and around the lakes of the Laurentian region of Quebec, the Bombardier household would sensibly have a certain liking towards water sports.

The Bombardier family, in a move to make reality their dream, commissioned Clayton Jacobsen II to design such machine. Jacobsen also dreamt of creating a motorcycle-like vehicle that navigate on water with relative ease and speed. The two parties joined their heads and their resources to realize the first ever personal watercraft.

Jacobsen first started with a stand-up design. Eventually the two parties worked for a personal watercraft design that allows the rider to seat while navigating the vehicle. The Bombardier family provided Jacobsen with an 18-hp Rotax engine. From then on, he toiled to perfect a sit-down design of his machine.

In 1968, the combined effort of the Bombardier family and Jacobsen produced the very first of the Sea-Doos (a play on the name of Bombardier's famous snowmobile line). A year later, Bombardier made changes in the engine and incorporated it with a liquid cooling system, an update of Jacobsen's design, which relied on air intake for the cooling mechanism to work. But problems with corrosion and engines made the Bombardier's gave up on the project.

Jacobsen tried to convince the Bombardier company to go on with project. He insisted that the models needed to be tweaked and adjustments should be made like integrating rubber components and waterproofing the body. Jacobsen's suggestions were ignored by Bombardier and the project was shelved.

Jacobsen, determined to see the project through, purchased the rights of the patent and sold the design to Kawasaki in 1971. With some tweaks of the original design by Jacobsen, Kawasaki was able to build a better, more functional type of personal watercraft. In 1973, Kawasaki released the Jet Ski, the first commercial personal watercraft. Today, the term Jet Ski denotes all types of water crafts, even though the name is a registered trademark under Kawasaki Motors.

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