The Quest for a Homemade Hovercraft

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Back in the 20th century, science fiction promised us all sorts of exciting technology, like teleportation devices and jet packs and tractor beams.

But there's one device that Slate senior producer Evan Chung dreamed about more than all the others.

I always wanted a hovercraft.

When I say hovercraft, I don't mean something crazy like a flying Jetson's car.

I'm talking about a personal vehicle that glides over the ground while levitating a perfectly reasonable amount, like enough to avoid potholes but not disrupt the migratory patterns of waterfowl.

I wanted something like Luke Skywalker's Land Speeder.

I know for me, the quintessential hovercraft was in Back to the Future 2, when Marty McFly zips around on a levitating skateboard.

He's not a hoverboard!

In the real world, people have been attempting to make vehicles like these for decades.

One of the most unusual recent developments is the flying platform.

The operator is standing directly above two revolving ducted fans.

This is from a 1957 documentary.

An astonishing new principle of flight.

Within the next few years, these drawings will become realities.

Despite these promises, personal hovercraft are still not available to the average citizen.

Except, Evan swears that back in the 1990s, when he was growing up, he could have had one.

And it wasn't some sci-fi novel telling me this.

It came from a perfectly legitimate source that promised that a kid like me could float on air.

Evan read that promise 30 years ago.

And I've been thinking about it ever since.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

And I'm Evan Chung.

When you're a kid, you're fascinated by all sorts of things: dinosaurs, heavy construction machinery, mixing random drinks together and daring your friends to chug it down.

Usually, you grow out of it.

But when I was just a boy, I became obsessed with an advertisement lodged at the back of my favorite Boy Scout magazine.

And I never got over it.

In this episode, I'll journey halfway across the country, wield power tools, summon my latent scouting skills, and conscript my father into a quest three decades in the making.

So today on Dakota Ring, can you float on air?

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My fascination with Hovercraft began as a Cub Scout.

To be clear, I was not exactly a model scout.

I hate camping.

I never learned to build a fire or orienteer or even wear a neckerchief properly.

But I liked Cub Scouts anyway.

There were two parts I enjoyed most.

The first was the Pinewood Derby, where you build little cars out of wood and race them down a track.

I surrendered the entire project to my dad, and the cars that he essentially made for me always did really well in the race.

And I love that.

And the second thing I loved was what came in the mail.

If you are in Boy Scouts, you can get a subscription to Boy's Life magazine.

That's my friend Brian.

Unlike me, he was a model scout.

I did like survival swimming.

We learned CPR.

We'd have to wake up at like four in the morning and learn random knots.

But as kids, we both read the same thing.

Oh, this was like the most fundamental part of my experience as a Boy Scout and Cub Scout as a kid.

Boys Life is the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America.

A few years ago, it got a gender-inclusive rebranding as Scout Life, but it's been coming out in some form every month going back to 1911.

I was so excited whenever it would come in the mail to like run down and be like, yeah, new, new issue of Boys Life.

And I would obsessively read them from front cover to back, like I would read everything.

Brian and I flipped through a classic 1994 issue from our youth.

And so this one has a dinosaur story on the cover, which is cool.

And then

this thing.

Yeah.

Each issue had comics and jokes and true life accounts of Boy Scouts performing daring rescues.

The child was trapped in sludge.

Fire engulfed his house.

But there was one element in every boy's life that my eyes were always instinctively drawn to.

One utterly captivating advertisement.

The hovercraft.

So

a couple of pages in, third page into the ads, here it is.

You can float on air

the object of our mutual obsession is just a very small rectangle in the classified section at the back of the magazine and beneath that headline is a grainy photograph of a boy with some kind of strange vehicle it has a seat perched on top of a triangular frame and underneath each point of the triangle is a mysterious disc.

Kind of look like deep dish pizzas that I think make it hover just very shadowy so it's hard to tell but but he's like peeking out from behind the hovercraft kind of like admiring it and his hand is around the the seat yeah I guess I never I mean I actually never noticed that he wasn't actually riding it no he's kind of like cradling it but nobody's hovering in the image and so you don't know how it works I think the ad had such mystique to it because it doesn't tell you anything it just leaves a lot to the imagination and I think my imagination as a a kid just ran away with the idea of hovering.

The idea of like showing up to school in a hovercraft just sounded so nice.

You just float to school, everyone's looking at you and you just like park the hovercraft outside of the school and it just floats all day waiting for you.

And then when school ended, I would go back outside and I'd put my book bag on it and then hover back home.

So it's just always on?

It's more like a magic carpet or something.

It's exactly like a magic carpet.

That's the best way to describe it.

It just floats.

I don't even know if you could turn it off.

What kind of elevation were you picturing?

Like three feet, maybe.

I'm not hovering way up there.

I'm not in the clouds, but clearly I'm hovering.

It's like, wow, that guy is truly like floating.

My hovercraft fantasy was similar to Brian's, only I lived in a dense city with narrow clogged streets.

So hovering to school was harder for me to picture.

When I stared at the image in Boys' Life, I imagined myself zipping through the hallways inside my school, beating everybody else to the four square court at recess.

But dreaming about a hovercraft was as far as I ever got.

Brian, though, is built of different stuff.

The good, resourceful scout that he is, he actually found a way to scrape together the money that the ad said it would cost to make him the envy of his peers.

All $8 of it.

I had truly no concept of money.

And so like, for me, $8 seemed fair.

That seems reasonable for a hovercraft, right?

When the day finally came for the package to be delivered to his house, he was shocked to discover that what he'd ordered was not a hovercraft.

We got like just a little pamphlet of instructions telling us how to build a hovercraft, which involved complicated stuff.

You need to like scrap parts from, I don't even know what, but we absolutely never tried to make it.

That's when the dream ended.

But did it have to?

Brian and I were grown-ups now, not Cub Scouts, and we still wanted to hover.

Oh, I would love to.

The dream of hovering has not ever gone away.

I mean,

who would say no to hovering?

Did this thing really work?

It was time to find out.

We'll be right back.

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I wanted to know if the hovercraft was for real, if it worked, and I figured I could begin by finding the person who had paid for the ad in the first place.

So I started digging into the Boy's Life archives.

It seemed that the first issue to feature the ad was in April 1974, nearly 20 years before Brian and I had seen it as kids.

But that first ad looked virtually identical.

The same picture of the kid on the triangular air car, and the same tantalizing promise that you could float on air.

Back then, though, it only cost $3.

There was also a company listed in the ad based in Newport Beach, California.

And when I looked into it, it led me somewhere useful.

Hey, Evan, this is Neil Roth regarding the air car story.

I'm actually the kid that was in the picture in Voice Life magazine.

I still remember the photo session.

I was probably, boy, I don't even know, 10, 11 years old.

Neil Ross lives in Orange County, California, very close to where his father David snapped the picture in the early 70s.

My dad was a professional photographer.

That's what he did for a living.

I remember putting on my Hang 10 shirt and we went to his studio and he set up all the backgrounds and the lights and he said, okay, I need you to put your hand on the back of the seat.

And of course, I could hardly wait to get out of there because my dad was always taking pictures of us as a family and it used to drive us crazy.

Lo and beholds, who would have thought that one of the pictures that day would be in the same magazine every issue for, I think, well over 30 years.

Neil's dad wasn't just the Hovercrafts photographer.

He was its inventor.

It all started with his first professional gig back in the 1940s.

Fresh out of photo school, David Ross took a job as a test flight motion picture photographer at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

He arrived there at a thrilling moment.

At the time, it was becoming the center for experimental aircraft technology.

For here is where test flights of all high-speed research aircraft have taken place.

It was at Edwards where Chuck Yeager made history in 1947.

Captain Yeager flew the X-1 faster than the speed of sound in level flight.

Another historic highlight in the Hero Space Age.

Those guys were going up in planes.

They didn't know if they were going to be coming back, and my dad was right in the middle of it.

David Ross was photographing these hot shots and going up into the skies to film their strange new aircraft in motion.

He became just an absolute total airplane and space geek.

In fact, I'm actually named after Neil Armstrong.

As Neil grew up, his dad introduced him and his brother to another of his interests, Boy Scouts.

My dad was very involved.

He was a guy that would help, you know, build the canoes that we would paddle down the Colorado River every year in the spring.

He even launched his own scout-like organization for boys.

He called it Space Clubs of America.

He would teach the kids how to build model rockets.

Then he'd take them to the park to launch them.

You know, a big crowd would form.

We'd shoot our rockets up and then, you know, the parachute would deploy and then we'd go chase them across the park.

That was a blast.

At the same time that David Ross was helping his space club kids with their rockets, his creativity and his aeronautics obsession were propelling him to build something of his own.

As crazy as the idea sounded, the seed was planted and the idea germinated that he could make a personal aircraft.

I remember my dad being out in the garage every night after his job, you know, with the saws and the hammers and everything else building out these prototypes.

I never remember ever a car being parked in our garage.

Neil's dad called his experimental craft the air car.

He modeled it off a device NASA used for astronaut training.

But for it to work at home, he figured out an ingenious and cheap power source.

It was a vacuum cleaner, the old canister vacuum cleaners that you would cut in half, and instead of sucking air, it would push air out.

As he developed prototype after prototype of the air car, he'd bring Neil in as his guinea pig.

Hey, get on the craft, Neil.

You're going to plug this thing in and see if it'll keep you stationary.

And sometimes it didn't work so well and you would tilt back and forth.

And then he'd have to go to the drawing board and kind of work on the balance of where the seat was.

He spent years tinkering with it until one day, finally, He felt the air car was ready for its grand unveiling.

It happened in the gym of the local high school, a big, flat surface, perfect for hovering.

A crowd of kids and teachers had assembled.

And I remember the inaugural test flight.

I was the pilot.

I'm on the air car, plugs it in, sure enough, boom,

it pops up.

And I remember him pushing me and just zipping across the gym floor, this really super smooth ride.

Kind of like you're floating on air.

Gliding across the length of the gym, Neil was filled with pride at his own dad's invention.

You think you're the luckiest kid on earth.

Are you kidding me?

I didn't want to get off it.

My dad said, hey, listen, you got to let some of the other kids try it.

And so all those kids that were in the gym all jumped on it and he pushed them across the floor of the gym.

The air car hovercraft worked.

And David Ross was inspired to take the next step.

He wanted to make it available to other people, specifically to other Boy Scouts.

So he learned how to set up a mail order business.

He took those photos of Neil with his invention, and he created the ad that so captivated me.

It debuted in Boys' Life in April 1974, and soon after, the orders started rolling in.

You know, I remember my mom opening up all these letters with kids writing on them, and the envelope would be full of change.

I mean, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters.

I mean, it was crazy, the old emptying of the piggy bank because they wanted to float on air.

The ad ran month after month through the 70s, 80s, and the 90s when it reached me and my friend Brian.

Neil says the air car never made his family rich, but it was enough loose change to fund their vacations every year.

Then along came the internet, and the entire mail order industry started to evaporate.

That's really why it came to an end, is it started falling off and the business just got smaller and smaller and smaller and he finally just kind of shuttered things up the final air car ad ran in the august 2003 issue of boy's life

i just i just remember the air car being kind of an integral part of our family i was always really kind of proud of the fact that my my dad invented this thing that kind of became you know, kind of a ubiquitous thing within the Boy Scouts.

Hearing Neil's memories of floating on his dad's invention got me excited all over again.

Finally, I had first-hand testimony that the hovercraft that my friend Brian and I had fantasized about actually worked.

It was all the confirmation I needed.

30 years after I first encountered it, I was going to build the hovercraft.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

So my mind was made up.

I was going to turn this fantasy of floating on air into reality.

The only issue is, I am miserable at building things.

But luckily, I knew just who to call for help.

Hi, Evan.

Hi, Dad.

What's up?

So do you remember when I was in Cub Scouts?

In Hong Kong, yes.

Oh, yeah, I still have the picture of you in the uniform in my wallet.

I carry it all the time.

Now, today.

And I treasure that.

When people ask me about my sons, I'll show them the picture when you were wearing a Cub Scout uniform.

I don't know if that's representative of me.

Would you describe me as someone who is very Boy Scout-like in terms of being very handy and things like that?

Well,

not overwhelmingly.

The major things that I remember is the Pine...

What was it called?

Pine.

The Pinewood Derby?

Pinewood Derby, okay?

I mentioned the Pinewood Derby earlier about how back when I was a Cub Scout, I had to make a wooden race car.

I would stare helplessly at my block of pine until my dad came to my rescue and did the entire thing for me.

And it was fun making the cards and painted them and we raced them.

It was great fun, you know.

My memory is that I was kind of useless and that I just had to rely on you to do everything.

You know, well, that's well, either way,

no.

You know, I hate to say that

at some points, I took over the project, but yeah, well, it was fun.

I reminded my dad about getting Boys Life magazine and told him about being fascinated with the Hovercraft ad in the back.

I don't remember this.

Are you by a computer?

I can send you a photo of it.

Yeah, I am.

I'm right in front of the screen.

Yeah, so you can.

All right, I just sent it to your email.

The AOL email?

Okay, let me take a look.

You're one of the few people I know who still has an AOL email.

Okay, well, wait a minute.

Lift 200 pounds.

And it only, so it probably is the $8 is for the plan to build it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Right, right.

So now I've got a copy of the plans.

Uh-huh.

And I was thinking about coming over to you and to see if maybe we could try building this together.

Okay.

Sure.

You know,

we put our resources and all that.

Maybe you need some woodwork cutting and so on, you know.

So yeah, it'd be fun.

I don't want to, again, I apologize.

I don't want to take over the project.

It's your project.

You know, I'll be just participating.

My dad worked in offices his whole career.

So he learned how to be handy the old-fashioned way by just figuring it out for himself.

When we moved into our house outside Chicago, he went into full suburban dad mode, learning how to landscape and how to finish a basement without any real guidance.

We were going to need that approach for this project.

David Ross's plans for the air car are filled with sketches and general tips, but a hovercraft is not an Ikea futon.

There's no step-by-step assembly guide.

That became clear to me after I flew to Chicago and we went to pick up our supplies at Home Depot.

We would need glue, nylon cord, casters, basic hardware, and a very thin sheet of plywood that, according to the plan, I was supposed to eventually ride on.

It's very flimsy.

You have to be very careful you don't step in the wrong place.

Easy enough for an eight-year-old, but what about when an adult man tries to ride it?

The ad in Boys Life had assured us it could lift 200 pounds, which should be sufficient for me or Brian.

But a close look at the instructions revealed some surprises.

The first is there are actually plans for four different models of the air car.

Naturally, we'd want to build the iconic one from Neil's picture, the triangular model with three hovering discs.

But then came the next surprise.

According to the plan, that hovercraft hovercraft can only handle 125 pounds.

So it would have to be air car model number three, which is a single large disc, four feet in diameter.

I had to admit, it didn't look as cool as the triangle-shaped version in the ad.

But the plans claimed it's the one that works the best and is the simplest to build.

The wooden part is a no-brainer, easy.

Okay, this is that's very easy.

But as for the hovering part.

Well,

so far, I look at the plan, it sounds like this is theory.

Has anyone made one that worked?

Well, according to Neil Ross, yes, his dad did.

Powered by the motor of a canister vacuum cleaner, cut in half with a hacksaw.

The plans include suggestions of where you can pick one up, like a vacuum cleaner repair shop.

Do you have stores like that anymore?

No.

Okay?

If someone is doing it in 1975, probably it's easy to find one.

That's no problem.

But today, I don't think you'll ever be able to find a vacuum cleaner like that.

Instead, my dad happened to have a modern alternative sitting in his garage.

Hurricane power leaf blower.

Well, that is like more powerful than four of these five of this vacuum cleaner together.

So you're not worried about deviating from the plan?

Oh, no, no, no.

Oh, no, no.

I have to confess that I was a little worried.

As much confidence as I have in my dad's skills, it's not the first time he's tried to outsmart a set of instructions.

When I was in junior high, for whatever reason, I desperately wanted a talk box, the device Peter Frampton uses to make his guitar come alive.

I found plans for a DIY talk box, but my dad decided to make some modifications.

Actually, a lot of modifications.

I ended up with a piece of wood with a tube sticking out of it that did not sound arena-ready.

In fact, it didn't make any sound at all.

But I would just have to trust my dad on this one.

Tools, tools, tools, wonderful tools.

We got to work in the garage, measuring out the pieces we'd need.

This is 12 inches, right?

According to the plans, the air car can be built in just a few hours.

I did my best to try to find ways that I could help, whether with tracing or hammering or planing the wood.

So I do it this way or this way?

What?

It seemed safest to let my dad handle all the sawing.

Okay.

It took us an entire day, but eventually we'd constructed the circular frame for the air car with a hole all ready for mounting a leaf blower.

There was just one final step.

Figure six, the skirt.

That's my biggest question mark.

The plans call for a narrow strip of fabric to drape around the perimeter of the hovercraft.

The bottom has to curve in.

How do you make it so that the whole thing lines up exactly and then there's no leak?

I don't know.

A skirt is not something I'd ever envisioned looking at the ad, but Neil Ross warned me that it's actually the critical component of the air car.

That's the toughest part to get right.

The skirts that actually create the lift.

The skirt would keep the air trapped underneath the plywood and you would actually float on that two-inch skirt.

So that's kind of the trickiest part because you're going to need somebody that's pretty good with a sewing machine.

I'm sorry to say that.

Well, we come from a family of tailors.

My parents are tailors, but I've never handled a sewing machine.

So

for my dad, I think it was extremely frustrating to find something completely out of his skill set.

But perhaps here was my chance, at last, to contribute to the project.

So i looked to the air car plans for guidance on the sewing it says to have your mother or sister do it yeah because that's what you need to do is get your mom and sister to do it because you know dudes don't do that

oh boy i didn't have a mom or sister with a sewing machine handy but luckily i did have my friend soren nearby who's an avid clothesmaker

He also happens to be a former Boy Scout, which means he's no stranger to the back pages of Boys Life magazine.

I totally remember this hovercraft.

I'm just like, I can just imagine me as a kid going, like, yeah, man, I'm gonna fly that thing to school.

And everybody's gonna be like, that's so cool that you have a hovercraft.

To make the skirt, he would have to sew two nylon cords into a 12-foot strip of vinyl sheeting, basically like a shower liner.

That's a weird material to work with.

What we wanted to end up with was essentially a big round plastic hoop a few inches tall.

That would then dangle from the edge of the circular piece of plywood.

What do you think?

That looks like a hovercraft skirt if I've ever seen one.

I think so, yeah.

I'm glad I never really built one in the 70s, though, because it just looks like a disappointment machine, doesn't it?

There's really no way to steer it, and it has to stay plugged in.

It's like you'll turn it on and be like, well, that's hovering.

Can it go anywhere?

No,

not really.

The The truth was, by this time, I was starting to be filled with doubt myself.

Neil Ross had warned me about the limitations of the air car.

As cool as it was and as fun as it was, it was unfortunately a little bit impractical.

You had to have this thing plugged into a wall and you had to have somebody push you because it wasn't self-propelled.

You couldn't really lean left or right very much.

You had to be very, quite stationary because if your weight changed too much, it would collapse the skirt on one end of the air car.

I mean, your bike was more practical because you could actually ride to the convenience store and buy some bubblegum.

Our air car was just about finished.

Even if it worked, I knew it could never live up to that childhood fantasy of freedom, of cruising around on my own set of hover disks, not when it had to stay tethered to an outlet.

I could steal myself for potential disappointment.

But what about my friend Brian?

Suddenly, I felt the weight of responsibility for maybe destroying his fantasy too.

And then there was my dad.

He took such pride in his handiwork.

Was I just setting him up to fail?

Instead of lifting us up, was the hovercraft going to let us down?

I didn't have to wait long to find out, because the next morning would be the hovercraft's maiden voyage.

I'm so excited to see the hovercraft.

I'd been waiting my whole life for this.

I was filled with apprehension as Brian and I pulled up to my dad's house.

Mr.

Chun, good to see you.

Wow.

So you're working on the hovercraft?

I guess.

Now, it's going to look a little different from what you might be expecting.

Is it going to have the three deep dish pizza shapes?

So no, it's going to be one giant deep dish pizza.

Oh, so this, this is the hovercraft.

This is is it.

I nervously explained to Brian why this air car didn't look a whole lot like the triangular one in Boys' Life, that this floating saucer model was the only one that could theoretically handle an adult's weight.

We didn't even bother building a seat because there'd be no room left for a grown-up's legs.

Okay, so the one that's from the ad with the three discs is for little kids to hover.

The iconic version is undeniably cooler looking.

Yeah.

We also had to explain that it wasn't exactly going to levitate.

The height is actually limited by the size of the fabric skirt around it.

Our skirt was about two and a half inches tall, so the maximum it could possibly lift was two and a half inches off the ground.

I mean, as long as it hovers, that's the goal.

We should go this way then.

We still had just a few finishing touches to make on the air car before takeoff.

It's a perfect day to build a hovercraft.

Sunny blue blue skies.

The skirt was sealed to the plywood disc.

The leaf blower was secured in position.

Finally, the mission was ready for launch.

I'm shocked that this moment is even happening.

I've thought about this hovercraft for most of my life.

All right, Dad, you want to plug it in?

Oh, yeah.

I'm feeling a little nervous.

Yeah,

this is the moment.

A famous moment in the history of hovercrafts happening right now.

Brian and I got into position.

We would take turns climbing aboard the air car in flight to sit cross-legged on the plywood.

30 years after becoming transfixed with the ad and boys' life, we were about to learn if you really can float on air here.

All right, Dad.

Whenever you're ready, let's do it.

All right.

You're all I don't for my cabin.

Wow.

Works!

It did work, with a certain limited definition of success.

With a push, we were able to glide smoothly across the garage floor.

at least until we hit a crack in the cement.

But if you didn't know it was supposed to be a hovercraft, you probably wouldn't be able to tell that it was off the ground, as opposed to just sliding on some very small wheels.

So it wasn't exactly a levitating magic carpet.

But the ad was right.

We could and did float on air.

It reminds me of those air hockey tables where you turn it on and you hear the whoosh of the air and then the little puck kind of starts to float a little bit, but it's not quite airborne, but it definitely has a lot of like it slides around

i didn't feel disappointed at all i felt a sense of accomplishment if anything i had an urge to keep tinkering with it to try out a taller skirt or i don't know add a second leaf blower and maybe we could get it just a little closer to how we imagined it as cub scouts well if i built this when i was a kid it wouldn't be what i thought it was I don't think I'd be able to float to school.

It's different from my childhood fantasy, but it floats on air, yeah.

You could still maybe hover craft to school with this.

Yeah, well, if you had a really long extension cord and the school was right by your house, then you could probably do it.

I don't know if this would make the other kids jealous.

Are you satisfied with the outcome?

100%.

It satisfies this unanswered question from my childhood from looking at boys' life and looking at this ad.

So I am honored that you put the time into it.

Super.

That is the best reward that I get from building this project because if the project did not work it's not the fault of the plant.

Maybe it was me.

It was only then that I fully grasped just how much stress I had been putting my dad under since I pitched him this project.

When I hear you say your lifelong dream of this, you see how much pressure you're giving, that was laying on me.

I am going have to deliver this, try my best to make it work.

While I'd been caught up worrying about disappointing Brian or making a terrible podcast episode, I hadn't fully considered my dad's anxiety.

He'd been constantly fretting over the air car schematics and feverishly planning the construction, afraid of letting anybody down.

He'd even cased the Home Depot in advance, mapping out the most efficient shopping route.

He put more thought into this hovercraft in a couple weeks than Brian and I had in our lifetime of obsessions.

And with my skills being just as paltry as they were in Cub Scouts, my dad's the person who got the hovercraft off the ground.

To be able just to execute that, it took the arsenal of all my tools, my skills, my common sense, and everything.

And finally, we made it work.

When David Ross invented the air car, he could have tried manufacturing and selling pre-assembled hovercraft, but he didn't.

Instead, he chose to place an ad for a set of instructions in the back of Boys' Life magazine.

And as his son Neil told me, there was a reason for that.

He just saw that, you know, like the Pinewood Derby was kind of a ubiquitous part of scouting.

He just saw the air car being a perfect father-son project.

Well, that was really the motivating factor behind it.

He got a lot of letters back over the years just thanking him for creating a a really perfect opportunity for fathers and sons to be involved with.

David Ross stayed close with his own son until the day he died.

In his final years, he lived four houses down from Neil and they were together constantly.

All those years earlier, David hadn't just invented a hovering machine so much as a hangout with your kids machine.

Or, you know, a hangout with your dad one.

And you can count me as another satisfied customer.

I moved from Chicago nearly six years ago.

So these days, it's hard to find a chance to see my dad more than sporadically.

I can't remember the last time we were together for this long in one go.

Who would have thought that all it would take is a hovercraft?

What are you going to do with it?

Are you going to take it and float around town?

I have to find a space in the basement to put it away.

Don't you want to tinker with it and refine it and so so it gets better and better?

No.

I mean, I need my leaf blow.

This is Decodering.

I'm Evan Chung.

And I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung.

Willip Haskin and Katie Shepard produce Decodering.

We have editing help from Joel Meyer.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of Narrative Podcasts, and Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Thank you to Doug Malowicki, Jim Netzel, Greg Hebda, Soren Davis, Kim Belware, Brian Morrison, and Tom Chung.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed in Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

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So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

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