BALTIMORE -- Howard Head, who invented sporting equipment including the the Head metal ski and the Prince tennis racket to improve his own athletic performance, died Sunday, officials said. He was 76.
Head died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as a result of complications following heart surgery, a spokesman said.
A native of Philadelphia, Head graduated from Harvard in 1936 with a degree in engineering sciences and soon turned the science of recreation into his life's work.
Fascinated with skiing but frustrated by the clumsy wooden equipment of the 1940s, he was determined to create skis from lightweight aircraft materials.
He started his own ski company with $6,000 in poker winnings and money borrowed from friends, and he eventually succeeded with a revolutionary aluminum-sandwich design.
Head skis went on to win medals at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympic games, and by 1966 the company's plant in Timonium, Md., was grossing $25 million a year on the sales of 300,000 pairs of skis in 17 nations.
Head sold his company to AMF in 1971, when he retired and decided to take up tennis. But the retirement did not last long.
He joined the board of Prince Manufacturing Co. in Princeton, N.J., a month after purchasing one of the company's ball machines and offering advice on how to improve the balky device.
Much like he tried to perfect the ski, Head set out to refine the tennis racket and eliminate the awkward twisting that occurred when he hit the ball off-center.
After two years of experiments, Head unveiled an oversized racket that received the broadest tennis racket patent ever issued. Experts greeted the invention with snickers but later embraced the racket, which provided greater control and four times the effective hitting surface of normal rackets.
He retired again in 1982 after Chesebrough Pond's bought Prince for $62 million.
In his later years, the noted philanthropist was elected president of the Ski Industries of America and honored as a member of the National Ski Hall of Fame. He also competed as a regional master in tournament- level bridge and was a certifed scuba diver.
Head is survived by his wife, Martha Becker Fritzlen Head, his daughter, Nancy Thode, three stepdaughters and five grandchildren.
