Are Hoverboards Real?

By Ned Hepburn on April 1st, 2009

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Back To The Future 2 was a watershed event in any boys life. On the playgrounds the world over the same question was asked countless times: Are Hoverboards Real?

Even today some 20 years after BTTF2 came out there are still people out there wondering that same question. It hounds our minds and leaves us unable to sleep. The speculation began with this video of director Robert Zemeckis “confirming” that they are indeed real. According to Snopes.com:

Robert Zemeckis, the film’s director and special effects genius, became fed up with people asking him how the hoverboard sequences were done, and, according to Michael J. Fox, he began answering, “What do you mean, how did we do it? It’s a real hover-board. It flies. Michael [J. Fox] just practiced a lot.” His exasperation-fueled flippancy only served to heighten the rumor; now even the director was confirming it!

The hoverboard’s failure to appear on toy store shelves was attributed to pressure brought to bear upon Mattel by parents’ groups concerned for the safety of children, and once again Zemeckis was right there to stir the pot: “Hoverboards have been around for years, but parents’ groups worry that kids will get hurt, so they’ve pressured the toy companies not to put them on the market,” he said. “We got our hands on some.”

But it seems that Zemeckis is pulling our legs, as Mattel vehemently denied its existence after being plagued with phone calls and letters from thousands upon thousands of kids in the early 90’s asking for them. Totally uncool.

However: there is hope! According to this article on Wikipedia:

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force [wiki], so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

EVEN A PERSON. This means a fucking hoverboard.

There’s even more luck for those of you willing to drop a few grand on actually making one (that will raise you up off the ground one whole inch). Future Horizons (a dubious sounding name of a company if I ever heard one) will give you the plans to build one using a lawnmower engine for a mere $50 (building it will cost you roughly $1700 for all the parts). You can check out the website here. Hell, beats sitting around watching That 70’s Show all weekend.

And if you haven’t seen BTTF 2, you have no soul and deserve to be punched in the gut with a fistful of nails.