A hoverboard (or hover board) is a fictional levitating board used for personal transportation, first described by author M. K. Joseph in 1967 and popularized by the Back to the Future film franchise. Hoverboards are generally depicted as resembling a skateboard without wheels. During the 1990s there were rumors, fueled by director Robert Zemeckis, that hoverboards were in fact real, but not marketed because they were deemed too dangerous by parents’ groups. These rumors have been conclusively debunked. The hoverboard concept has been used by many authors in various forms of media.
Guinness World Records recognizes the term hoverboard to include autonomously powered personal levitators. In May 2015, the Romania-born Canadian inventor Cătălin Alexandru Duru set a Guinness World Record by travelling a distance of 275.9 m (302 yd) at heights up to 5 m (16 ft) over a lake, on an autonomously powered hoverboard of his own design.
On April 30, 2016, Guinness World Records recognized a new record of 2,252.4 m. The Flyboard Air was powered by jet engine propulsion, and its use allowed Franky Zapata, in Sausset-les-Pins, France to beat the previous record by nearly 2 km. Another method of achieving self-levitation is superconductivity, used by the Slide hoverboard.