The Yo-Yo

One of the oldest known toys, it is likely that the yo-yo was created independently in several different areas. Stone yo-yos more than 3,000 years old have been found in Greece and evidence indicates that yo-yos may also have been present in ancient Chinese culture. In the 1700s, the yo-yo or jou-jou, as it was called, provided entertainment for the French royal court.

In the 1800s, the toy became popular with children in Victorian England, where it was known as a bandalore, or an incroyable (the French word for incredible). It arrived in the United States around 1866, where various patents were issued and design changes were made to improve its play. None of the versions caught on, however, and by the early 1900s, the toy had lost its allure in the U.S. It was a popular toy in the Philippines, however, where yo-yos were finely crafted from wood. An article on "Filipino Toys" published in 1916 in Scientific American featured directions for making the yo-yo, and defined the name as the Filipino equivalent of "come-come".

In the 1920s, a young Filipino man named Pedro Flores started a yo-yo company in California. Around 1928, the entrepreneur Donald Duncan, who had already successfully marketed the parking meter, movie screen, and Good Humor ice cream bar, happened to see Flores demonstrating how to play with a yo-yo in Los Angeles. Enamored with the toy, Duncan bought Flores's small yo-yo making company for $25,000. Soon, Duncan had hired hundreds of "Yo-Yo Professionals" to travel the country demonstrating amazing yo-yo tricks, like "walking the dog" and "around the world," while drumming up sales of the toy. The yo-yo was a huge success.

In 1960, Duncan began manufacturing the plastic version of the toy that we see today. Two years later, the company was selling 45 million yo-yos per year, and supply could hardly keep up with demand. Duncan struggled to hold on to the trademark for the name yo-yo, but in 1965 a federal court ruled that the name was no longer a trademark, as it had become a part of the language. Duncan's company went bankrupt in 1965, and the "Duncan" name was sold to the Flambeau Plastics Company, which now manufactures the Duncan yo-yos sold today.

Three U.S. presidents, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, have publicly played with the yo-yo. Political activist Abbie Hoffman once "walked the dog" during a Congressional hearing, an action that earned him a citation for contempt. Tom Kuhn, who started his own yo-yo company, has built a 256-pound yo-yo with a diameter of fifty inches. In 1985, the NASA space shuttle Discovery carried a yo-yo aboard as part of its "Toys in Space" project. The toy blasted into space again in 1992 on the space shuttle Atlantis, where it was used in an educational video.

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