Trampoline Story: How a world war saved play
Trampolines and Play are synonymous. Can you associate any emotion other than happiness or joy with bouncing on a trampoline?
It’s something I’ve always wanted to do ever since I was a child. I finally got to bounce on a trampoline in 2018. If you haven’t done it, I’d recommend you give it a try! It’s an amazing feeling!
The story of the trampoline itself is something that I found extremely intriguing. It is one of play, whimsy, invention, iteration, and international recognition!
Intro
George Nissen, was born in Iowa in 1914. He began training in gymnastics joining the school team and a local YMCA team for Tumbling. Soon he also took to learning diving.
This fascination meant that he and his family would visit circuses to watch trapeze artists. There he noticed that they would fly through the air and land on a net and sometimes be bounced back up to do a few more moves when in the air.
He wondered whether a net like this could also help gymnasts keep bouncing and perform more complex maneuvers.
When he was 16, he began working in his parents’ garage trying to build a bouncing apparatus. He used scrap steel to build a frame and stretched some canvas over it.
After several iterations and experiments, he built the first functional rig and brought it with him to a summer camp where he was working as a camp counselor. The bouncing apparatus was a huge hit with everyone at the camp!
Along the way, he went on to win intercollegiate athletics 3 times while he was completing his Bachelor’s degree in Business.
After 1937, along with two friends, he started Three Leonardos where they took the bouncing apparatus to do acrobatic shows on it. While traveling in Mexico, he learned that the word for the diving board in Spanish was el trampoline. He then went on to register the word ‘Trampoline’ for his invention.
World War 2
While most of the interest was to watch the Three Leonardo shows, very few people were really placing orders for Trampolines. Nissen decided to pitch the idea to the military saying the trampoline could help practice parachute landings, diving, helicopter pilot landing maneuvers, etc. The US Military liked the idea and ended up placing about 100 orders, saving the invention in a way. (But the material used was nylon instead of canvas. )
And thus this playful invention became sustainable because of a war.
In 1943, Nissen joined the Navy. After the war, he incorporated his business, the Nissen Trampoline Corporation, and began heavily promoting the trampoline. National “rebound tumbling” competitions began to take place in 1947. He married Annie, a Dutch acrobat, in 1950, and established a branch of his company in England in 1956. He traveled all over the world to promote the sport of rebound tumbling and watched the trampoline market grow soon there were more than 50 manufacturers of devices similar to his.
Nissen created games incorporating the trampoline such as Spaceball, which became very popular in the 1960s. He also broadened his product line, including gymnastic equipment such as balance beams and parallel bars. He acquired a number of patents on improvements to these types of items. His company was sold and eventually ceased to exist in the 1980s, but he continued to invent, with creations such as the Bunsaver Air Cushion, an inflatable cushion designed for spectators to use on the bleachers at sporting events; and the Laptop Exercycle, for passengers to use for exercise while traveling on long airplane flights.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20040502164844/http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/nissen.html
While the Trampoline became Popular, Nissen’s Company didn’t go the same way
By the late 1950s, “jump centers” became an attraction at gas stations around the country — kids could hop on trampolines while their parents gassed up. “It was a craze like Hula-Hoops,” says Nissen’s daughter, Dagmar Nissen Munn.
Then came the lawsuits. In the 1970s, several children suffered paralysis or were maimed after falling on Nissen equipment. “It was very sad for him,” Munn said of her father. Eventually, the Nissen Corporation could not afford to insure against these claims, and in 1989 the company shuttered its factory.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/who-made-that-trampoline.html
Spaceball, Kangaroos, Olympics and beyond
The association with the US Military ended up with a training exercise involving a three-sided trampoline based game which later went on to be called Spaceball.
Nissen even went on to put a trampoline on a pyramid, and bounce on it with a Kangaroo in his ceaseless promotional activities that brought trampolining to national fame.
While his company shut down, Nielsen lived long enough to see Trampolining be welcomed into the Olympics in Australia
The next time you see or jump onto a Trampoline, I hope you remember this incredible story of a playful invention that took decades to evolve into something very commonplace today!
Prasanth.
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/who-made-that-trampoline.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-trampoline-came-be-180974343/
https://web.archive.org/web/20040502164844/http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/nissen.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304703104575174230454495048