Reinventing the yo-yo: a simple toy gets seriously techno

Science News, April 17, 2004 by Peter Weiss

Got an extra 400 bucks? How about spending it on a yo-yo? A really nice yo-yo, a state-of-the-art, forged-magnesium-alloy, ultralong-spinning yo-yo. Later this year, Duncan Toys, a seller of inexpensive yo-yos for 75 years, will roll out this new high-end yo-yo, which the company plans to call the Freehand Mg. It comes with the latest in axle and bearing technology, and its balance is ensured with precision tooling to micrometer tolerances by a computer-controlled lathe.

"It's gonna be awesome; says champion yo-yoer Stephen D. Brown, Duncan's chief yo-yo designer. "I've gotten a few prototypes of it. It rules!"

Not so long ago, Duncan sold only $2 or $3 yo-yos, many of them not much different from the product that the company offered in 1929, when Donald F. Duncan Sr. bought a fledgling yo-yo company. In the last decade, however, the company has been scrambling to keep up with a wave of technological innovation launched by other yo-yo aficionados and small manufacturers. Those developments have been transforming yo-yos into precision instruments.

But isn't a $400 yo-yo a bit over the top? Even Brown admits that its premium materials and precision of the machining go well beyond what's needed for even the highest levels of play. But with those additions, Brown says, the company has made a topnotch toy for dedicated yo-yo fans and competitors, and the high-tech plaything does double duty as a publicity gimmick.

Manufacturers are in the midst of a "science-innovation war," says Dale Oliver, a yo-yo producer and champion yo-yo player. "It's the search for the Holy Grail of the yo-yo."

Fans today commonly pay $40 for a competition-grade yo-yo. It can sport features such as minimal-friction axles, a string-grabbing response system for enhancing tricks, and modular construction for easy repairs and upgrades.

The high-teching of yo-yos has fomented a revolution in the ways in which people play with yo-yos. Today's hotshots put their ever-spinning yo-yos through long-lasting sequences of leaps, bounces, and swings as they weave the string on their fingers into patterns resembling configurations in the game cat's cradle.

Yo-yoing has gone extreme.

GETTING SOME SLEEP As mostly everyone knows, a yo-yo is a puck-shaped toy, usually made of wood or plastic, that's split down the middle except for an axle at the center that holds the two halves together. By means of a string in contact with the axle, a player can make the yo-yo fall and spin under the influence of gravity, unwinding the string as it descends. The yo-yo then rises as its rotation makes it rewind the string around its axle.

Yo-yos have been around for millennia. Historians have found evidence in a painting on a Greek bowl from around 500 B.C., for example. No one knows whether it was the ancient Greeks or Chinese or someone else who invented this toy.

The main difference between high-tech yo-yos today and all the yo-yos that went before is the time that the modern ones can spin at the ends of their strings. In yo-yo parlance, that's called sleeping. A few decades ago, a good player could make a yo-yo sleep for 15 to 20 seconds. Last October at the World Yo-Yo Championships in Chico, Calif., Rick Wyatt made his yo-yo sleep for 14.03 minutes, a new record.

For a yo-yo to sleep at all is a fairly modern development. Although the history is murky, it seems that right up to the early 1900s, strings were attached directly to taxies of such toys, which the French called "emigrettes" and the British called "quizzes". As it reached the end of its string, the simple yo-yo immediately would start its ascent.

By 1928, Pedro Flores had introduced to the United States a toy, called a yo-yo, from his native Philippines. With it arrived the key innovation behind today's versions: looping the string around the axle so that the axle could spin freely within the loop. Since then, yo-yo popularity has had its ups and downs, reaching its latest peak in 1998, largely through successful commercial promotions.

When a yo-yo sleeps, a world of tricks opens up. Those include rolling the dangling, spinning yo-yo along the ground "walking the dog", swinging it back and forth through a triangle of string "rock the baby, and swinging the flinging yo-yo in giant circles at the end of the string "around the world".

When a yo-yo sleeps for minutes, rather than seconds, the number of possible tricks climbs. "For 50 years, there were probably between 150 and 200 tricks," says Oliver, who runs Spintastics Skill Toys in Euless, Texas. He estimates the repertoire of tricks now tops 2,000. What's more, trick complexity has soared.

RIP VAN WINKLED Two modifications give today's yo-yos their remarkable sleepiness. Manufacturers have redistributed the weight across the disks and have practically banned friction between the yo-yo's spinning axle and the string.

Yo-yos sleep longer when their weight is concentrated at the outer edges, thereby increasing the rotational inertia. That has the effect of boosting resistance to starting the toy's spinning, but it also increases an already-spinning yo-yo's tendency to keep spinning.