And now it's time for Who Smarted? Step right up, folks.
Step right up and prepare to be amazed. I can't believe it's the amazing Yo-Yo Mama.
Ooh, I can't wait to see what she does this time.
She's the greatest. Psst. Hey. Smarty pants, I'm at a local carnival, and for some strange reason, there's a fairly decent crowd gathered to see a nice, but fairly ordinary lady.
Hey kid, who is this yo-yo mama and why is she so amazing?
Are you kidding? She's the yo-yo mama. She's only the greatest yo-yo-er ever.
Watch! Here she goes! Ooh! See? Right. I mean, I guess it's kind of cool. i don't know i always thought of yo-yo as a kind of lame boring old-timey toy no offense but i mean it's just a plastic circle and a string seems pretty boring to me Well, well, well.
What do you know? It seems we have a yo-yo hater in the crowd.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not a hater. I'm a trusty narrator who's just curious, that's all.
Look, I have nothing against yo-yos, per se, But they just don't seem all that exciting to me.
Wow! You are just... Wow! No! No, no! No booze!
He's entitled to his opinion, even if it's wrong.
But seriously, I'll have you know, Mr. Narrator, that yo-yos are in fact very exciting.
Not only that, but they've got a long and fascinating history.
From their humble beginnings to taking the world by storm.
And as you just saw me demonstrate, you can do some pretty cool tricks with him.
Well, I doubt you could do cool tricks with him.
Cool tricks? You mean like up and down or side to side?
It doesn't look very hard. I'm sure I could do it.
In fact, I know I could do it. Okay. Be my guest.
Catch! Okay, I just take this string and let it go and...
Um, why isn't it coming back up? Here, let me try again.
Oops, um, hold on. Wait, wait, I got it, I got it.
Nope, don't got it. Hmm, I think it's broken.
I think you don't know what you're doing.
I think you're right. I think I may have been wrong about yo-yos.
No, no, nobody laugh at him. I think this is a perfect time for a teachable moment.
How would you like to learn about all things yo-yo?
I think I'd like that. Like, how was the yo-yo invented?
Are all yo-yos the same? How do you do tricks with it?
And why is it called a yo-yo in the first place?
All right, smarty pants, get ready for the ups and downs and ins and outs of yo-yoing as we take another big whiff of science and history on...
Who smarted? Who smarted? Who's smart? Is it you?
Is it me? Is it science? Or history? Listen up, everyone.
We make smarting lots of fun on Who's Smarted?
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Uh, where are we, Yo-Yo Mama? I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
Kansas? I was in Kansas two weeks ago. Were you there?
No, no, it's just an expression. Sorry, didn't mean to lose you.
Oh, and speaking of lost, where are we? Why, we're in ancient Greece!
Oh, right. I should have known. So many things began in ancient Greece.
Was the yo-yo one of them? You tell me.
Look over yonder. Say, is that young boy playing with a yo-yo?
Why, yes. Yes, he is. That's because the yo-yo has existed since at least 440 BCE.
Ah, so they were invented in ancient Greece.
Um, that's not what I said. What I said was, we know for sure they had yo-yos in ancient Greece.
Smarty Pants, how do you think they could possibly know that?
We know that because even today there exists painted vases from ancient Greece. many of which are in museums that have drawings of children playing with yo-yos.
Whoa. No. Whoa, whoa. Whoa. Okay, I've got to admit, that is pretty cool.
So were these ancient yo-yos very different from the yo-yos of today?
Yes! And no. The basic principle was the same, but they were made of very different materials than today.
Smarty Pants, what do you think yo-yos in ancient Greece were made from?
Was it A, wood, B, metal, or C, terracotta? which is a clay-based material used to make pottery and statues.
The answer is all three, though the terracotta ones were most likely just for looking at and not playing with them.
Yeah, I could see that being a problem. Okay, so we know yo-yos existed in ancient Greece.
Do we have any idea who actually invented the yo-yo?
Why, we do not. Why? It seems yo-yos existed for so long and were so widespread among the ancient world that it's really hard to say.
The best guess has them likely being invented in ancient China.
While that remains unknown, we do know who brought them to the United States where they became a big hit.
Ooh, tell us more. For that, we can thank a Filipino immigrant named Pedro Flores.
He came to the United States in 1915 and started a yo-yo company in California in 1928.
Interesting. But how did he know so much about yo-yos?
Smarty Pants, do you have any ideas? The answer is simple.
Yo-Yo's had already been super popular in his native Philippines for hundreds of years.
True or false, Smarty Pants? This is where the name Yo-Yo came from.
The answer is... True! The name yo-yo comes from the local Ilocano language of the northern Philippines.
Aha! Now this is the factoid I've been waiting for.
Why is a yo-yo called a yo-yo? What does yo-yo even mean?
Does it mean A, come come, B, go go, or C, where'd you go?
What do you think, smarty pants? Yeah, I'm not sure either.
Come on, trusty. You can do it. Think about how a yo-yo works.
Uh, I guess of those three, the one that makes the most sense is A, Come Come.
Oh, trusty. You're right. Coming back is exactly what a yo-yo does when you release it.
Well, maybe not you. Yeah, yeah, I haven't mastered that yet, but we'll get to that later.
For now, I want to know more about Pedro and his California yo-yo factory.
Well, it opened up in 1928 in a part of California known as Santa Barbara.
At first, Pedro produced only 12 yo-yos.
But in just one year? He had three factories, a staff of 600, and he turned out over 300,000 yo-yos a year.
Wow, that's a lot of yo-yos. The yo-yo must have been very popular.
Oh, it was. And one of the reasons Flores Yo-yos were so popular because of a simple innovation or change that made them more fun to play with.
Hmm, I wonder what that could be. Was it, uh, they weren't made of ceramic?
No, they weren't made of ceramic. But that's not it.
You see, traditional yo-yos had a knot at the axle.
That's the part of the yo-yo between the two discs where the string winds around.
Okay. But Pedro Flores' yo-yo had a loop tied there instead of a knot.
This simple change meant that now, instead of just having your yo-yo go down, then up, then down, then up, you could also do...
Yo-yo tricks! Ooh, teach me a trick. Teach me a trick.
Teach me. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Weren't you the one who said, and I quote, I thought they were kind of lame and boring and old-timey?
Um, maybe. Maybe. It's just a plastic circle and a string.
Look, that was earlier. My opinion since then has... yo-yoed.
I'm sorry, okay? I just want to learn some tricks or just how to make it come come back to me.
Well, I guess I could teach you in the smarty pants a couple of tricks.
How'd you like to learn to sleeper and to walk the dog?
Uh, Smarty Pants, do you know how to do those tricks?
Well, we're going to hear all about them right after this quick break and a word from our sponsor.
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Now back to who smarted. Ah, I almost had it.
Keep practicing. You'll get there. Right.
Well, let's just pretend I'm good enough to start learning tricks.
What were those two tricks you mentioned and how are they done?
Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is you don't have to be a yo-yo expert like me. to do either of these relatively easy tricks.
What's the bad news? Both the sleeper and the walking the dog tricks are easier to learn by seeing them than hearing them.
So I'll describe them, but I suggest the smarty pants with the help of an adult.
Look up both these yo-yo tricks and more online.
Fair point. The sleeper is when you make the yo-yo spin for a long time at the end of the string before pulling it back up.
And walking the dog is when you do the sleeper.
Only this time, you're going to let the yo-yo touch the ground so that it spins forward, which looks like you're walking a dog.
Gotcha. Okay, I'll practice those later.
In the meantime, I need to know more about the yo-yo craze that took America by storm once Pedro Flores opened his yo-yo factory.
What happened next? What didn't happen? First, a rich businessman named Donald Duncan thought he could make yo-yos easier. even more popular than Pedro Flores.
So he bought Pedro's company from him, making Pedro a very rich man.
Wait, I think I've heard of Dunkin' Yo-Yos.
Have you, Smarty Pants? If you have, it's because that was his plan.
One of the first things he did was make lots and lots of ads for Yo-Yo so more people knew what it was.
The new high-performance transaction yo-yo from Dunkin' Spits three times longer than other yo-yos But here's the thing since this was still a fairly new toy, even if people saw Yo-Yo in an ad or in a store.
Not everyone knew how to actually play with it.
So Duncan and Pedro traveled around the country giving yo-yo lessons to kids.
Whoa. Soon after, they began promoting yo-yo contests where kids could actually show off their yo-yo tricks and win prizes.
Ooh. I see. So Pedro and Duncan worked together?
They sure did. Duncan took charge of the business end while Pedro became a yo-yo ambassador teaching kids how to play with yo-yos.
Aww, that's so cool! You bet! But things were about to get serious.
The yo-yo was becoming such a hit toy in 1932, Donald Duncan actually had the name yo-yo trademarked.
That meant other companies making yo-yos couldn't call them yo-yos anymore.
Hey, smarty pants, which of these is an actual name that a competitor named their version of the yo-yo?
A, spinny disk. B, whirligig. Or C, twisty thing.
If you said B, whirligig, you're right. But that was just one competitor.
Others called them twirlers or returning tops.
Interesting. But wait a minute. If the name Yo-Yo was trademarked, why do we call all Yo-Yos Yo-Yos today?
Good observation, trustee. By the 1960s, yo-yos, the name, and the toy... were both so popular and interchangeable that everyone simply referred to all yo-yos as yo-yos.
Because of that, All the other companies wanted to call their versions yo-yos too.
They began appealing Duncan's case in court.
And in 1965, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled against Duncan and his trademark.
They said, trademarking the term yo-yo was no longer valid because the word yo-yo was now part of our language.
Ah, kind of like Q-tips and chapstick. Exactly.
From then on, they could call their whirligigs, twirlers, or returning tops a yo-yo.
Okay, now that everyone could call a yo-yo a yo-yo, then what happened?
In the 1970s and 1980s? Yo-yo makers added ball bearings to the inside of some yo-yos to help reduce friction, allow for longer spinning, and enable yo-yo masters like me the ability to do even more advanced tricks.
The new high-performance Dunkin' Transaction Yo-Yo!
Whip it! But other than adding some small weights and being made of plastic instead of other materials, yo-yos have... haven't really changed much throughout the years.
Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's a good motto.
But while yo-yos have remained virtually unchanged, Yo-yo competitors have gotten way bigger.
Like the World Yo-Yo Contest, a.k.a. Yo-Yo Con. which is the biggest yo-yo competition in the world.
It takes place in a different city every year, and dozens of countries compete.
Ooh, that sounds cool. I bet there are videos online you can check out Smarty Pants with an adult's help or permission.
Sounds like someone doesn't think yo-yos are so lame, boring, or old-timey after all.
Nope, you were right. I was wrong. I just wish I could learn how to do it.
It seems so simple. All you have to do is toss it out and...
Hey! I did it! I'm doing it! I knew you'd get it eventually, trusty.
Remember, yo-yos are just like life. You've got your ups and downs.
And sometimes you have to walk the dog. A big shout out to some serious Smarty fans, Julian and Zuri in Broomfield, Colorado.
Thanks so much for smarting with Who Smarted?
And for reaching out to me and suggesting episodes.
We'll get to that skiing episode soon. In the meantime, keep on smarting with us, Smarty Pants.
This episode Yo-Yo's was written by Phil, Rock the Baby Jeremy, and voiced by Sheila Morris, Rain Morris, Adam, Trix Davis, and Jerry Colbert.
Technical direction and sound design by Josh, Walk the Dog, Han.
Our associate producer is Max Kamikaze Kamaski.
The theme song is by Brian, Shoot the Moon Suarez, with lyrics written and performed by Adam Tex Davis.
Who Smarted? was created and produced by Adam Tex-Davis and Jerry Colbert.
This has been an Atomic Entertainment production.
Too smart and...
