The yo-yo is an all-American toy that is familiar to just about everyone. It seems with every generation, it pops up and is extremely popular for a season then fades away, only to reappear again (often with a new marketing campaign and new technology). This is called the yo-yo effect. (Kidding!)
Since my kids are now into yo-yos, I thought I'd do a little digging into the etymology of the word. Turns out the word is from the Philippines. In fact, it's from Ilocano, in northern Luzon. Were yo-yos invented by the Filipinos?
A little more digging around and I discovered that yo-yos have been around for a long, long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates from 550B.C. and was made of terra cotta. It's from Greece and there is a painting on a vase that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. Naturally, it wasn't called a yo-yo then.
In the 1800s, the French referred to the toy as a bandalore while the English referred to it as a quiz. Then in 1916, Scientific American publishes an article about Filipino toys and makes mention of the yo-yo. But the watershed year for the modern yo-yo was 1923 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino living in the US, makes a yo-yo in the tradition of his forefathers. In 1928, he opens his first yo-yo factory in Santa Barbara. The yo-yo craze takes off, helped along by Flores's yo-yo contests.
Then along comes Donald Duncan who sees the potential and buys out the factory and the brand name from Flores. Duncan renames the product as a Duncan yo-yo. And with clever marketing, the yo-yo phenomenon really took off. That's the story of the yo-yo. I like the idea that such an "American toy" actually has roots going back to the Philippines and further back into ancient Greece.
Find out more about yo-yo history from the Duncan website.
