Stuff You Should Know - How Trampolines Work

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

The world’s loved trampolines since they were invented by a pair of acrobats in Iowa in the 30s – so much so, trampolining is now an Olympic event. What people don’t love about trampolines is their propensity to cause paralysis, brain injuries and death. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brown, and there's Jerry over there.

And we're just bouncing around with giddiness about this episode on trampolines. That's all that coming from a mile away. You did not. Yeah, I knew there would be some jumpy bouncy metaphor. Well, you know me very well after these 11 years. 11 years. That's good, you didn't disappoint.

Good, I don't like disappointing you, Chuck, it feels really rotten. Yeah, especially since I'm wearing a t-shirt that says you've disappointed me again. Josh, and it's got that pointing finger right at me, thanks. Come on, Josh. Yeah, it actually is three dimensional. It comes out of the shirt just so you know I'm pointing at you.

I can see it, it's like a magic eye poster. Oh, goodness. So speaking of goodness, Chuck, we're talking about trampolines, but it's funny that I would say goodness because it turns out trampolines have a lot of badness to them. Yeah, they're danger pits. Yeah, they are, big time.

Well, pits if it's one of those built into the ground things. Yeah, trampoline in a pit. Have you ever been on a trampoline? Sure, I had one in high school. Oh, really, you owned one? Yeah, it was inherited from the people who previously owned the house. That old move.

And they took maybe half of the springs with them when they moved apparently because you could make contact with the ground pretty easy on that one. Yeah. And actually, if you go onto my Instagram, JoshOmClark, you can see a little photo spread of me bouncing around a trampoline park,

totally oblivious to the amount of danger I was actually in. What? What do you mean what? I mean, I gotta look that up. I didn't know that existed. I talk to you about my Instagram account like every couple of days.

Well, I mean, pictures of the trampoline A and B, I'm not on Instagram at all. So I gotta like, you know. What? You have to what? Well, I don't know. I mean, how do you find something on Instagram if you're not on Instagram? Can you just Google?

I think you have to go, yeah, you gotta, no, you can, you can, you can just Google it, I believe. Okay. I'll show you later. Okay. But anyway, it's pretty great, you're gonna love it. But there was one point in time where I landed flat, and this is in the photos, flat on the back of my head,

upside down, and there was a crack and everything. And I was like, whoa, that was crazy. But after researching this chuck, I was like, I can't wait to die and go to heaven if there is such a thing in place. So I can be like, I've gotta know, how close was I to full body paralysis that one time at that trampoline park?

And I guarantee when they tell me, I'm gonna shudder with just, I don't know, some sort of proximity fear, maybe. I don't know what else you would call that kind of thing. Or what if they say here, I'm gonna issue a ticket number and you're gonna have to go down that wing where they handle near death experiences. That's fine, I'd go, I'd go spend some time.

It's eternity after all, I've got time to kill. It feels like it would be very bureaucratic. I could see that, sure. Yeah. Do you have a pencil pushing? I haven't, you know, I had trampoline experience and my only trampoline experience really was elementary school.

When we had a, you know how in elementary school, at least at mine, they would have, I don't know, you do like one sport for a month or something. Yeah, I remember that. We did trampolines for a little while and our gym teacher was a legit gymnast of some kind and he could do all the things. And we had the 1980s, you know, rectangular,

they weren't even the mats, as we'll learn, we'll learn all about the trampoline in a minute, but the little bouncy part you bounce on, it was not solid, it was like a checkerboard. I don't understand. Well, it wasn't a solid piece of fabric, it was a weave. Okay, but I mean like.

With little tiny, with little squares in between. So like a net. Yeah. I have never seen what you're describing. Yeah. Wow. Like a token go through it. So Chuck, let me ask you this then.

Okay. In that, when you would rotate out for new things, like every month. Yeah, yeah. Did you guys ever do the thing where like every, you'd have a parachute and everybody would pull and lift the parachute up at once and it would be somebody's turn to run underneath

and you had to make it to the other side before the parachute covered you? I remember that sort of yes. Okay. Now, had your gym teacher done the opposite of that where you put somebody in the middle of the parachute on top and everybody pulls it, taught so that the person has launched it in the air.

The Lebowski, yes. Yeah, the Lebowski. You would have been doing what is one of the only things that somebody can point to as a predecessor to the trampoline because it is almost virtually its own invention. Yeah, I love how you brought that around, my friend. Thank you.

The Grabster wrote this for us and he does make a point that even before that, people just liked anything they could bounce on. It's just sort of, it seems intuitive as a human that that's fun and thrilling. Right. Whether it's like, hey, this log that fell across the creek has some spring to it and that's fun.

What? You know? Sure. A board that spans an opening. What was the opening called in that horror story? Have you lost your mind? I remember the Halloween horror thing that we did with the creek and the, what was that called?

I don't, oh, oh. Remember there was a word and you even looked it up. Yeah, and it was a specific place. Anyway. Yeah, I don't remember. A board spanning that. You're talking about bridges. We're talking about trampolines today.

You realize, we're talking trampolines. I'm so tired. I'm like hallucinating. So it's coming through loud and clear, buddy. Good. So there's the cloth or fabric that you could launch somebody up in the air. The Lebowski.

There was a log apparently that people jumped on. But there was this kind of, people figured out that it was kind of fun to get up into the air. And I saw it, it was one of those things you know, we're always warning people when they ask us how to research that if you see the same thing everywhere on the internet, it's probably wrong. I saw that about how there was,

there's in China, Iran and Egypt, there's depictions of people using trampoline like devices. Didn't see anything beyond that. So it's probably made up. But we can point to when the trampoline wasn't vented. And it was actually fairly recent. Like what we think of the trampoline came about in I think like the 1930s over the period of a few years.

Yeah, now are we gonna tell people what a trampoline is first? Or are we gonna talk about the history and then tell people what a trampoline is? No, I'm glad you did this Chuck, because yes, not only do we have what a trampoline is, I got a little bit of physics too to throw into. I had a feeling.

Okay. So a trampoline, if you've never driven out into rural Georgia, that's where I see them. Yeah, the people in the rural areas like the trampolines, there's not a lot to do out in rural areas. I think that's the deal. I was kind of wondering like, why do I see those when I drive out to the country,

but I don't see them as much in urban areas. And I think of space A and B is just a very cheap way to be like, here you go kids, knock yourself out for the next 10 years, literally. Literally, yeah. All right, so trampoline is a frame that has a bouncy surface in the middle of it. The frame is very rigid, usually steel frame.

And then the mat as it's called is held together with these tight coiled springs, or not held together, but strapped to the frame. And it's not, you know, it's those springs is where you get the bounce. It's not the actual material, although that could have a little bounce to it. It's got a little give, because it's woven.

It's like a seatbelt. Yeah. Super tightly woven fabric that mat is. Right, and that's the larger trampolines. They do have the little smaller, like I guess people used to use them to exercise and stuff like that. Did you not have one of those?

No, we never had one of those. I think I had to do it with Jazzercise maybe, or something like that. I think so. I've seen those more often at like NBA games when they bring the guys out in between the timeouts or whatever, and they do the high flying dunks.

Yeah, those are awesome to see. Do you like those? I love watching those, sure. I never get up during half time because of that. Yeah. All right. I'm strapped to my seat. What they should do to me, in my opinion,

at every sports game ever during the half time, the only thing they should do is have the little league teams play. Oh, that gets you, huh? It's just the cutest thing ever. Like I don't need to see a dance routine or some corny anything, but whenever they have like the five-year-olds

out there playing basketball in the big court, or football, that's all I need. What about the guy who climbs an increasingly high stack of chairs? I like that guy a lot. It's not bad. Okay. Is it spinning a plate?

No, no. He just, sometimes he'll do handstands on the top. It's really thrilling. Yeah, I'll take that. You need to watch more half time shows. But okay, so basically what you described was a trampoline, that's a trampoline. There's like variations to it for sure,

but there's competition trampolines. They tend to be rectangular. Right. They actually have specific dimensions because they're competitions, so they have to all kind of have like a universal size, but usually something like 10 feet by 17 feet. I think the ones that they use in college

are a little smaller, but not too much. Did you watch any of that stuff? Yeah, it's in trancing. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Because it's not a slow motion when you're the one doing the bouncing, but when you're watching it from afar, because the mind kind of makes the point

from when you bounce to when you next bounce again is kind of like one complete cycle, it does kind of take a second. So it does kind of seem like the whole thing's happening in slow motion to the mind. Yeah, it is very lulling. Maybe that's why I'm tired. I think it is.

Because you were lulled to sleep by trampoline watching. So yeah, the rectangular ones are the competition, but when you go out to the country is when you'll see the round ones, the octagonal ones and the hexagonal ones. Yeah, and the ones that you see like that people have bought for their home use, they're very frequently,

they're going to have nets around the sides. So that if you start to go off the side of the trampoline, the net catches you and throws you back into the center, the mat of the trampoline. Which we did not have when we were children. No, we did not. It was your off, it's called thinning the herd, I think was the model I had, the herd thinner.

Yeah, in fact, they even had a landmote full of nails and sharp glass surrounding the trampoline. That's right. And armadillos with leprosy. Oh, wow. But the ones in competition, they don't have nets. And there's a really good reason why, not because they're daredevils and thrill seekers,

but because the people in competitions tend to jump so high that the nets wouldn't do any good. They just go right over the side. Unless they had super tall nets. I guess so, but I mean, once you get into nets that are too tall, it becomes kind of cost prohibitive. Yeah, plus it ended up looking like one of those indoor skydiving tubes.

Right, which we've done. That was fun. That was kind of fun. And that footage is lost forever, I can't find it anyway. Oh, thank God. Oh, I like that one. Was it me or you that got thrown against the side at the end?

It was me. For those of you that don't know what we're talking about, we did some Toyota commercials years ago. It was funny, we were much more marketable early on than we are now. Yeah. But yeah, they flew us out to California and we did a Toyota commercial

as we were both indoor skydiving. And it was pretty interesting and fun. Yeah, I think my line was, you're just telling me that now. And then I lose control and bump into the side of the wall. That's harder than it looks. You don't just, you know, it's very taxing on the muscles. Really is. It was fun though too, I had a good time.

Should we take a break? No. No? No, because we're not done with this part yet. Okay. Okay, you ready? Yes. We're getting there, Chuck.

By the way, I should probably explain to everybody, Chuck thinks that this is going to be like the, Oh no. The Jackhammer episode, which he and I agree is our worst episode ever. I think that it's patently wrong. So let's prove them wrong, everybody. Okay.

Okay, so there's one other thing I wanted to talk about before we go to break, Chuck. Okay. Aside from where the trampoline is, which I feel like we've done a pretty good job of defining it to this point, right? Yes. The physics of a trampoline

are actually pretty fascinating because if you look at the outside of the trampoline, it's like you said, that mat, that fabric that you actually jump on has a little bit of give. But where the trampoline gets the most give is from those springs that are attaching the fabric mat to the frame, correct?

Okay. So what that means then is because there's all these springs working together, the trampoline itself is actually physics wise, a giant spring. And the reason why when you jump on a trampoline, it shoots you back up into the air is because you're combining two kinds of energy,

kinetic energy, which is the movement, the energy from you jumping up and down on something. And then there's also potential, elastic potential energy, which is the stored energy those springs have when they're extended, they wanna go back to their normal shape. And so as all of this energy gets stretched out

and then goes back to its normal tension, it directs all that stored energy and that energy that's turned into actual energy toward the center, which is where you happen to be and it launches you back up into the air. So more Tracy Wilson is smiling. Right, exactly. One more thing, mouth parts.

So I think now we can take a break, don't you? Yes. Okay. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Stuff You Should Go"] Stuff you should go. All right, Chuck, we're back. And I think it's time to talk a little history of trampolines.

Yeah, so earlier you teased that this was sort of an invention of its own, like there was no predecessor really to the trampoline aside from Inuit people tossing people up in the air, Lebowski style. Right. So the credit for the trampoline is as roundly, I don't think there's anyone that disputes this, right? No, no, it's George Nissen for sure.

Yeah, George Nissen and a man named Larry Clark Griswold. All right. And we'll get to their story and how Larry figured in. But it was really George Nissen's brainchild between 1930 and 1936, like you said earlier. It took a little while to get it just right. But when George was a little boy in 1930, he was 16, I guess, medium sized boy.

Sure. And he was watching the trapeze artists. And you know how they have that net and they leap off the trapeze at the end and they do a flourish and they land on the net and then they usually do a couple of little flips and then land on the net again. And then that cool move where they hold on to the net

and flip out and land on their feet very gracefully. Right, right. Little George saw this and was like, everyone's wild about this trapeze. He's like, the best part is that end. When they get on that net, I should make one of those. Yeah, he wanted one where you didn't just bounce once basically get one bounce but that you can just keep bouncing

and bouncing and bouncing. And he's like, I'm gonna go home and make something like this because he was a gymnast at the time already. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense once you know that, I think. Exactly, he was a gymnast who went to circus performances and was inspired by that net. And so he actually went home, I guess spare metal parts

from like a junkyard from what I can tell. He got his hands on a canvas mat and affixed the two things together and it broke his ankles. Basically, it did not work very well at first. I mean, it had some bounce to it. It was as far as like an early proof of concept goes, it worked in that respect, but that was about it. And he called it a bouncing rig

and he put it down in his parents' basement, I believe, and then went off to the University of Iowa to study business and joined the gymnastics team. And joining the gymnastics team at the University of Iowa turned out to be pretty fateful because it was there that he met the man who would become his co-inventor in the trampoline Larry Griswald. Yeah, I wonder if he, if leaving that trampoline prototype

in his parents' basement was, it had to been the first instance of what would be hundreds of thousands of many trampolines left in their parents' basements. Yeah, apparently George Nissen's dad was not all that happy about the trampoline thing. He was not a true believer as far as the trampoline was concerned.

All right, so he goes to school, like you said. He met coach Larry Griswald. We call him Clark around here. And I guess he thought this was a good idea. He shared it with his coach and he's like, you know what, I'm a little older, have a little more experience. Why don't you let me help you with this thing?

And they built a different prototype. This time they had a nylon mat. They use grommets, which obviously made it a little sturdier. And the springs, they subbed in bicycle inner tubes. Yeah, because I'm not even sure that he used springs. He just somehow attached the canvas to the frame. So when they added bicycle tubes, that gave it way more give and it worked a lot better.

And they knew that they were on to something just with this. I'm sure they knew it could be improved, but this was a pretty good first start that they worked on at the University of Iowa. Yeah, so between then and I guess 1937, they introduced the steel coils in 1934. And they really had the trampoline going at this point. Although it was not called the trampoline

until Nissen in 1937 traveled all over North America performing routines under the name, with two of his friends under the name, the three Leonardo's, which is a very 1937 thing to do. It really is. And they went to Mexico and they learned that there was a name, a Spanish name, for this bouncing rig like the springboard

called a trampoline, or I guess an in without the E on the end. Right. And he said, hey, I'm just gonna add an E on the end, trademark that thing. And I've appropriated something from another culture. I read on educatorpages.com that he, while down in Mexico, he learned the Mexican word for springboard was trampoline. Yeah.

The Mexican word. Oh, that's what they said? On educatorpages.com. I was just disappointed enough that I wanted to point it out. Well, I mean, there are Mexican specific words. This is not one of them. Okay. Just try it.

This is Spanish word. I gotcha, I was just trying to make that clear. So, George, this is great. I've been calling this thing a bouncing rig, but this trampoline word is way better. I'm gonna call this a trampoline like Chuck said, and trademark it. And that was a huge, huge improvement for this thing

because they had something by this time. They had a really great invention going, but now they had a name and kind of a catchy name, and one that even made sense as well. A springboard, by the way, is one of those, you know those little things you jump on to get onto the pole or the pommel horse? Yeah.

That's a springboard. Yeah, or what's it called the vault? Is that what they use for the vault? Yes. Right. Yeah. Okay, so this is kind of what inspired him to say that is somewhat tied to this.

It's a great name. I'll probably never sell one of these in Mexico. I'm just gonna take it, and like you said, appropriate it. So now he had a great invention, he had a name, and he and Griswold founded the Griswold Nissen Trampoline and Tumbling Company in 1942, and started selling these things, not exactly like hotcakes at first.

I believe they sold 10 in their first year, and George Nissen's dad suggested that they had satisfied the world's need for trampolines by this time in the first 10. I'm telling you, he wasn't really on board. He's kind of snarky. But his son ended up really rubbing the dog poop in his dad's face because trampolines

started to take off pretty quick. So they both agreed, though, the two partners, Griswold Nissen, that in order to sell this thing, they had to demonstrate it. It's not the kind of thing you can just, it was so revolutionary, my friend, that they couldn't just throw an ad up. But at the time, Griswold, the former coach,

had a little touring routine, a diving. There were both divers. I don't think we mentioned that, like competitive divers. George Nissen was too? Oh yeah, Nissen, not a professional, but he did two things. He did gymnastics and diving.

Oh, okay. So Griswold was touring the country doing a comedy act, a diving board comedy act called, what was it, the Diving Fool? The Diving Fool, it has to be seen to be believed. Yeah, so I kind of do the same routine every summer at neighborhood pools. He'd stagger around pretending to be drunk at a pool

and falling off the diving board and doing all these tricks and things like that. The difference is you're not pretending, right? I am a drunken diving fool. Get a couple of bloody Caesars in you? That's right. Although you just call them Bloody Marys, right? Well, what was the Caesar at part?

The Clamato. Oh, yeah, I never knew that. Yes, you did. I told you that years ago. Well, no, I mean, I never knew it until you told me years ago. Oh, okay, gotcha. But in any case, the Diving Fool

was something that Griswold was actually making a little bit of money at. And I guess he was touring the country and wooing the ladies. So he was like, I kind of like this over trampolining. And so are you interested in buying out the shares of this company? And Nissen said, sure.

Yeah, why not? Well, thanks a lot, Chump. I will take over this company myself. And then Nissen started touring around and this is when the demonstrations really took hold. He and his wife, who was an acrobat name, Annie DeVries. She's like a Dutch high wire artist, I believe.

And you have to understand, now in the world we live in, the world we were born into, Chuck, like the trampolines are a thing. It seems like they've always been around. This is at a time where you had to go take them places to demonstrate them. Or when Larry Griswald was doing his diving fool thing,

when he gets to the end, it looks like he's gonna dive into a pool. And when he dives in, it turns out there's a trampoline hidden behind this thing that looks like a pool. So he would bounce back up. That's probably pretty great if you're a kid. Yeah, but also I think even adults at the time

are like, what just happened? Exactly. He's just produced magic. So, and you can actually see it. There's a bit of him doing it on the Sinatra show in 1951. Yeah, it's pretty great. And you can hear the crowds going berserk over this kind of stuff.

But anyway, so he, like you said, he decides that he's better off doing that, sells out to Nissen, and then Nissen starts touring to demonstrate the trampoline. And he had a real flair for this. He studied business, like I said, at University of Iowa.

I'm sure the trampoline probably would have taken off regardless, but thanks to George Nissen, he really did a good job at promoting it and making it catch on, especially in the 60s and the 50s. Yeah, he went around the world actually, and he would do things like in Central Park,

he would bounce with a kangaroo. I'm sure that got some pretty good attention. Yeah, he rented a kangaroo for this photo shoot. And then basically shared the photo with like the Associated Press who spread it around the world. Absolutely. He went to Russia,

he went to Egypt and did tricks atop the pyramids. And as a result, and of course, because it's the 1950s, that's kind of when something like this would really, it just makes sense that it took hold then. And that's when it became a legit fad. And there were people buying trampolines, there were trampoline bounce centers,

which apparently are big now again, which I didn't know. Yeah. Have you ever been to one of those? I told you this, where my Instagram photo spread was taken. I thought yours was just a regular trampoline. No, no, it's at one of those bounce centers.

So what are there? There's trampolines everywhere? Yes, everywhere. There's the whole floor trampoline. No, they're everywhere built into the floors. There's places that you kind of walk in between them, but for the most part, it's like these giant, you know the bags that like a stuntman falls onto

from high above? Sure. They have those built into the floor, they have trampolines everywhere, trampolines on the walls at angles. I would say you got to go, but don't. Or if you go, just poke your head in and just leave. Yeah, I don't want to say weak ankles,

cause that makes me, I don't know how that makes me sound. Something makes you sound like a thoroughbred horse. But I don't like it. Oh, okay. Well, thanks. Yeah. But yeah, if I step off a curb wrong, it's not fun.

So. You don't need to be trampolining. I don't want to trampoline, not at this age. You shouldn't. But earlier, I guess we should mention that his idea was like all good business people wasn't just so singular. Like, hey, maybe we can sell these to kids.

He thought, you know, because he was a gymnast, we can use these for training in gymnastics. Anything where there's tumbling or falling, we think we can like sell this, including to the military and to NASA. Yeah. There were two things that he really saw early on that they could be used for for training.

Like you said, tumbling or that kind of thing. But also like diving where you're doing aerial tricks. Yeah. And it's not like you just know how to do those tricks. It takes a ton of practice. Well, it really sucks to have to go get out of the pool, climb back up the ladder, walk down and try it again every time.

Dry off, have a smoke, drink a beer, do it again. If you have like a harness on, you can practice this stuff in midair just from a trampoline with every bounce. You don't have to climb back up the ladder. You can practice bounce after bounce and then you could take it up onto the diving board. So that was one.

And then the other, like you said, the military and eventually NASA to get pilots adjusted to disorienting body positions, like tumbling head over heels. Yeah, through the air and learning how to keep their orientation even when their bodies flipping all over the place. And the military bought into it.

They said, yeah, that's a really good idea. So much so that when George Nissen was assigned to a pre-flight center in the Navy, I think St. Mary's College outside of Oakland, he found that they were already using trampolines for training before he even got there. So his invention preceded him before he even showed up to proselytize it.

Yeah, and like if you think about getting on a trampoline, if it's been a lot of years, you probably remember like, yeah, it's easy. You just get on it and jump, dum-dum. But it's, you know, if you're like seriously trampolining, like we were doing in elementary school, like we would learn tricks and stuff like that. It's aerobic, it improves your agility and balance.

There's a lot of like muscle work going on. So it's not, you know, sure you can just jump up and down like in, like Tom Hanks and Big. Sure. But if you wanna do tricks and things like that and jumps and spins, there's athleticism involved for sure. Yeah, you can get really good at it in other words.

There's one other thing that you wanna take a break in a second. So trampoline is one of my favorite things now. It's a proprietary eponym, right? Which means it's generic, but it used to be a trademark name, like you said. And then it got so popular that by the 60s, George Nissen just got tired

of trying to fight unauthorized use of it. So he stopped enforcing his trademark and it became generic. But up to the 60s, anytime somebody in the news was describing a trampoline, they had to call it like bounce tumbling or just make up some words to get the point across without using the term trampoline

because it was trademarked at the time. Yeah, rebound tumbling was a pretty good one, I thought. It's not bad. So how about that break? Yeah, let's do it. I thought you were gonna get me back and say no. No. All right, let's do it.

We're learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

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["Suffice Should Go"] All right, Chuck. So trampolining is an actual sport. Like you said, it requires a lot of, like, fitness, and you can get really good at it, and there's a lot of tricks you can learn and do. And although it's not technically an NCAA sport, you can find it competitively in colleges.

Enough colleges so that there are colleges that compete against one another in trampoline matches. It's just not sanctioned by the NCAA, like, say, basketball or softball or football is. Yeah, I get the feeling it's one of those fringe sports that if enough people, and in this case, it's probably gymnastics or gymnasts, they would say, hey, they go to the school and say,

hey, we got like 12 people here who want to get on the trampoline and compete. Can we do this? And they'll say, sure, we can allocate you, like, $600 a year, and I've got a trampoline at my house. But yeah, they compete, and that's great. However, early on, this was actually, like, that seems like something that would have happened

more recently. All the way back in 1964, they held the World Championship in London at Royal Albert Hall of all places. And this was when Nissan was still, like, still trying to, you know, the 50s, they really sold well. The 60s, they were selling OK. But like all fads, I think he saw the riding on the wall. So things like the World Championships

and trying to get sports, legitimate sports leagues or whatever going, was pretty important, I think, to him. Yeah, I guess from that first fad, though, in the 60s, like the real heyday of trampolines, it did become, it started to become a sport. But rather than people saying, like, this is a thing, let's get together.

It's like you're saying, like, one school, like one group of gymnasts went to their school and said, hey, we want to do this, and that happened at other schools and other schools. And before you know it, there are enough schools to compete against one another. And so there is actual events. There are now, like, collegiate trampoline events

that, again, aren't sanctioned by the NCAA, as far as they know, or they didn't used to be. They may be now. Because beginning in 2000, like, the biggest of the big happened at trampolining, and what started out as just a training thing, became an actual Olympic event. There's now a trampoline event in the Olympics starting as of 2000 in Sydney.

Yeah, which, Nissen lived to see that, which was kind of cool. The little kind of silly invention that he had so many years earlier became an Olympic sport, and that was, I'm sure, a very, very big day for him. Yeah, because, I mean, not only was he the inventor, he was like a tireless, what is it called when people go? Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Chuck. We're not very good at that part either. No, so he was a tireless now, or talking. He was a tireless promoter of it too. So I think it meant quite a bit to him to see like his invention become an actual Olympic sport. Because he was a trained gymnast. Like, this was his thing.

He wasn't, you know, like the inventor of the etch-a-sketch or something like that, or he just accidentally happened to, like, come across this idea. This is like really important to him, and it became an Olympic sport, this thing that he invented. That's right.

I think that's really cool. Plus also, he was such a gymnast through and through, I read that he was still able to do handstands in his 80s. Wow. And headstands into his 90s. Wow, maybe they just couldn't tell his head from his butt at that point, and they thought he was doing a headstand.

Maybe so. That's usually how it goes by then. Oh, boy. So, if you're at a collegiate trampoline event, you may see synchronized tramping. Did you watch that? Yeah, it's cool. Like, any synchronized event,

it's all about trying to exactly mirror one another, doing the same thing side by side on two different trampolines. Yeah. It's very cool. I'm such a brat, I was watching, I'm like, oh, they're not in sync. I'm not in sync again.

Not in sync again. Out of sync, yep. And you're like, maybe I'm not watching the synchronized. Or I'm looking at it from the wrong angle. It's my internet working, because these guys are not on the same page. In the Olympics, though, they don't have that. They have two events,

and you're not likely to see these on TV. This is not burning up the airwaves. You probably have to have, I'm sure you can get some Olympic package where you get everything. But Olympic trampolining has two events, the men's and the women's individual. And like most sports like this,

there's a compulsory routine where they say, all right, you've got to do these predetermined tricks. And then the voluntary routine where you really let your creative juices as a trampoline or show and shine. And you get 10 bounces and you can do whatever you want. Well, I don't know about whatever you want, but you do these fancy combinations of tricks

in those 10 bounces. I also noticed on the Olympic trampoline that was like a target in the center and another box around that. And I didn't look it up, but I got the feeling that you kind of had to stay within that, unless that's just for the benefit of the jumper.

Because I saw them land outside of it a couple of times and I heard the announcers go, ooh, yeah. So I don't know if that's a penalty deduction, like vaulting off the mat or something. Yeah, no, I could totally see that for sure. Yeah, I'm not really sure, but they are judged on flight time, which is awesome. Execution and difficulty.

Right, and then if they bounce, if they go through a bounce and don't do a trick on that bounce, they lose points for that too. Yeah, they're like, what are you doing? What are you, the rec center? That was a waste of everyone's time. And of course, it's highest cumulative score wins. Yep, so originally it looked like Russia

was gonna be the big trampoline-ers in the world. Of course. Because the Russians won the men's and women's gold in Sydney, so the first ever gold for trampolining the Russians won. And then all of a sudden China comes out of nowhere and they start dominating. I believe Dongdong is the world's most decorated

trampoline athlete with gold, silver and bronze to his name. Nice. Not bad, but if you're talking women's trampoline, you wanna go to Canada because they are as good as it gets, starring Rosanna McClellan and Karen Cockburn, who are Canada's two big trampoline-ists. Trampoline-ists, is that it?

I didn't say in trampoline-er. Oh, I think it's whatever you want it to be. It's only very recently an Olympic event, so it's kind of a free-for-all to call it whatever you like. Yeah, so before we get into the downer, which is injuries and sadly, deaths from trampolining, we will mention a few other kind of crazy sports that like the NBA during halftime or timeouts,

people have tried to incorporate trampolines into other sports or maybe just invented sports out of whole cloth. And they're always a little goofy, a task. Right, a little. So 1964, space ball, which I had never heard of before, just YouTube this and check it out.

It's much less impressive than it sounds when you finally watch it. Yeah, because I mean, space ball has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that it was like created during the height of the space race. It's the only reason that I can possibly come up with that. It's called space ball. Yeah, and I said in here, it says space ball had teams of two.

I only saw one person at a time. So would they sub in and out? I don't know, because I only saw, I think we saw the same video. Probably Scottie's name. A really off-puttingly lighted black and white video. Yeah, and it's almost like, I think one guy checks his watch in the middle of the match.

Well, they were goofing around and one guy hid the ball under his shirt and was like, what, what happened? Yeah, but they're all bouncing this whole time. And the point is so there's like a trampoline, there's two different trampolines, each guy's on a trampoline. In between their two trampolines,

the thing they're facing is a net. In between the net is a tunnel and that's where the ball goes through. And the point is to try to get the ball through the tunnel to hit the other guy's backstop trampoline. Yeah. Which is from what I saw in that video, and I guess you did too,

is utterly impossible to get it past the person. It's not a great game. Now, but this is, I don't know if George Nissen created it or helped develop it or what, but it was one of those things where it's like, you know, the fads starting to wane. Let's come up with new uses for the trampoline. So space ball they can catch on.

No. But then years later, other people have been like, hey, hey, let's not give up the ghost. There are other things you can do with the trampoline, like slam ball, which actually is kind of awesome to watch. Now, see, I didn't find slam ball that all I saw was people doing dunks. I didn't see a like real four on four basketball game.

It's not exactly like four on four basketball in that you can, like it's more like rugby mixed with basketball with trampolines. So you're not dribbling probably, right? No, you're not. And somebody can just knock you right off of your feet and stop the ball from moving. But the point isn't what everybody comes to see

is right in front of the net, there's a big, you know, ground level trampoline that you jump on and do like an amazing dunk. Yeah, I'm not a fan. It's not bad. Then there's bossa ball. This is crazy. It look like literally it is crazy.

Yeah, it is one part volleyball, one part soccer. 10 parts trampoline. Well, and there's trampoline, but also the whole, imagine, well, you should just watch this one too, but imagine a big inflatable volleyball court. So instead of sand, let's say, the whole thing is like a big sort of bouncy inflatable area. And then the center part of that

and around the net are actual trampolines built into that. Right. So people are bouncing around the outside, and they're doing sets and stuff. And then if you're on the trampoline part, you jump up and you can use your feet. That's where the soccer comes in. Yeah, so you can do like bicycle and rainbow kicks.

Yeah, or you can use your hands. Right. So you can spike it really hard from high up above the net. Yeah, and I get the impression that using your feet just gets you extra points or something. Yep. Otherwise, why would you? There's also, well, just to show off,

I think there's a lot of glory involved there. But also the reason it's called bossa balls because it's named after bossa nova type of samba music. And it's like you have to play two samba musicals. It's not an official bossa ball match. So yeah, it's like you said, you just have to go watch it. And this is in Spain, by the way. I don't think we pointed that out.

Spain, I think also Brazil too. Yeah, well, of course. Yeah, but it's fun to watch. It's great. It's another thing you can do with trampolines. It's the coolest of all of them, I think. I don't know. I like my slam ball.

You like slam ball? No one likes space ball, though. You know what I don't like about slam ball is it's the same thing at the NBA games. These guys do these big dunks and they're all, they're like beating their chest, like, yeah. And I'm just like, dude, like you used to trampoline.

It's not, I mean, it's still impressive. I couldn't go out there and do that right off the bat. Sure, it'd take you two, three tries. I don't know. They're just acting like they're ballers and stuff. And I'm sure the players on the court are just like, God, get these guys out of here. Yeah, no, I know what you mean.

So that's my gripe. I'm with you. I feel you, man. But you're like, but it's just so fun. I like watching it. Have you, how about this? This is how you'd like it. If they had elementary school basketball players to it.

Yeah, I'd be into that. Yeah. So you would never want to put an elementary school player on a slam ball trampoline or a trampoline at all, at least according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. And by the way, I want to just pluck my shirt lapels a little bit here. My segues are killing it in this episode.

I don't know if you've noticed. I know you have. I have. But yeah, okay. Yeah. So, and I just stumbled all over my segue just now with that. So the American Academy of Pediatrics, get this,

says do not let kids six or under on a trampoline. Just don't. That's what they open with their guidelines for trampolines. If you're under six or six or under, don't go on a trampoline. Your bones are too underdeveloped and a trampoline is too dangerous. And until I researched this,

I had no, I knew trampolines are dangerous, but they're like funny ha ha dangerous. Like that one episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets a free trampoline and turns his backyard into a trampoline park and every kid who jumps on it like breaks an arm or breaks their back or something like that. So it's funny like that.

No, actually it's like dangerous in about, it's like lawn dart level dangerous basically. Yeah. I mean, nothing will drive that home like some 18 year old statistics. But in the early 2000s, this is what we have. I've got newer ones. Well, I imagine it's about the same.

Over a four year period, there were 93,000 emergency room visits. And I guess this is the United States. Over a four year period. And here's the thing, like a broken arm, that's not great, but it's not the worst thing in the world. But over 2,000 of those 93,000 were traumatic brain injuries. And between.

Those are pretty bad. Yeah, children between the ages of five and 18. And the American Academy of Pediatrics basically says, it's the risk, like the risk of catastrophic injury, that's the differentiator between this and just like playing baseball or whatever. Like if you get hurt on a trampoline, it's very good chance that you might really, really be hurt.

Yeah, because I mean like nobody trampolines with a helmet on or with shoulder pads on, you're getting, you know. You can't be that kid at the park. No, you can't. Your parents would just be like, I'd rather you get a brain injury than have to look like that kid on a trampoline

at the trampoline park. The padding that you put on the trampoline that goes around like the springs in the frame and everything, that's supposed to be replaced like every year or two. No one ever does that. So it's actually like a really dangerous invention, like much more dangerous than people realize.

And some people will point to it and say, you know, actually bike, like bikes swimming, these things put more kids in the hospital every year than trampolines, true. But it's much more likely that kids are going to be biking or swimming than they are going to be trampolining. And so it's possible that comparatively speaking, trampolines are the most dangerous activity

kids can engage in. It's possible, it's not proven, but it's the statistics are there that it would be not surprising to a lot of people if that panned out to be the case. Yeah, and by far the most dangerous thing as far as trampolines go that you can let your kid do is get on there with five or six other kids.

And it's fun and it looks like a big party and kids love it. But 80% of these injuries are when there are multiple users on there at the same time. Yep, because you bounce into one another and you can crack heads. It's mayhem. You can get, there's that, you know, that errant bounce that you weren't expecting

and it shoots you off in a direction that you weren't planning on. You try to do that as a kid. Exactly. You try and like double jump people so they'll jump higher and you know, kids don't understand angles and physics. They understand physics enough that they can, they try to counteract another kid's bounce and time it perfectly so that the frequency is the opposite

so that the kid who's coming down and rather than bouncing they're just hitting the upward momentum of that trampoline mat just so that it's like hitting the ground, right? And there's actually something called trampoline ankle where in kids the growth plate, the plate where their ankle bones are growing together still, if that gets fractured and it can get fractured from that kind of,

that very same kind of thing where the bounce is going, it's coming back as they're coming down. Apparently it can be like hitting, like landing on the concrete from a nine foot drop. Yeah. And these little fragile bones that are still growing can be broken and when they start to grow again, their development can be all kinds of messed up.

So there's something called trampoline ankle that I think physicians in Ottawa and Canada have identified that is an actual thing. Well, American Academy of Pediatrics does have a list of things. You already mentioned no kids under six at all. Safety netting of course, all that padding, padding on the ground, this is a good one.

No ladders near the trampoline people because the little kid's gonna find that and climb up. Don't try flips and big tricks like that unless you're trained to do so. And only one person at a time, that's the big, big, big rule. Yep. Don't get on there with a bunch of kids. It's just, you're just asking for it.

Right, which is why some people point to these trampoline parts is like, well, wait a minute, a lot of the kids here are under six. The whole point is to stuff as many kids under a trampoline or a bounce pit or whatever is possible. That's where most of the fun comes from. And there have been a lot of, I don't wanna say a lot, but there have been some very high profile deaths

of mostly adults at these places where grown men have broken their necks, suffered traumatic spinal injuries, have become paralyzed, have died. A New York Yankees pitcher had a compound fracture of his ankle. Yeah, don't do it. And almost died from blood loss.

So there was an advocacy group that went away. I think their last post was 2016, but they're called Think Before You Bounce. But even without looking them up, like go research this before you go to your next trampoline park and I guarantee you will second guess it. I thought that group was for recommendations

before you decided to leave a party, no? Nope. Interesting. Dad joke alert, they're coming harder and faster these days, have you noticed? Yeah, it makes sense. By the way, I said I had more up-to-date statistics. Get this, an Indiana university study

found that between 2002 and 2011, not 93,000 in four years, a million plus ER visits in the US in nine years. That's a lot of ER visits from trampolines. Well, hopefully that number's going down because trampoline sales for people in homes have been going down since 2004. So maybe people are just realizing it's too dangerous.

Who knows? Or at least sink them into the ground so you don't have as far to fall. That is one thing. That is one thing, Jack. Well, if you want to know more about trampolines, I guess go read up on it. I would say go jump on it, but just don't.

And since I said just don't, it means it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, this is a two-parter. The first part is just gonna be us issuing a sort of retraction slash apology during the Michael Dillon episode recently, Transpioneer Michael Dillon. We decided, which was not a good idea,

to mirror Dillon's own experience in life and his own transition using the pronouns that he himself used, trying to make a point that there weren't even names for this stuff back then. And we had quite a few trans listeners that wrote in all very kind about it and said, hey, listen, what you do now is you refer to that person from their moment of birth.

Like it doesn't matter about their journey and even what pronouns they used at the time. Like what you really need to do is just refer to that person by the gender they identify with from conception on, or not conception, but from birth on. Right. And yeah, like you said,

everybody who wrote in was very nice and gentle about it. Yeah, they know he meant well. Right, exactly. So thanks to everybody who wrote in to let us know. Yeah, for sure. Okay, what's part two? Well, part two is along the same lines. And this is just a good tip.

I always love getting these just sort of nudges about current best practices for language. This is from Ann. Hi guys, Ann Jerry. I've been listening for at least a decade and I've really enjoyed learning so much over the years. I really appreciate how you handle language. I'm an English teacher.

And you're always trying to use the most appropriate and sensitive term for any group. Recently, I listened to the Black Loyalist episode and was reminded of something I read a little while ago which recommended using the term enslaved person rather than slave to help express that the state of slavery was not some quality of these humans, but the result of an action

by enslavers. She said, I'd never thought of that, but have been trying to use that language in my classroom. And I thought I'd pass it along, keep up the good work and thanks for all the knowledge. And that is from Ann. Thanks, Ann. That's a good one.

It is a good one. And it really goes to the heart of like, language does so much, we use it to like justify things, legitimize things to diminish people. Like it's crazy how important language is. So that was a good tip too. Yeah, so to the people out there that think big deal, it's not important, like language is important.

It's more than just words. It's how we communicate chump. Yeah. You really shouldn't use the word chump though, because nowadays we say- You chumped person? A chumped person. That's good.

Thank you. What were you gonna say? I didn't have one. I'm glad you came through. I swooped in at the last moment. Yeah. If you wanna get in touch with us like Ann did or like all the people who let us know

what we got way, way wrong on the Michael Dillon episode. And again, thanks for that. You can go to our website. It's called stuffyoushouldknow.com and there you will find all of our social links. You can also send us all an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.