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Boing!..Boing!..Boing!
The design of pogo sticks had barely changed between the time they were first patented and sold in the U.S. in 1919 to about 2000.
Inventor George Hansburg promoted the toy by teaching dancers for the famous showman Florenz Ziegfeld how to pogo. He once staged a wedding where the bride and groom bounced into wedded bliss on pogo sticks.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2000, Irwin Arginsky, who bought out Mr. Hansburg in 1967, was approached by Bruce Middleton, a physicist who had gotten an idea while watching his daughter on her pogo stick.
The physicist suggested a design using heavy-duty rubber bands (rather than old-fashioned steel springs) for propulsion.
Soon after, Arginsky’s company, SBI Enterprises, of Ellenville, N.Y., sold its first Flybar, which could send a rider weighing up to 250 pounds five feet off the ground.
Pogo riders today, mostly teenage risk-takers who might otherwise favor skateboarding, can bounce more than six feet in the air and perform spins and flips.
Other producers have also popped up: Mission Viejo, Calif., based Vurtego Inc., makes a stick that relies on compressed air instead of a spring and has developed a prototype with a booster that it claims can launch a rider 16 feet in the air.
A third extreme pogo model, called the BowGo, uses a strip of fiberglass that bends and recoils to provide lift. The stick is under development at Carnegie Mellon University and was born out of technology to enable robots to run.
Photo by SBI Enterprises.
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Efusjon on October 13th, 2009 3:19 am
As legend has it, the Pogo stick was named by American traveler and inventor George Hansburg from the daughter of a poor Burmese farmer named Pogo who initially had troubles going to the temple due to rocky and muddy road. So the poor farmer built a jumping stick for her, and Pogo’s daily temple bounce-trips through the mud and over the rocks ensued. When an impressed Hansburg returned home, he made a jumping stick of his own, attaching a spring to the wooden stick contraption that the farmer had introduced him to.
Benjamin Christopher on October 13th, 2009 12:31 pm
Great story. I’ve just got to try one of these things. I used to love pogo sticks as a kid.
We recently ran a story on Vurtego Pogo Sticks, which you mention in this story.
It’s a 90 second audio feature. Check it out.
http://thinkofthat.net/htmdocs/stories/VurtegoPogoSticks/index.php
eFusjon on October 18th, 2009 3:57 pm
I just saw a video of a guy doing this…it looks like it takes a bit of practice.
Amega on March 20th, 2010 12:43 pm
Now that’s what I call a pogo-stick on steroids!
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