Yo-yo

The yo-yo is a toy that falls and rises on an adroitly manipulated string. It is the second oldest known toy in the world (only the doll is older), and has been around fo 3,000 years.

Playing with the yo-yo was one of the favourite pastimes of ancient Greek children. A Greek vase painting from 440 BC shows a boy playing with a yo-yo.

Boy playing with a terracotta yo-yo, Attic kylix, c. 440 BC,

Yo-yos were used as a weapon by hunters during the sixteenth century in the Philippine Islands. They hid in trees with a rock tied to a cord to throw at wild animals beneath them. The cord meant they could get the rock back without having to come down from the tree. These yo-yos weighed 4 pounds and had a 20-foot cord.

Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette were yo-yo enthusiasts. Later, during the French Revolution the dangling toy was associated with aristocratic French families fleeing the guillotine. It was known in those days as a "bandalore".

A 1791 illustration of a woman playing with an early version of the yo-yo, 

They were first introduced to America in 1866 by James L. Haven and Charles Hettrick of Cincinnati but remained in relative obscurity until 1928 when a Filipino American named Pedro Flores opened the Yo-yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara, California.

By November 1929, Flores was operating two additional factories in Los Angeles and Hollywood, which altogether employed 600 workers and produced 300,000 units daily.

An entrepreneur named Donald F. Duncan recognized the potential of this new fad and purchased the Flores yo-yo Corporation and all its assets, including the Flores name, which was transferred to the new company in 1932.

The word yo-yo was registered as a trade name in Canada in 1932, and it was then that a sudden craze for the toy spread through the Western world.

The hands of 1932 World Yo-Yo Champion, Harvey Lowe, were insured for $150,000. He travelled through Europe and while in London taught the Prince of Wales how to play the Yo-Yo.

Yo-yos were banned in Syria in 1933, because many locals superstitiously blamed the use of them for a severe drought.

More than half a billion yo-yos have been sold in the United States since Donald F. Duncan introduced the toy in 1930.

There was a female rapper named Yo-Yo (Yolanda Whitaker) who was a protégé of Ice Cube. She cracked the US Top-40 in 1991 with her song "You Can't Play With My Yo-Yo."

Cheap yo-yos can spin approximately 10-20 seconds, with a record of nearly 4 minutes, while professional ball bearing yo-yos can spin for 1-4 minutes, with a record of just over 21 minutes.

Yo-yos can spin around 6,000 revolutions per minute, about as fast as most car engines can turn over.

Due to a yo-yo's gyroscopic stability and the string's friction, the string doesn't even need to be tied to the yo-yo to make it work.

One of the most famous tricks on the yoyo is "walk the dog". This is done by throwing a fast Sleeper and allowing the yoyo to roll across the floor.

Yo-yo balloons are a common type of water balloon found at festivals in Japan. The balloon is tied shut and hung from an elastic string with a finger loop tied at the end. This gives them enough weight and bounce to function as a yo-yo, earning their name.

Source Songfacts

Toy

A toy is a plaything, which is usually for children. They can be for adults, and animals too. 

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The earliest toys were made from rocks, sticks or clay. In Ancient Egypt, children played with dolls made of clay and sticks.

Dolls may be the world’s oldest toys. Examples have been found in Egyptian tombs from 2000 BC.

Model soldiers date back 4,000 years to ancient Egypt.

In Ancient Greece children played with dolls made of wax, terracotta or sticks. 

Little horse on wheels, Ancient Greek children's toy. By Sharon Mollerus

The Greeks made charming small terra-cotta figures, known as Tanagra figurines, probably for use as ornaments or as children's toys. 

The yo-yo is the second oldest known toy in the world (only the doll is older), and was born over 3,000 years ago in the days of ancient Greece.

Boy playing with a terracotta yo-yo, Attic kylix, c. 440 BC, 

When Greek children, especially girls became adults, it was required to sacrifice the toys to the gods. On the eve of their wedding, young girls around fourteen would offer their dolls in a temple as a rite of passage into adulthood.

Toys became more widespread with the changing attitudes towards children as a result of the Enlightenment. Children began to be seen as people rather than just extensions of their household and they had a right to flourish and enjoy their childhood. 

Tin soldiers were first produced in Germany in the 1730s by molding the metal between two pieces of slate. They became widespread midway through the 18th century, inspired by the military exploits of Frederick the Great.

The Jigsaw puzzle was invented by the English mapmaker and geographer John Spilsbury in around 1760. He used a marquetry saw to produce maps cut in pieces to help children learn geography.

John Spilsbury's "Europe divided into its kingdoms, etc." (1766). Wikipedia

The kaleidoscope is an optical toy, where the user sees many beautiful, colorful patterns. It was invented in 1816 by Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster (December 11, 1781 – February 10, 1868). The word "kaleidoscope" is derived from the Ancient Greek kalos, "beautiful, beauty", eidos, "that which is seen: form, shape" and skope, "to look to, to examine." 

A patent was granted for the kaleidoscope in July 1817. Unfortunately the manufacturer originally engaged to produce the product had shown one of the patent instruments to some of the London opticians to see if he could get orders from them. Soon the instrument was copied and marketed before the manufacturer had prepared any number of kaleidoscopes for sale. An estimated 200,000 kaleidoscopes sold in London and Paris in just three months, most of them copies, which did not give a correct impression of Brewster's invention.

A toy kaleidoscope tube. Wikipedia

Stuffed toys are less than 150 years old with the first stuffed toy being a felt elephant originally sold as a pincushion by the German Steiff company in 1880. 

In 1892, the Ithaca Kitty became one of the first mass-produced stuffed animal toys in the United States, started a fad for plush toys that lasted from its introduction until after World War I.

Snow globes were accidentally invented in 1900 by a medical tool repair man. Austrian Erwin Perzy I  was trying to make a brighter light bulb for operating rooms, so he tried using a water filled glass with reflective particles to do this. The effect looked like snow to him which is how he got the idea for snow globes.

Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit was the first soft toy to be patented, in 1903, making Peter the oldest licensed character.

Joshua Lionel Cowen tried to make an electric train at age 7, but it exploded. Years later, in 1910 his efforts were successful and the Lionel train was born. It cost $6 and consisted of an electric flatcar and 30 feet of track.

Three Polish-Jewish brothers, Herman, Hillel, and Henry Hassenfeld started by selling pencils in 1923. When two decades later, they specialized in producing toys, including Mr. Potato Head, the company was renamed "Hasbro."

Silly Putty (originally called nutty putty) is a silicone plastic "clay" with unusual physical properties, that is sold as a toy for children.  It was first created when Scottish-born engineer James Wright, while attempting to develop a substitute for rubber, dropped a lump of gooey stuff on a General Electric laboratory floor and it bounced. Accidentally, he had invented Silly Putty.

Silly Putty was introduced as a toy on March 6, 1950 by Peter C. L. Hodgson, Sr. a marketing consultant, who packaged one-ounce portions of the rubber-like material in plastic eggs.

Silly Putty in the form of a solid cube

In 1952, little Anne Odell's school restricted students to toys no bigger than a matchbox. So her father an engineer, made her a tiny die-cast steamroller—the first ever matchbox car.

The first toy product ever advertised on US television was Mr. Potato Head, which was introduced in 1952.

The original Mr. Potato Head didn't come with a plastic body. The pieces were meant to be put into an actual potato.

The green clay humanoid character Gumby wasn't originally meant as a toy. Illustrator Art Clokey conceived the sweet, supple icon as a character for an animated jazz video, but studio heads quickly recognized his greatest fans would be children.

American children were first introduced to Play-Doh in the mid 1950s. Play-doh was originally designed as wallpaper cleaner two decades earlier by Joe McVicker. It was his sister-in-law, nursery school teacher Kay Zufall, who discovered its potential as a children's toy.

The inventors of Hot Wheels (Elliot Handler) and the Barbie dolls (Ruth Handler) were married for over two decades before either toy was invented. Barbie and Ken were named after their children.

1960 was the year of the Etch-a-Sketch. The Etch A Sketch toy was invented in the late 1950s by André Cassagnes, an electrician with Lincrusta Co, who named the toy L'Écran Magique (The Magic Screen). When The Ohio Art Company saw the product, they decided to take a chance it and renamed the toy Etch A Sketch. The very first Etch A Sketch rolled off of the Ohio Art Co. production line on July 12, 1960 and it quickly became the most popular drawing toy in the business. 

The Etch a Sketch's appearance in Toy Story 2 in a scene used to present sketches related to the investigation of Woody's kidnapping increased sales of the product by 20% and The Ohio Art Company was saved from financial ruin.

The Taj Mahal, complete with ripples in the reflection By Etcha - 

On March 5, 1963, the Hula Hoop was officially patented by Arthur "Spud" Melin, one of the co-founders of Wham-O, the company that popularized the toy. The Hula Hoop quickly became a sensation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with millions of Americans buying and twirling the colorful plastic hoops around their waists. The Hula Hoop craze even sparked a number of related products and spin-off toys, such as the Super Hoop, the Shoop-Shoop Hula Hoop, and the Hula Hoopla game.

Rubber ducks have been around since at least the 1940s, but they had a popular resurgence when on February 25, 1970 Jim Henson performed the song "Rubber Duckie" as Ernie on Sesame Street. Ernie frequently spoke to his duck and carried it with him in other segments of the show. The rubber duck bath toy has been an iconic American symbol ever since.

Silly String (also known as aerosol string) is a toy of flexible, sometimes brightly colored, plastic string propelled as a stream of liquid from an aerosol can. After being invented in 1972, one of the inventors was trying to sell their idea to Wham-O, when they sprayed the can all over the person who was meeting with them and all over their office. They were asked to leave, however, a day later received a telegram asking them to send 24 cans for a test market.

Young girls playing with Silly String. By Eden Keller from Mechanicsburg 

In 1982, Air Force and NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson was performing experiments in his bathroom for a new type of refrigeration system. Johnson shot a stream of water across the room and thought, "This would make a great gun." The Super Soaker went on to make him some $73 million in royalties.⁠ 

The Rubik's Cube, a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974, is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.

The stick (yep, the small tree branch) was inducted into the (U.S.) National Toy Hall of Fame in 2008. Organizers called it one of the world's oldest toys and said sticks "promote free play - the freedom to invent and discover."

LEGO is the largest toy company in the world. 

McDonald's is the world's largest distributor of toys.

Here is a list of songs about toys. 

Teddy bear

A teddy bear is a soft toy that looks like a bear. They are usually made from synthetic fabrics.

Pixiebay

HISTORY

The teddy bear was named after Theodore Roosevelt. The American president's childhood nickname was "Teedie," but his adult nickname was "Teddy" (which he despised and considered improper, preferring "T.R."). 

Theodore Roosevelt started the fashion for Teddy bears when during a hunting trip in Mississippi on November 14, 1902, he refused to shoot a defenseless black bear that had been tied to a willow tree. Political cartoonist Clifford Berryman picked up on the story, drawing a cartoon showing President Roosevelt with a bear, which ran in the Washington Post two days later.

The political cartoon in The Washington Post that spawned the teddy bear name.

An alert Brooklyn shop owner Morris Michtom saw the cartoon and created a tiny plush toy bear cub with his wife Rose's help. He sent it to Roosevelt asking the president for permission to use the name "Teddy." Roosevelt replied: "I don't think my name is likely to be worth much in the bear business, but you are welcome to use it."

After receiving permission to use Roosevelt's name, Michtom put a plush bear in the shop window with a sign "Teddy's bear" on February 15, 1903. The sale of the bears was so brisk that Michtom created the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company, which began making dolls in 1907 to complement its line of teddy bears. 

Below is a Teddy bear formerly owned by the president's son Kermit Roosevelt, thought to be made by Michtom in the early 1900s

By Smithsonian Museum of Natural History - https://www.flickr.com

Around the same time in Germany, Richard Steiff, unaware of Michtom's bear, produced "Bear 55 PB", the first toy bear with jointed arms and legs. Steiff exhibited the toy at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903, where it initially attracted little attention, but its fortunes were changed when an American buyer snapped up the entire lot of 100 bears and ordered another 3,000 just before the exhibition finished. 

A replica Steiff model 55PB displayed at the Steiff-Museum, By MatthiasKabel 

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the term teddy bear to 1906.

1906 also saw the first advertisement for the "teddy bear", in the trade journal Playthings. 

"The Teddy Bears Picnic" was originally called "The Teddy Bear Two Step." The song was composed in 1907 by JK Bratton; and around the same there were several other pieces of music with "Teddy Bear" in the title. The words by by Dublin University graduate Jimmy Kennedy were added in 1932.

At the height of the teddy bear's huge popularity in the 1900s, there is record of one Michigan priest who publicly denounced the teddy as an insidious weapon. He claimed that the stuffed toy would lead to the destruction of the instincts of motherhood and eventual racial suicide. 

Pixiebay

In 1919 British aviators Alcock and Brown make the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight. They took teddy bear mascots with them on their record breaking journey. 

One of the most famous teddy bears was an 18-inch-high one A. A. Milne and his wife brought from Harrods in London. It was a present for their son, Christopher Robin Milne, in honor of his first birthday on August 21, 1921. The bear was later named Winnie the Pooh.

Christopher Robin Milne . Wikipedia

TEDDY BEAR FACTS

A teddy bear in New Hampshire was responsible for killing 2,500 fish. It clogged the drain in a hatchery, preventing the fish from getting oxygen. 

Manuel Noriega ruled Panama from 1983 to 1990. He was known to have dressed his teddy bears as soldiers. He put them on an office shelf between his graduation photo and a bust of Napoleon.

A British teacher in Sudan was arrested because she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear "Muhammad".

At 8,026 teddy bears, 68-year-old Jackie Miley broke the record for the largest teddy bear collection. The teddy bears she'd accumulated in her hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota, USA earned the 68-year-old a spot in the 2018 Guinness Book of World Records for the world's largest collection of teddy bears.

Here's a link to some songs about teddy bears. 

Source Daily Express

Scrabble

HISTORY

While unemployed during the depression, architect Alfred Mosher Butts (April 13, 1899 – April 4, 1993) created a board game in 1930 that utilized chance and skill. He called Lexiko.

Alfred Mosher Butts

Butts worked out his letter scores by looking at the frequency with which individual letters appeared in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. His basic cryptographic analysis of the English language and his original tile distribution have remained valid for over 85 years.

Alfred Butts manual  tabulation of  the frequency of letters in words

Eight years later Butts came up with Criss Cross Words, a variation on Lexiko. The new game added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play.

The first few sets Butts made he sold to family and friends but he made no money out of it.

The New York Times revealed that Mrs. Nina Butts was better at the game than her inventor husband, once scoring 234 for "quixotic."

The game went unnoticed until 1948 when James Brunot, from Connecticut, who was an entrepreneur and passionate games player, saw commercial possibilities. He bought the rights to the game, made some small changes to the rules and gave Butts a royalty on every set sold.

Brunot also changed its name to "Scrabble," a real word meaning "to grope frantically."

Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown, Connecticut. They made 2,400 in 1949, but sales in the early days were modest, amounting, to a few dozen sets a week

Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from his holiday, Straus placed a large order.

Unable to meet demand himself, Island-based Selchow and Righter offered Butts three cents a game for the rights to mass produce Scrabble. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter-built product, nearly four million sets were sold.

Selchow and Righter was bought out by Coleco in 1987; After Coleco went bankrupt, Hasbro purchased the company's assets, including Scrabble.

National Scrabble Day is celebrated on April 13, the day Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts was born. Many Scrabble enthusiasts mark the day by playing the game with friends and family, organizing tournaments, or simply enjoying the challenge of creating words from letter tiles.

FUN SCRABBLE FACTS

The game is sold in 121 countries and more than 150 million Scrabble games have been sold worldwide.

Scrabble is available in 29 languages including Welsh (released in 2005) and Irish (2009). An unofficial Klingon version also exists.

The highest score ever recorded in a Scrabble tournament is 850, achieved by Toh Weibin of Singapore at the Northern Ireland Scrabble Championship on January 21, 2012.

The highest-scoring word set down during Toh Weiben's record-breaking game was BEAUXITE, which won him a whopping 275 points. 

The 2015 and 2018 world champion of French Scrabble can't speak a word of French. New Zealander Nigel Richards accomplish this by memorizing the whole French Scrabble dictionary.

"Qi" is the most commonly played word in Scrabble tournaments.

Roughly one-third of American and half of British homes possess a Scrabble set.

On average, more than eight Scrabble games are started every second worldwide.

The word "OXYPHENBUTAZONE" is theoretically the highest possible scoring word in Scrabble, netting 1778 Points. It has never been played.

There are 19 letter A tiles in Malaysian Scrabble, the most for any letter in any language.

The letter Z is worth only one point in the Polish version of Scrabble.

Scrabble has 105 acceptable 2 letter words.

In the game of Scrabble, 98 tiles have letters on them; two are blank.

Rubik's Cube

The Rubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.

Rubik's actual purpose for coming up with the cube was solving the structural problem of moving the parts independently without the entire mechanism falling apart. He did not realize that he had created a puzzle until he scrambled it the first time. It took Rubik a month to restore his cube to its original set up.

Ernő Rubik applied for a patent for his puzzle on January 30, 1975, and obtained Hungarian patent HU170062 later in the year.

Rubik introduced the toy as the Magic Cube in Hungary, named for his theory of "magic cubology," but the Ideal Toy Corp. dubbed it the Rubik's Cube in 1979.

Packaging of Rubik's Cube, 1980–Ideal Toy Corp.. By Jpacarter 

The Rubik's Cube reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1980s. It was the bestselling toy in the world in 1981. In the early 2000s interest in the Cube began increasing again and in the USA sales doubled between 2001 and 2003.

A number of books on how to solve the puzzle were published and became bestsellers in 1981. The most popular of these was The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube by James G. Nourse, which sold over 1.5 million copies. Other popular books on the topic included You Can Do the Cube by Patrick Bossert, and Rubik's Revenge by Don Taylor.

In 2008, Rubik's Cubes sales hit a high of 15 million globally thanks to a scene in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness.

There are 54 colored squares on a Rubik’s Cube — nine on each of the six sides

There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different color combinations possible on a Rubik's Cube. That's a greater number than inches that light travels in a century.

Even though a Rubik's Cube has over 43 billion billion configurations, no configuration is more than 20 moves away from being solved, and 99.99999% of all configurations can be solved in less than 20 moves.

The first World Rubik Cube championship was held in Budapest on June 5, 1982. Nineteen National Champions took part. Minh Thai, the US Champion, won by solving the Cube in 22.95 seconds.

First Rubik's Cube World Championship,  Stamp of Hungary, 1982

The world record, in competitive conditions, has grown progressively lower. Lucas Etter, was the first person to solve a Rubik’s cube in less than 5 seconds in a sanctioned competition. The 15-year-old solved the cube in 4.904 seconds in 2015.

The current world record for solving the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube in competitive conditions is 2.76 seconds, held by Teodor Zajder from Poland. This record was set at the GLS Big Cubes Gdańsk 2026 event on February 8, 2026. Zajder was just 10 years old at the time.

Rubber duck

The earliest rubber ducks were made from hard rubber in the mid to late 19th century. after manufacturers began using engineer Charles Goodyear's vulcanized rubber. The ducks were solid and could not float. They were used as chew toys.

Sculptor Peter Ganine created an "uncapsizeable duck" in the 1940s, then patented it and reproduced it as a floating toy, of which over 50,000,000 were sold.

On February 25, 1970, Jim Henson performed the song "Rubber Duckie" as Ernie on Sesame Street, and the rubber duck bath toy has been an iconic American symbol ever since.

In 1992 when a container of yellow rubber ducks, fell into the Pacific Ocean, it allowed scientists to gain insight into a hidden world of ocean currents. Over the years, the ducks washed up on several different continents, revealing a worldwide network of currents, that had been invisible.

In 2001, a British tabloid reported that Queen Elizabeth II had a rubber duck in her bathroom that wore an inflatable crown. Sales of the toy surged 80 percent following the announcement.

In 2002, the Great Singapore Duck Race set a world record of 123,000 rubber ducks taking part in the same event. The last such race was in 2007.

The world's largest rubber duck was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman in 2007, measuring 16.5 m × 20 m × 32 m (54 ft × 66 ft × 105 ft) and weighing about 600 kilograms (1,300 lb).

The world record for the largest collection of rubber ducks is held by Charlotte Lee of Seattle, Washington, who had 5,631 of them as at April 10, 2011. Charlotte started collecting rubber ducks in 1996 after she found a rubber duck in her hotel room during a business trip. She was so taken with the duck that she started buying more and more of them. She now has rubber ducks from all over the world, including some very rare and valuable ones.

Charlotte's collection is so large that it takes up an entire room in her house. She has even had to build special shelves to display them all. Charlotte says that she loves collecting rubber ducks because they make her happy. She also says that they are a great way to travel the world without ever leaving her home.

Rubber duck debugging is where computer programmers work out problems in their code by explaining them out loud to a rubber duck.

In 2013 rubber ducks were inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame.

January 13th is National Rubber Ducky Day. It gets its date from Sesame Street, when Ernie said the toy’s birthday was on January 13.

Roller skating

HISTORY

Roller-skates made their first recorded appearance at a party in Carlisle House, London in 1760. A young Belgian musician who rolled into a London party while playing the violin wore these first roller skates. It was not a successful introduction as the violinist crashed into a mirror causing nearly a thousand dollars' worth of damage.

Man on the Edvard Petrini's pedaled roller skates, known as Takypod in Sweden, circa 1910

Robert John Tyers of London applied for the first patent for roller skates on April 22, 1823. The fruit seller's "Volito" ("I voltigiere" in Latin) inline skates were made of wood and metal and had five wheels in a single row with the middle wheel being the largest, and the other four being of unequal size. The skater could only be on two wheels at a time and could turn by bending forward or backward. The skates also had hooks in the front and back for brakes. 

While an exhibition of Tyers' skates was given in Haymarket, London, the invention did not become popular, although roller skates were used in a ballet performance in Bordeaux.

The first public skating rinks were opened in 1857 at The Strand, London and Floral Hall.West Morwood.

In 1863 New Yorker James Plimpton came up with the four-wheeled turning roller skate, or quad skate. It was a huge success, so much that within three years the first American public skating rinks were opened in 1866 in Plimpton's Big Apple furniture store and in Newport, Rhode Island.

In 1866 former civil war arms producer Everett Barney patented the all-metal screw clamp skate. They clamped on to the edges of the soles of shoes and were tightened with a key. However, with the advent of athletic shoes, there was no place to secure the skates so they eventually disappeared.

As the UK Home Secretary, Winston Churchill refused to agree to a by-law that banned skating on pavements, ‘as it affords outdoor exercise for young people, which is badly wanted in London’.

Roller skates in the United States around 1905

The quad skate remained the dominant roller skate design until Minnesotans Scott Olson and Brennan Olson came up with idea of roller blades in 1979. They were inspired after coming across a pair of inline skates created in the 1960s by the Chicago Roller Skate Company and, seeing the potential for off-ice hockey training, set about redesigning the skates using modern materials and attaching ice hockey boots. Within a few years the Rollerblade-branded skates were more popular than the traditional quads.

ROLLER DERBY

Roller derby is a contact sport played by two teams of five members. It has its origins in the banked-track roller skating marathons of the 1930s, and by 1940 had become a popular American sport with more than five million spectators watching in about 50 American cities.

Windy City Rollers (Chicago, Illinois). By Joe M500 from 24hr Siren City 

On November 29, 1948, Roller Derby debuted on New York television—broadcasting well before television viewership was widespread.

In 2001, a group of women in Austin, Texas started a roller derby league. Five years later, an A&E Network reality show Rollergirls started broadcasting examining the personalities, antics and motivations of the women involved with the Austin Lonestar Rollergirls roller derby league. Soon, women in every big city in the USA and Canada were starting their own roller derby clubs. There were even clubs starting up in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Here's some more songs about roller skating.

Puzzle

The oldest known puzzle is a dissection of a square mentioned by Archimedes around 250BC. Archimedes asked how many solutions there were. The answer of 536 was only found in 2003.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the origin of the word 'puzzle' is a bit of a puzzle. But the verb 'to puzzle' seems older than the noun 'puzzle'.

The first documented use of the word 'puzzle' to describe a new type of game) was as a verb in a book titled The Voyage of Robert Dudley...to the West Indies, 1594–95, narrated by Capt. Wyatt, by himself, and by Abram Kendall, master (published circa 1595). The word later came to be used as a noun.

Jigsaw puzzles were invented by the English mapmaker and geographer John Spilsbury. He used a marquetry saw to produce the first one in 1760.

Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, would lie awake all night devising mental puzzles to keep erotic thoughts at bay.

The crossword puzzle was invented by journalist Arthur Winn and published for the first time in the Sunday edition of the New York World on December 21, 1913.

New York Times' puzzle editor Will Shortz designed his own major program at Indiana University, and in 1974 became the first and only holder of a degree in Enigmatology, the study of puzzles.

The Rubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Erno Rubik. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy. It took Ernö Rubik, a whole month to solve his puzzle before he introduced it to the world.

The Sudoku puzzle was invented in America and first published in 1979 by Dell Magazines as Number Place. The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in 1984 where it soon became immensely popular. It took off in the UK, Israel, and Canada twenty years later, stimulating worldwide interest.

Tetris is a Soviet tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was in 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.

Professor Layton is a puzzle adventure game series for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS developed by Level-5. They are a direct result of Akihiro Hino's childhood love of Akira Tago's popular Atama no Taisou series of puzzle books, which have sold more than 12 million copies to date in Japan. of April 2015, the series has sold over 15.5 million copies.

The puzzle-solving prowess of pigs have been known for centuries. In Georgian England learned porkers were frequently on view solving mathematical puzzles. Past studies have shown that pigs can be taught to distinguish between scribbles they have seen before and ones that are new. The only other animals known to be this observant are chimpanzees.

Source Daily Express

Pokémon

Pokémon is a media franchise that is owned by The Pokémon Company, a Japanese consortium between Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures.

The name Pokémon is the romanized contraction of the Japanese brand Pocket Monsters.

"Pokémon" is identical in both the singular and plural, as is each individual species name; it is grammatically correct to say "one Pokémon" and "many Pokémon", as well as "one Pikachu" and "many Pikachu".

HISTORY

The Pokémon franchise is based on the concept of catching, collecting, raising, trading, and battling with hundreds of different creatures. This concept was first thought of by Pokémon executive director Satoshi Tajiri, albeit with a different concept and name, around 1989 or 1990, when the Game Boy was first released.

The concept of the Pokémon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokémon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, a pastime which Satoshi Tajiri enjoyed as a child.

The Pokémon franchise began as a pair of video games for the original Game Boy that were developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo on February 27, 1996.

Pokémon is now represented in many types of media and spans video games, trading card games, animated television shows and movies, comic books, and toys.

Pokémon - I Choose You!, the pilot episode of the Pokémon anime series was first broadcast in Japan on April 1, 1997 and premiered in the United States on September 8, 1998.

Ash with his newly received Pokémon; Pikachu from the pilot episode

An episode of the anime called Dennō Senshi Porygon (Electric Soldier Porygon in the United States) was first shown in Japan on December 16, 1997. One part of the episode showed quickly flashing red and blue lights, which caused 685 Japanese children to have epileptic seizures  Because of this, the anime went on a four-month break, and several laws were put in place regarding the flashing lights.

In 1998 Nintendo of America brought the series over to America. Pokémon's first stop in the country was Topeka, Kansas. For one day the city renamed itself ToPikachu in celebration of the popular species of Pokémon.

In 2000, Pope John Paul II gave his blessing to the Pokémon franchise. This was reported by the Italian Bishops' Conference's satellite TV station, Sat2000, which said that the games did not have "any harmful moral side effects" and were based on "ties of intense friendship."

The Pope's blessing was seen as a positive endorsement of the Pokémon franchise, which was facing some criticism at the time from some religious groups. These groups were concerned about the games' violence and their promotion of evolutionism.

In 2002, researcher Andrew Balmford found that eight-year-old British children could identify 80% of Pokémon, but only 50% of common wildlife species.

The Pokémon character Pikachu served as the mascot for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

The video games have sold more copies than every other series except Nintendo's Mario series.

Pokemon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, beating out Star Wars by over $16 billion.

POKEMON SPECIES

Although there are 802 different species of Pokémon, most people will know of the mascot of the company, an electric mouse Pokémon known as Pikachu.

Pikachu. By Promotional press kit material for the Pokémon series. Artwork by Ken Sugimor

The Pokemon Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan are based on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.

If Pokémon were real, Blastoise's water cannons would shoot at Mach 4 — which would blow a hole right through a human.

Jynx, a species of Pokémon, was criticized because it looked like it was using blackface. It was especially an issue in the United States', where critics insisted that the species enforced a negative stereotype against African Americans. As a result the Jynx now has purple skin instead of black skin, and anime episodes featuring it with its old skin color have been banned.

POKEMON GO

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play, location-based augmented reality game developed by Niantic for iOS and Android devices. In the game, players use a mobile device's GPS ability to locate, capture, battle, and train Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player.

Pokémon Go got its start in an April Fool's joke by Google and The Pokemon Company in 2013, called "Pokemon Challenge".

Following the release of Pokémon Go on July 6, 2016, Nintendo's share price rose by 50%.

Pokémon Go earned an estimated $200 million in its first month for Nintendo and developer Niantic.

It took 75 years for 100 million people to get access to the telephone; "Pokemon Go" hooked that many users in less than one month in 2016. That is how fast the digital revolution is compared to other transformations.

At the height of Pokémon Go,  several players tried sneaking into a highly classified military explosives plant in Virginia because a Charizard was reportedly located inside the arsenal.

By September 2016, Pokémon Go had been downloaded over 500 million times worldwide, and became the fastest game to make over $500 million in revenue.

Pentagon employees are banned from playing Pokemon go inside the building because the users' movements are inadvertently mapping the insides of the Pentagon for all to see.

Pogo stick

The modern pogo stick was invented by Germans Max Pohlig and Ernst Gottschall and patented in Hanover in March 1920. They called their device a "spring end hopping stilt".

In 1922 a British patent was awarded to Walter Lines for a "new or improved hopping-pole for use in exercise or in playing games".

The two-handle pogo stick design was patented by George B. Hansburg in 1957.

By Srd2005 - Own picture,  Wikipedia Commons

The word 'pogo' is thought to be made up of the first two letters of the German inventors' names, though Hansburg said that 'Pogo' was the name of a Burmese girl he had seen whose father had created a crude version of the device so that the daughter could travel to the local temple for prayers.

The sport of Extreme Pogo, or Xpogo, was introduced around 1999 using poles that can reach around 10 feet.

By Xpogo - Wikipedia Commons

The official record for the highest jump on a pogo stick is 3.378 m (11 ft 0.99 in) by Russian athlete Dmitry Arsenyev.

The longest pogo stick marathon is 206,864 bounces, achieved by James Roumeliotis (USA) at Pogopalooza 8 in Costa Mesa, California, USA on July 29, 2011. Roumeliotis bounced for 20 hours and 13 minutes for the marathon held at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Roumeliotis started bouncing at 10:00am on July 29th and finished at 6:13am on July 30th. He used a X-Pogo Elite pogo stick and wore a protective helmet and knee pads. Roumeliotis is the first person to break the 200,000 bounce barrier.

Source Daily Express

Play-Doh

Play-Doh was first invented in the 1930s by Noah McVicker of Cincinnati-based soap manufacturer Kutol Product. It was originally devised as a product that could clean coal residue from wallpaper.

By the 1950s, wallpaper cleaning putty wasn't really used much anymore as people had transitioned away from coal heat. In a last ditch effort to save the dying company, McVicker’s nephew Joseph joined Kutol with the remit to save it from bankruptcy.

Joseph McVicker's sister-in-law, nursery school teacher Kay Zufall, had seen a magazine article about making art projects with the wallpaper cleaning putty. Knowing the trouble her brother-in-law’s company was in, she went out and bought a job lot of Kutol’s wallpaper cleaner, and found her kids had a blast using it.

Seeing the fun the kids were having with the putty, Zufall persuaded Joseph McVicker to manufacture it as a child’s toy. So in 1954, 22 years after it debuted as a wallpaper cleaner, the brightly colored, salty clay hit the shelves as a for pre-schooler's modelling product.

Objects made out of Play-Doh. By © Nevit Dilmen, Wikipedia

Zufall and her husband came up with the name Play-Doh; Joe McVicker had wanted to call the children's putty "Kutol's Rainbow Modeling Compound," Zufall assured them that was a horrible name.

Zufall was given no credit in the patent nor any financial compensation for saving the company.

Advertisements promoting Play-Doh on influential children's television shows Captain Kangaroo, Ding Dong School, and Romper Room in 1957 furthered the product's sales. In 1958, Play-Doh's sales reached nearly $3 million.

Play-Doh was inducted in 1998 into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

The non-toxic and non-allergenic dough is primarily a mixture of water, salt, and flour.

 In 1991, Hasbro became Play-Doh's owner, and it continues to manufacture the product today through its preschool division.

Hasbro trademarked the smell of Play-Doh, and in order to do so they had to explicitly define every nuance of the scent.

More than two billion cans of Play-Doh were sold between 1955 and 2005.

In 2005, Play-Doh was being sold in 75 countries around the world at 95 million cans a year.

If you made a big ball of all the Play-Doh ever created, it would weigh more than 700 million pounds. That translates to more than 2 billion cans of this colorful clay.

Source Todayifoundout.com, Goodhousekeeping