Children who think of their yo-yo as a modern invention may be surprised to learn that their Chinese counterparts were playing with a form of the toy approximately 3,000 years ago. Greeks were also playing with yo-yos well before the birth of Christ, and by the 1700s the toy was popular elsewhere in Europe as well as in India. But the quantum leap in popularity came through Filipino entrepreneur Pedro Flores, who achieved rags to riches success by making the yo-yo an international toy.
Flores named the toy after the game he played as a boy and opened his Yo-yo Manufacturing Company in 1928. Within a year he was producing 300,000 units a day, and in 1932 at the height of the Depression he sold the company for USD 250,000 (equivalent to USD 4.25 million today).
1932 also saw the world’s first competitive yo-yo championship, held in London. It didn’t become a regular event until the 1990s but these days its popularity reflects the appeal of the toy itself. The most recent competition was held in Florida and won by a Hungarian, underlining the global reach of the toy.
Over the past half century the term yo-yo has become a popular reference for any process which goes through sharp rises and falls. Appropriately for a toy which began mass production within months of the Wall Street Crash, it is often linked with dramatic activity on financial markets. It is also linked with dieting fads which see dramatic weight loss followed by equally dramatic weight gain, and sports teams that gain promotion to a higher league only to be relegated again soon after. Perhaps that explains our enduring fascination with the yo-yo. It’s reminding us that what goes down usually comes back up again, and vice versa.
