Who Invented the Pogo Stick?

Legend

• A legendary, but almost certainly false, story claims that a European inventor traveling in Africa came up with the idea for the pogo stick. There, the story goes, he met a girl named Pogo, who used a jumping stick to traverse the muddy, rocky path between her home and the nearest missionary church.

History

• The first patented pogo sticks were made in Germany in 1919. The man who applied for the patent--and therefore the man credited with inventing the pogo stick--was named George Hansburg.

Name

• The source of the name "pogo" for this toy is unclear. The name "pogo" may have derived from the first letters of a manufacturing company in Germany, Pohlmann &Goppel, though Hansburg could have simply made up the name "pogo."

Popularity

• The height of pogo sticks' popularity was the 1920s, when both children and adults used them.

Fun Fact

• Pogo sticks became popular partly because they appeared in some Ziegfeld Follies' productions in the early 1920s.