Core77

Richard Knerr, partner of Wham-O and inventor of the Hoola Hoop, Frisbee, and SuperBall, died last Monday, and John Schwaratz has a nice reflection in Sunday's Times. Here's a passage informed by Edward Tenner:

Edward Tenner, visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity," called toy fads "a surprisingly serious subject," and added that the toys that make it big say a lot about the societies that love them. "Toys really are us," he said.

Our toys, Dr. Tenner said, flow from the cycles of innovation and refinement that define all technologies. The playthings tend to be the byproducts of a new technology and a fertile imagination. So Silly Putty came from failed experiments in making artificial rubber, and the Slinky was a tension spring that a naval engineer saw potential in--and not just potential energy. The postwar period from 1945 to 1975 was especially rich in innovation, and thus toys, Dr. Tenner said.

But the cultural moment has to be right as well. "You can see pictures in Bruegel of kids running after a hoop and a stick," he noted, but in the Hula Hoop the technology of cheap, plastic manufacturing dovetailed with a nation ready to shake its hips. The message of the Hula Hoop, and for that matter of Elvis Presley, he said, emerged in a time for many of intense optimism, which seemed to say: "You can let yourself go. You can dance wildly. You can swing wildly. You don’t have this dignity to preserve."