For a long time—and still in many popular accounts—yo-yos have been said to date back several thousand years. At the very least, people have been playing with yo-yos for their own entertainment and for that of others for several centuries that can be confirmed.
When I started yo-yoing in the early 2000s, it was widely believed that the yo-yo was around during the times of ancient Greece; there are artifacts in museums which have been pointed to as the source for this claim. I even remember learning the basics of the hobby from a Duncan VHS on how to yo-yo titled How to Be a Player Vol. 1, in which they referenced old Duncan marketing materials from the mid-1900s. The presenter discussed how Greek soldiers once overcame their pre-battle nerves by playing yo-yo.
In recent years, however, a yo-yo collector and historian known as Lucky "Doc Lucky" Meisenheimer has presented a different take on these artifacts. On his internet show Doc Lucky's YoYo Talk, he presents his research and insights into the Boy Playing with Terracotta Yo-Yo vase painting and the terracotta "yo-yos" featured in museums, which many yo-yoers see as definitive proof that yo-yos were around in ancient Greece.
His analysis of the vase painting brought him to the conclusion that the depiction actually shows an aryballos—a small container holding fragrant oils—hanging from a leather thong or strap. He references other known paintings of aryballoi and compares them to the supposed yo-yo painting, noting key features found in both examples that make continued belief in the yo-yo interpretation difficult to maintain.
The terracotta disks which many yo-yoers point to as "obviously yo-yos" also fall apart when you consider the context in which they were found. Doc Lucky points out that they were recovered from the graves of middle-aged women, and were most likely to be bobbins or spools—tools used in weaving and threadwork—which would explain their shape and context far better than a toy designed for spinning. This goes against another hypothesis yo-yoers tout, which assumed they were yo-yos that young men had to give up in a rite-of-passage ceremony.
So if they aren't an ancient Greek invention, where did they come from?
Well, that's probably an impossible question to answer, as their origin story seems to be lost to history. But Doc Lucky feels they're at least several centuries old and probably came out of China or another Asian country. Whether they came about at the same time as diabolos (often called Chinese yo-yos) or slightly before or after, there are historical pieces of known age depicting yo-yos from that part of the world. Doc Lucky owns a Japanese vase from somewhere in the 1700s depicting skeletons playing with yo-yos and diabolos on it.
As you can see, the history around the toy has been vague at best. Many civilizations are credited with inventing the toy. For a while, the ancient Greeks seemed to have been the original inventors, and the Chinese and Philippine civilizations have their own histories of the yo-yo originating in their cultures.
One popular story is that the yo-yo was developed first as a weapon by Philippine hunters to use for stunning and killing their animal game. This story, however, appears to have been a hoax developed in the 1900s as a marketing ploy. I remember hearing some yo-yoers in chatrooms theorizing about how this was a response to interest in yo-yos dying and children wanting cap guns instead near the end of World War Two, but I haven't been able to find anything confirming this.
The modern yo-yo industry came to life in the early 1900s. A Philippine immigrant named Pedro Flores (who lived in California) brought with him the yo-yo toy of his childhood. After seeing how the toy interested his audiences, he began manufacturing them and selling them himself under the brand Flores Yo-Yos.
He even invented a new type of string that didn’t need to be tied directly to the yo-yo axle but instead cradled it in a loop at the bottom of the string. This new method meant that when you threw the yo-yo, it didn’t immediately return to your hand but could spin freely at the end of the string—a trick known as sleeping—which unlocked new tricks and gave him a competitive edge with his new company.
It was around this time Donald Duncan came into the picture. Donald Duncan was already a successful businessman when he met Pedro at a hotel in California. He was so interested in the yo-yo and its ability to draw people in that he bought the rights to the toy and began producing and marketing them, developing a team of Duncan Yo-Yo Professionals to help spread information on the toys as well as organize competitions to promote hype for them.
Duncan aligned himself with larger organizations and companies to help promote his toy—companies like the Cheerio Cereal Company and Disney. His business was a wild success until the mid-60s, when demand for the toy diminished and Duncan lost the trademark for the word “yo-yo.” Duncan Yo-Yos eventually went bankrupt and was bought out by a plastics company known as Flambeau Inc., which now holds ownership to the Duncan Yo-Yo line and still produces yo-yos to this day.
From the late ’70s into the early ’90s, the yo-yoing industry picked back up. Great minds like Dr. Tom Kuhn were innovating and incorporating new technologies into their yo-yo designs, like the ball-bearing axle in the Silver Bullet 2 yo-yo.
Once this new innovation caught on, the arsenal of tricks a yo-yoer could be capable of exploded—from hundreds of trick possibilities on fixed axle yo-yos to literally thousands. Because of the addition of the ball-bearing axle, yo-yoing became a high-tech sport. There are almost no limits to the tricks capable of being accomplished when the performer has a good background on trick fundamentals.
With the amount of technological advances and the typical yo-yoer’s ability to tie themselves into so many industries, the yo-yo’s technological revolution is in full swing. The end of the advances is nowhere near in sight, and the possibilities around this toy are virtually limitless.
With such an incredible track record, the amount of time the yo-yo has existed, and the amount of enthusiasm and effort put into today’s yo-yo industry, it is quite possible that this toy will never stop spinning.
Note: This article was originally written for a how-to yo-yo book I started around 2009, titled Learn to Throw: A Beginner’s Course in Yo-Yoing. Over the past year, I’ve been slowly revisiting that project—updating old material, expanding it, and shaping it into something new. The updated version will be called Intro to Yo-Yoing. I’ll keep publishing each article as I go, and once the project is complete, I plan to self-publish the full book.