Trampolines

A trampoline is a gymnastic and recreational device consisting of a piece of taut, strong fabric stretched over a steel frame using many coiled springs to provide a rebounding force which propels the jumper high into the air. more...

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In a trampoline, the fabric is not elastic itself, the elasticity is provided by the springs which connect it to the frame.

History

Early trampoline-like devices

It could be said that a kind of trampolining was done by the Inuit people who used to toss each other into the air on a walrus skin, something like the sheet used by firemen to catch people jumping out of burning buildings. There also is some evidence of people in Europe having been tossed into the air by a number of people holding a blanket; Mak in the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play and Sancho Panza in Don Quixote are both subjected to blanketing -- however, these are clearly non-voluntary, non-recreational instances of quasi-judicial, mob-administered punishment. The 19th century circus poster on which the Beatles' song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite is based references performance on trampoline, though the device is thought to have been something more like a springboard than the fabric-&-coiled-springs apparatus in use at present.

These may not be the true antecedents of the modern sport of trampolining, but it is certain that in the early years of the 20th century some acrobats used a "bouncing bed" on the stage to amuse audiences. The bouncing bed was in reality a form of small trampoline covered by bedclothes on which the acrobats performed mostly comedy routines.

According to circus folklore, the trampoline was supposedly first developed by an artiste called Du Trampolin who saw the possibility of using the trapeze safety net as a form of propulsion and landing device and experimented with different systems of suspension, eventually reducing the net to a practical size for separate performance. While there were trampoline like devices used for shows and in the circus, the story of Du Trampolin is probably a myth and no documentary evidence has been found to support it.

The first modern trampolines

The first modern trampoline was built by George Nissen and Larry Griswold around 1934. Nissen was a gymnastics and diving competitor and Griswold was a tumbler on the gymnastics team, both at the University of Iowa, USA. They had observed trapeze artists using a tight net to add entertainment value to their performance and experimented by stretching a piece of canvas, in which they had inserted grommets along each side, to an angle iron frame by means of coiled springs. It was initially used to train tumblers but soon became popular in its own right. The name comes from the Spanish trampolín meaning a diving board. George Nissen heard the word on a demonstration tour in Mexico in the late 1930s and decided to use an anglicized form as the trademark for the apparatus.

Read more at Wikipedia.org