SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How Yo-Yos Work

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1:01John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy continuing holidays, everybody.

1:41Chuck here to tee up our next episode on our 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist. And I am super excited because you're about to listen to one of our older episodes from this list about an older toy. It's all about yo-yos. it's how yo-yos work. Hope you like it.

2:03Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

2:13Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That's me. Same as ever. Scratching the old back. Yeah, just got a little itch there. You ever use one of those little dealies, the little creepy hand, the little monkey paw on the end of the stick? I have before. Yeah. I don't like to do that. It hurts. Oh, yeah? I guess you could call it. It's a painful sensation. I get up against the wall sometimes and do the baloo, the bear trick. That I'll do sometimes, too. Oh, yeah. But it's weird. Like, I only have back itches in about the same place, and that would be on my left shoulder blade on the western side of it, depending on which direction I'm facing.

2:55Curiously, this is going to be the most interesting part of this show. That is not true, Chuck, man. So, Chuck. Yes. This is going to be a great one. Okay. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those ones where it's like, wow, that turned out to be really good. It's physics heavy out the yin-yang. Yeah, everyone loves that. But the fact is, when we finish this, you're going to know how Yo-Yo works. This is probably the most truly titled, truest titled episode we've ever done. you think yep I don't know alright well we'll find out I think it should be called physics through the eye of a yo-yo so listen have you ever seen the movie Harlem Nights uh parts dude that is go back and watch it again like watch the whole thing oh you're crazy it's one of the best movies ever Eddie Murphy Red Fox Richard Pryor great cast and like everybody else in it too I think Bernie Mac's in there awesome cast terrible script I don't think the script was terrible.

3:51I thought it was great. There's one thing about that movie that bugged me to no end. It's set in like the 20s, right? Yeah. And throughout the movie, Eddie Murphy uses the word yo. Yo is obviously a modern term. And it just sticks out like a sore thumb every time he does. It drives me crazy. Like, it drives me crazy that he did. It drives me crazy that the director wasn't like, you can't say yo. This is like 1920s New York. Yo wasn't around. I don't know that they were going for historical accuracy in that one. They were wearing spats. Yeah, well. So, Jerry liked that one. So, I went back and did a little digging, Chuck, and it turns out that Yo was, in fact, around in the 1920s, but Eddie Murphy was still wrong for using it in that capacity.

4:34Okay. Okay, so Yo goes back at least to, like, the 15th century as, like, a hunting cry, right? When somebody was like, somebody else might go, Yo! And you go chase a fox. That was kind of the first wave of yo As far back as 1859 We know that there were sailors that were using it Yo ho ho Yo ho ho Or also it was a response for roll call Like yo Like somebody called your name You would say yo A key It wasn't until after World War II though That the modern incarnation comes And it came out of the Italian quarters of Philadelphia. Of course it did. So that's where they think Yo came from after World War II.

5:23Hence, Eddie Murphy was wrong in using Yo, especially frequently, in the movie Harlem Nines. So I did all that research, or I could have just looked into Google Translate from English to Filipino, or vice versa, and find that it just means come. Yeah, but I don't think that's what it means. here, does it? It does now. Okay. So the word yo-yo, as it stands, means come, come, or come back. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you know that? I did. All right. You want to talk a little bit about the history of yo-yos? Did you know before reading this fantastic article that yo-yos originated, as we understand them now, originated in the Philippines in the 1920s?

6:10I didn't know that. I did know that it was around for a long time before that, though, in other forms. Well, pretty much the same form. There were two forms of yo-yos in history, and one came out of the Philippines. The other one, yeah, it was pretty old. Well, ancient Chinese, or at least ancient Greeks, more than 2 ,500 years ago. They think the Chinese had something similar to that. Yeah, I'm starting to strongly suspect that the Chinese are the origin of human civilization. Yeah. They came up with beer. Yeah. Well, they came up with beer. There you have it. They win right there. And it is the oldest toy on the planet except the doll, the dolly.

6:52I thought that was pretty interesting too. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Although I wonder if they're kind of diminishing any kind of ancient rituals or rites by saying, like, look at this cute doll when really it's, you know, some sort of fetish. I don't know. You never know. So it's been around a long time. They've designed it in different ways over the years. the original design had the string tied tight to the little axis there. We'll call it the Greek design. The Greek design? No, we'll call it the Chinese design. Or the European design. Well, not design, but it was popular in Europe. Yeah. And that obviously, if you ever used an old yo-yo like that, or redesigned yours to where it's tied around the axle, it'll pop up, you know, as soon as you throw it down, it'll pop back up.

7:38Yeah. Because it's tied to the axle. Makes a lot of sense. Right. And you said it was popular in Europe. There were other words for it, other names for the yo-yo before it was a yo-yo. That's right. There was the L 'Emigret, the Bandalore. The Bandalore was British, I believe. The Quiz. Yeah, I didn't get a country of origin for that. But it was very popular in Europe. There's a painting of, I think, Louis XVIII. Is he the boy king? I don't know. Whichever Louis was the boy king of him holding like a yo-yo. Like a royal painting of him with a yo-yo. Or the, what was the little hoop on it and a stick?

8:14I think that's what it was called. That was an awesome game. The hoop on a stick. Woo-hoo. And then, I don't think you can compare the yo-yo to the hoop on a stick. No, I'm not comparing it. I'm just saying I just never got that toy. Oh, okay. Well, here's another one for you. Napoleon was well-known for carrying and using a yo-yo, apparently for stress relief. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Didn't work too well. He was a stressed out dude. Yeah. He needed the yo-yo. But as you said, that's the European favored or Chinese design where like the string's tied really tight to the axle and it just basically goes up and down.

8:51Yeah. Right? So the Filipino design led to the modern yo-yo as we understand it now. And the huge distinction is that the string is just looped around the axle kind of loosely. Yeah. Which has the added benefit of allowing the yo-yo itself to spin once it reaches the end of the string Yeah Sleep, that's why people yo-yo, I think Yeah It's all about the tricks I mean, it's sort of fun for a minute just to go up and down But it's really all about the tricks Right, it's just a stress reliever if it just goes up and down Did you yo-yo when you were a kid? Yeah, here or there But even as a kid, I could sense that these new modern ones that we'll talk about With ball bearings and clutches They just seem like cheating I agree.

9:35Let's not even talk about them. It's not even a real yo-yo. So, Chuck, you want to talk a little bit about physics? Well, let's finish the history first, shall we? Oh, okay. Well, I have plenty of that. It was originally in the Philippines. They think it was a hunting weapon for like 400 years. But not like a little tiny yo-yo. They were really big, and it was basically a big spindle attached to a rope with spikes coming off of it. They were like the size of a yugo. Yeah, and I guess the benefit there is you could get it back after you threw it at somebody. Right. The string was almost just useless, though.

10:12Well, it was rope. Like you could just throw it and run after it. Oh, really? Okay. It was actually heavy rope, and they used it for hunting, too. Right. Well, at some point down the line— And in war. Well, yeah, you would think anything used in hunting, you know, does double duty in war. Exactly. Anything you're trying to kill. Yeah. at some point though they became smaller and became toys and in the 20's a Filipino immigrant to the US named Pedro Flores started a company the first modern yo-yo company in the United States and did pretty well for himself and then in 1929 he sold out to a man named Duncan, right?

10:52Donald Duncan? Yes, Donald Duckin or Duncan and you know Flores is in San Santa Barbara, and like you said, was selling these things like hotcakes enough that Duncan said, hey, let me buy that. I'm going to keep the name Yo-Yo because it's catchy. I'm going to trademark it, and now I own it. And through the years, he had competitors that made similar devices with different names, and they were like, dude, everyone's calling this thing a Yo-Yo. We want to be able to call it a Yo-Yo too. And he said, no, no, I own it. Then the federal courts in 1965 says, you know what? That's generic enough now where you don't own it any longer.

11:32They're all yo-yos. Well, those legal challenges to their trademark, the name yo-yo was one of the things that bled the company dry. It eventually went bankrupt. The Dunkin' Company went bankrupt. Yeah, the same year they ruled against them. They were like, well, that's it for us. But they also had other money troubles. They were actually victims of their own success, the Dunkin' Company was. So they moved in the 40s to Luck, Wisconsin, which very quickly became known as the yo-yo capital of the world. And at their peak, they were making 3 ,600 yo-yos an hour. Wow. Mostly out of wood at first, maple.

12:08They were using a million board feet of maple wood every year. Yeah? That's a lot. And they actually, in addition to their legal challenges, like the money going to fight their legal battles, They were paying tons of money in overtime, too, advertising. And as a matter of fact, I think in 1962, Chuck, they managed to sell 45 million yo-yos. And in that same year, there were only 40 million kids in the U.S. Wow. That's pretty astounding. A chicken in every pot and a yo-yo in every other hand, at least. Yeah. Sure. I guess some kids were yo-yoing with both hands up. They're rich kids. But like I said, the company ended up going bankrupt anyway.

12:54But Yo-Yo Enthusiasts still look very fondly on the Dunkin' name. And I think June 6th, yes, June 6th is National Yo-Yo Day, which happens to be the same day as Donald Dunkin ''s birthday. Yeah. Well, and the Dunkin' name lives on. Obviously, you still see Dunkin' Yo-Yos. They sold out. They didn't just shut down. Well, they went bankrupt and sold out, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, who was it? The Flambeau Plastics Company? Yeah. They said we'll keep the name Duncan because it's synonymous with yo-yos. Yeah. It's not generic yet. No. No.

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16:15There's a little yo-yo history for you. Yeah. I got a little more I'm going to save to the end. I think you'll like. Okay. I'm going to tease you with it. Now let's talk about physics. Well, I think this is very interesting. Good. So there's two... Okay, you mentioned with the string tied to the classic Chinese design yo-yo, you have one kind of energy going on, right? Yes. And that is linear momentum, the ability of it to go up and down, or I should say down and up, right? That's right. With the Filipino design, the modern design, it has two kinds of potential energy. It has that same linear momentum to go up and down, but it also has angular momentum.

17:00And angular momentum is its ability to spin on an axle. Yeah. Okay? So you've got two things going on. And like you said, when the yo-yo hits the end of the line of its linear momentum, it can still, it's built up since it's wound around the spool. Yeah. It's built up a lot of angular momentum, so it can just sit there and spin or sleep, as you called it. Yeah, it actually increases as it goes down, which is the key to keeping it spinning. Right. It gets faster as it falls. There's another pretty cool trait to a yo-yo. Who knew they were so complex? I didn't. Did you? I did not. Okay, so they also have gyroscopic stability, Chuck.

17:39They do. Okay, so if you have a yo-yo that's sleeping and you push down on top of it, Like it goes down and then back up. Right. That's because of its gyroscopic stability. That point that you push down on the yo-yo is transferred from the front and spun around to the back. So that's evened out. So the yo-yo will just keep spinning as long as it's spinning fast enough. Gyroscopic stability. Yes. That means a spinning object will resist change to its axis of rotation. And if you've ever thrown a football, it's the same thing. Yeah. Or if you've ever thrown a football poorly, what do they call that?

18:15A wobbler, a turkey, a brick. That's why a wounded duck doesn't go very far because it doesn't have that tight spin. Yeah. So it falls off its axis and won't travel as far. Exactly. Same as a frisbee. And then the whole team's mad at you. Basically anything that spins. Yeah. Frisbees, footballs, there's got to be a baseball. We could liken it to a baseball somehow. Let's say a curveball, knuckleball, slider. Definitely not a knuckleball. Slider. Because it doesn't spin at all. Really? What is it like a shot put? No, the knuckleball, the whole key is it doesn't move. It travels like this, and that's why it moves all around.

18:51Crazy. Isn't that nutty? Yeah. So you've got your yo-yo sleeping. You're totally aware of its gyroscopic stability, and you understand that its angular momentum is just awesome. It's far out, right? It's far out. But you want to wake it up, And that's when you bring it out of its sleep and rewind it back up the spool, right? A little tug on the old finger. Yeah, and the reason why is because the loop, right, there's less friction with the loop around the axle. Yeah. When you tug it, you increase that friction and you allow it to rewind. It just grabs a hold of its buddy and says, let's go back up to the palm.

19:31Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. I like yo-yo physics a lot. So we basically just talked about the two hardest parts, right? sleeping and waking. Yeah, and like I said, sleeping is the key to do any kind of trick like walking the dog, which I was pretty good. I used to do a few yo-yo tricks. Really? Yeah, I could walk the dog and I could do the deal where you make a triangle and then tick-tock through the triangle. Something like a cradle or probably the cat's in the cradle. Let's call it a cat's cradle. And then I could do the around the world. around the world. Yeah, I couldn't do any of those.

20:12This inspired me to get a new yo-yo, by the way. I like the vintage Duncan ones, specifically the yellow ones with the butterfly, like the gold butterfly. The inverted ones? No, it just had a butterfly on the ramble. Because they had those that looked like a butterfly that were inverted, and I think that actually plays a part in the increasing the moment of inertia section. I think that's why they flipped it out, to put more weight on the outside. Yeah, okay. You want to talk about that? Why not? So do you remember when we did the Murphy's Law podcast? How could I forget? Remember one of the books that he wrote was for your moments of inertia?

20:53Yeah. Yeah, I didn't realize it was a terrible, terrible engineering pun until I read this article. Yeah. Kind of made me hate John Paul Stapp a little bit. Nah, we love that guy. So, Chuck, a moment of inertia is basically a way of describing a spinning object's resistance to changes in that rotation, basically being slowed down. Yeah. Right? And what smarter people than us have figured out is that if you increase the mass and distribute it slightly further away from the axis, you're going to increase its moment of inertia. Right. And that increases the amount of time it's just sleeping, right?

21:34Yeah, and like I said, I don't know this, but I just remember when I was a kid, they had those inverted yo-yos, and I bet you anything that's why they did that. It's got to be. Because they were wider at the outside and then curved in, which had to be less mass. Yeah. It was less stuff, less wood. Right. So I'm going to go on record as saying that's why they did that. But I think you want more mass further away to increase its moment of inertia, right? Yeah, so there was more mass on the outside further away from the axis. Right. Yeah. So that allows things to sleep a lot longer, and that was, I guess you could say, one of the breakthroughs in yo-yo design.

22:13I think in the 60s, they started adding mass to the outside and extending the axle a little bit. Bam! The yo-yo's been improved. Think about this, right? 2 ,500, maybe even longer than that, years ago, somebody invented the yo-yo. does not change until the Philippines in the early 20th century. Well, I thought it said it did change. We just don't know. It said there were changes in designs over the years. No? Not that I took. I took it like there was one way, and then there was the Filipino way. And that was it. We got a correction to make then. And then the 20th century hits, and then there's all these great improvements on these designs.

22:54Indeed. One of the improvements, Chuck, was adding ball bearings, right? Right. Yeah. So you and I don't think these are improvements, or at least I don't. Okay. That's absolutely true. That's a good caveat. Yeah. I think that the Filipinos perfected the yo-yo. Let's just call them modifications. Okay. For sorry kids who don't know how to yo-yo. Rich kids. Yeah. That makes it easier, I think. Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of both of these things? Yeah, I guess the - Because it makes it easier to sleep and - Yeah. And I guess they're like, well, if you're just enjoying sleeping and waking your yo-yo, then why make it tough?

23:29If you want to have fun with your toy. Right. I can't believe they made it easier for kids to have fun. How dare they? So the ball bearing design, I think, is kind of clever. Basically, this modification takes the axle and splits it in two. Yeah. Into two races, which are basically little courses for ball bearings to spin around. Now, does that split the axle? These are just around the axle. So one is connected to the axle. Right. That's the inner race. One is connected to the string. That's the outer race. And then in between the two are ball bearings. Right. Okay? They're not connected in any way except maybe via the contact with the ball bearings.

24:13Right. So when you release your yo-yo toward the ground and its linear and angular momentum really build up, when it hits, the inner race can tilt a little bit and connect with the outer race via the ball bearings. So they're spinning. Right. Right? And then as they straighten out, they're not connected anymore so that the string no longer has any effect on whether the yo-yo spins or not because it's just the inner race connected to the axle that's spinning. so your yo-yo can sleep far, far longer. Yeah, the outer race spins the inner race, which spins the axle. Right, it's like a transfer of angular momentum.

24:54Exactly. And then the string's just like, you just let me know when you're done, and we'll wind back up. Well, it'll give a little tug. It'll do the same thing with that style, right? Right. Okay. Or you can just completely take yourself out of the equation altogether except for a snap of the wrist. The initial release is all you need to do with what's called the yo-yo with the brain. these are really fake yo-yos. Yeah. I want to get one, though. It's kind of cool. You could be in a vegetative state and do this yo-yo. Yeah, this was in the 90s. A company called Yomega released these, and they called it the yo-yo with a brain, when in fact they should have called it the yo-yo with a clutch.

25:33And the deal here is you've got these two clutch arms, weighted ball on one side, and it's not attached on the other side, and they're spring-loaded. the spindle is not attached to the axle but the clutch arms are attached to the spindle so when you throw this thing down it's going to spin slower at first and the clutch is engaged as it gets faster all of a sudden it's enough inertia to pop the clutch essentially against the edges and it releases the spindle which makes the whole thing spin faster on the axis Right, the centrifugal force pushes down the weight, which pushes down the arm onto the spring, which releases the two, which allows it to spin.