The Hula Hoop and Wham-O
Good morning. It’s March 5. In 1963, the U.S. government awarded U.S. Patent Number 3,079,728 to a creative Los Angeles tinkerer named Arthur Melin. The patent request was for something called “Hoop Toy,” although the world already knew it by another name: Hula Hoop.
Melin was called “Spud” by his friends, who included his boyhood chum and business partner, Richard Knerr. The two young men grew up in L.A., attended Southern Cal together, and then resisted pressure to work for their fathers by starting a business of their own selling toys and specialized sporting goods.
Their first innovation was a new slingshot design. In 1948, they put $7 down on a Sears & Roebuck table saw, and began building slingshots in the Knerr family garage. They tested their contraptions by shooting food in the air to falcons, and sold them via mail order after advertising in Field & Stream magazine. They named their little company Wham-O – a rough approximation, they believed, of the sound made by their slings.
At some point in the mid-1950s, Richard Knerr and Spud Melin learned that Australian kids used a bamboo hoop in gym class for exercise. They acquired one, but didn’t quite know how it worked until a friend from Australia showed Melin how to gyrate your hips to keep it aloft, so to speak.
“Spud brought it home and showed it to me – he said it would be huge,” his widow recalled a decade ago. She wasn’t so sure. “You can't put that on television,” she told her husband. “They just banned Elvis Presley's hips from the Ed Sullivan show.”
But nobody could ban the Hula Hoop. The partners built a prototype out of plastic, and tested it on Southern California kids – who loved the thing. In early 1958, Wham-O went to market with their hoops, setting off one of the most frenzied fads in U.S. marketing history.
By November, some 100 million of the things had been sold, roughly half by competitors who sprang into action. It was this theft – swiping an idea that they themselves had appropriated – that led Wham-O to seek a patent.
But by the time the ponderous machinery of the federal government had cranked itself into action, the Hula Hoop fad had passed. It was over, in fact, by November of 1958. “Hoops have had it,” pronounced the Wall Street Journal.
Wham-O was just getting going, however. A year before the Hula Hoop phenomenon, Knerr and Melin had purchased the rights to another plastic toy. This one was a pie-tin shaped thing that its owner, Walter Fredrick Morrison, had dubbed, in various incarnations, Whirlo-way, Flyin’ Saucers, and Pluto Platters.
Wham-O renamed it the Frisbee, added some ridges to make the design more aerodynamic, and sailed off into the future.
