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A trampoline is a device consisting of a piece of taut, strong fabric stretched over a steel frame using many coiled springs. People bounce on trampolines for recreational and competitive purposes.

The fabric on which users bounce (commonly known as the ‘bounce mat‘ or ‘trampoline bed’) is not elastic in itself; the elasticity is provided by the springs which connect it to the frame.

It is 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 (see Nalukataq), 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-and-coiled-springs apparatus presently in use.

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 named 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 apocryphal, 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 in 1936. 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. Nissen explained that the name came 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.

In 1942 Griswold and Nissen created the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company, and began making trampolines commercially in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The generic term for the trademarked trampoline was a rebound tumbler and the sport began as rebound tumbling. It has since lost its trademark and has become a generic trademark.

Early in their development Nissen anticipated trampolines being used in a number of recreational areas, including those involving more than one participant on the same trampoline. One such game was Spaceball — a game of two teams of two on a single trampoline with specially constructed end ‘walls’ and a middle ‘wall’ through which a ball could be propelled to hit a target on the other sides end wall.