There also is some evidence of people in England being tossed up into the air by a number of people holding a blanket. These may or may not be the true origins of the sport of trampolining but it is certain that in the early years of the 20th century there were stage acts which 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.

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.

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


World War II

During World War II, the United_States^ Navy Flight School developed the use of the trampoline in its training of pilots and navigators, giving them concentrated practice in orientation such as had never been possible before. After the war, the development of the space flight programme again brought the trampoline into use to help train both American and Soviet Astronauts, giving them experience of variable body positions in flight.

A competitive gymnastic sport of trampolining has been developed and it has been part of the Olympic Games since 2000. On a competitive trampoline a user can bounce to a height of up to ten metres. Trampolines feature in the competitive sport of trampolining as well as in both Slamball, a variant of basketball, and Bossaball, a variant of volleyball .


Trampoline construction

There are two types of trampoline, recreational and competitive. Recreational trampolines are less sturdily constructed and their springs are usually less strong. They may be of various shapes, though the most usual are circular, octagonal or rectangular. The fabric is usually a waterproof canvas material.

The frame of a competitive trampoline is made of steel and can be made to fold up for transportation to competition venues. The trampoline is rectangular 14 feet by 7 feet in size. The bed is made of a strong fabric. The fabric can be woven from individual thin strings as in a Ross bed or from webbing. The fabric bed is not elastic itself, the elasticity is provided only by the springs.