[Music]
The year was 1997.
Bill Clinton was sworn in for the second time as U.S. president.
The United Kingdom transferred the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China -
effectively ending the British Empire.
Scientists cloned a sheep at the Roslin Institute in Scotland,
and Catherine Hettinger, an inventor from Tulsa, Oklahoma,
filed a patent in Washington, D.C.,
for what was then called the "Spinning Toy".
- It defined us, and it opened us to being what we became:
good and bad things.
What the world knows now as the Fidget Spinner
was an invention born out of pain.
In the early '90's, living in Florida,
Hettinger was suffering from Myasthenia Gravis;
a neuro-muscular disease that causes weakness in the skeletal muscles.
"I couldn't pick up her toys or play with them at all,"
Hettinger says of her then young daughter.
"so I started throwing things together with newspaper and tape, then other stuff.
It wasn't really even prototyping, it was some semblance of something..."
It wasn't long until that semblance began to take shape.
Hettinger flew with her daughter to our nation's capital to patent her new invention
with the anticipation, perhaps, of a gold rush.
- Shopping for the next Furby;
that was the goal of the sixth annual toy and decoration fair
at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Our own young at heart reporter, Brian Hatchel, stopped by.
[Newscaster] Say hello to Crazy Bones.
These small plastic figurines come in dozens of shapes and sizes
and cost about a buck each.
[Nerdwriter1] The 1990's were, of course, no stranger to toy crazes
whether it was Crazy Bones, or Pogs, Furbies or Tamagotchi.
Every year, the world was once again possessed
with a new favourite toy.
No one could guess what was going to be next;
toy-makers would have payed handsomely to anybody who could,
but each time the new craze seemed to sync poignantly with the national character.
- GAK is great stuff!
- Oozy!
- Eugh!
[chuckle]
- I don't think there is anything tremendously philosophical about it.
I don't think there is anything meta-physical.
I think it's so much fun to watch.
Suck it up and squirt it out with the GAK Vac.
Pump it up and blow it up with the GAK inflator.
- Disgusting!
[Aeroplane engines]
If Catherine Hettinger returned from Washington, D.C.
with magnificent images of GAK swirling around in her head...
who could blame her?
And for a while, it looked like those GAK-soaked dreams
would become a reality.
The mammoth toy company Hasbro
agreed to test Hettinger's finger spinners.
Unfortunately, in the end, they decided not to move forward with the production.
And somethings that should not have been forgotten, were lost.
History became legend.
Legend became myth.
And for two decades, the spinning toy passed out of all knowledge.
Until... when chance came...
it ensnared a new generation.
- They are popping up more and more in schools
and stores are really having a hard time keeping them on the shelves.
I'm talking about fidget spinners.
- They're called fidget spinners.
- Well call them fidget spinners, fidget widgets or whatever you'd like...
- Fidget spinners
- The fidget spinner
- It's called a fidget spinner, my daughter has one.
You just kinda put on your finger and spin it around like this.
Though no one can say when, exactly,
the fidget spinner came to America in late 2016.
Reality TV star Donald Trump had been elected
the 45th president of the United States.
All cell phones had lost physical buttons in favour of touchscreens.
And two brothers, Mark and Matthew McLaughlin,
had just unexpectedly raised $6 million
for a trinket called the fidget cube.
- It's a great story. It's a human story.
It's a story of those who went first.
They were first.
They led the way.
They opened the trail.
It's obvious to everyone that the fidget cube is fun.
I mean, just look at it.
But it was much more than that.
Citing a study from the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties,
a claim was made that these game-changing toys
could actually help those afflicted with ADHD to focus better.
And then, two days before Christmas,
fidget spinners, dormant for almost two decades
except in certain underground fidget circles,
exploded, like lighting, onto the scene.
It's more exciting than this makes it seem.
These days fidget spinners are everywhere.
They're in office cubicles and playgrounds,
in hospitals and locker rooms...
even in the White House.
- Everything must be perfectly done.
And they weren't working on a production line.
And you didn't have to get so many pieces done per hour,
but it all had to be perfectly done.
And it does extend to you, as you look at it, the sense of serenity.
For months, the spinners medical benefits were hotly contested by news websites
with nothing better to do apparently.
They were banned from classrooms across the globe.
You could find them everywhere...
and nowhere.
And what about Catherine Hettinger?
That, of course, is the great tragedy of this story.
In 2005 in the long, dark calm before the fidget storm
Hettinger was forced to let her patent expire
because she couldn't afford the $400 renewal fee.
Since then, the inventor of the fidget spinner
hasn't seen a dime of the profits...
of the most successful product of all time.
- Anything really new in thought and in material life
has to have its source in something
that you have to call spiritual.
Nobody can be really creative
unless there's something spiritual behind it.
Whether it goes by that name or not.
I mean who invented the house?
Or who invented any of the things we have?
Probably someone engaged in some kind of search.
[Music]
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