The 19th-century poster for Pablo Fanque‘s Circus Royal references performance on trampoline, though the device is thought to have been 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 indicate that the concept of bouncing off a fabric surface has been around for some time. 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 acrobats performed mostly comedy routines.
The first modern trampoline was built by George Nissen and Larry Griswold in 1936.[2] 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. Nissen had 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[4] 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 side’s end wall.
As with competitive trampolines, recreational trampolines are usually made using coiled steel springs to provide the rebounding force