Fidget-spinning a tale of toy origins
Cheated small-time inventor narrative compelling, if not completely true for this particular gizmo
NEW YORK— The fidget spinner is a toy that sits like a propeller on a person’s finger, with blades that spin around a bearing. Depending on your personal taste, watching the spinning motion is either mesmerizing or irritating.
But even for those who don’t want to play with the spinners themselves, the gizmo’s story provides a classic parable of the small-time inventor with the big idea who got cut out when the time came to cash in. This kind of narrative is reliably compelling even when — as in this case — it’s not really true.
Over the last week or so, a wave of media outlets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have declared that Catherine Hettinger, a woman living in the Orlando, Fla., area, is the inventor of the fidget spinner.
Hettinger isn’t involved in any of the companies that are making the popular toys and told a reporter at the Guardian that she is having financial difficulties. The press coverage quickly congealed around an interpretation summed up expertly by the headline writers at the New York Post: “Woman Who Invented Fidget Spinner Isn’t Getting Squat.”
Hettinger, 62, is a chemical engineer by training and said she’s always been a tinkerer.
She first got two patents for a placemat that would help people control their diet by telling them how much the food they were eating weighed.
In 1993, she filed for a third patent, which covered a circular device moulded from a single piece of plastic that spins on the tip of a finger. In her patent application, Hettinger described the device’s shape as akin to the U.S. Capitol building. It could also be a weird frisbee or a toy UFO. She called it a “spinning toy.”
Hettinger’s patent was granted in 1997. She said she began making the devices in her laundry room, using a machine she bought from a defunct sign-making manufacturer and selling them at art fairs.
Hettinger travelled to toy conventions topitch the spinner to Hasbro Inc., which market tested it and eventually decided not to pursue a deal, she said.
Hasbro didn’t respond to an interview request.
Patent holders have to pay periodically to maintain their patents, and Hettinger let the spinning toy patent lapse in 2005. Over a decade later, in 2016, the currentgeneration of finger-spinning toys became a hit.
Aside from the spinning, these devices had little in common with Hettinger’s toy. They relied on a completely different mechanism for movement. Yet, when someone created a Wikipedia page for the fidget spinner this April, it described Hettinger as the inventor.
When she first heard of the Wikipedia page, Hettinger said she assumed that one of her friends had made it.
But she asked around, and no one would cop to doing so. Reporters started calling, and she was happy to tell them the story of how she had invented the spinner.
Aside from the Wikipedia page, Hettinger acknowledged that there is no evidence of a direct connectionbetween her own plastic disc and the popular fidget spinners.
She said she doesn’t have an opinion on whether her patent would apply to them. “You’re going to have to call a patent attorney. This is way beyond me,” she said.
Bloomberg asked two patents experts to review Hettinger’s idea for a spinning toy. They came away skeptical of its connection to the fad.
“In reading it, it doesn’t appear to cover the products that people are selling now,” said Jeffrey Blake, a partner at Merchant & Gould, a law firm focused on intellectual property.
Hettinger didn’t argue with this conclusion. “Let’s just say that I’m claimed to be the inventor,” she said. “You know, ‘Wikipedia claims,’ or something like that.”
Apatent search for the words “spinning toy” pulls up thousands of patents covering everything from yoyos to a “flying toy for propeller launching with liquid dispersing parts,” and dating back over a century.
It’s not clear which patents, if any, would cover the current fidget spinners. If the toys have a true inventor, he or she remains in obscurity.