“Every time you jump, there is two seconds of freedom…”
George Nissen, gymnastics coach
George Nissen (b. 1914) was a gymnastics coach and Larry Griswold (1905-1996) a gymnastic tumbler and acrobat. In the summer of 1935, they became acquainted with the great trapeze family, known as the Flying Wards, and often helped the Wards mend their nets at the local YMCA. Nissen thought a small rebound net may assist aerialists with tumbling practice and, with Griswold, set up a workshop in his parents' garage to develop a bouncing frame. They gathered a section of canvas, had it sewn up, and attached to it a series of springs along its outer edge. This was then joined to an angled iron frame scavenged from a nearby demolition yard.
The pair took their new bouncing frame to a University of Iowa summer camp, where it garnered much interest. After graduation, Nissen and two friends, collectively known as The Leonardos, developed an act and took it south into Mexico. There they found work as a hand-balancing and tumbling act at a small nightclub called the El Retire in Mexico City. There Nissen gradually set about improving his Spanish. A canguro was a jack-knife, aeroplano meant swan-dive, and the Spanish word for spring board was el trampolin. Nissen anglicized the word by adding an "e," and the trampoline, known alternately as a magic carpet, catroelastico, or simply a "Nissen," was born.
In 1942 the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company was established. Their trampolines were used among the armed forces during World War II as a tool in the mental and physical conditioning of pilots and as an aid to the pilots orientating themselves while in the air.
