Catherine Hettinger

Catherine Hettinger is an American engineer. She is the inventor of a predecessor to the fidget spinner.[1]

Hettinger originally invented a spinning gadget that rests on one finger as a toy for her daughter in the early 1990s, and began to sell it at local arts and crafts fairs in Florida.[2] She filed a patent application for her design in 1993 and received a patent in 1997.[3] Hettinger attempted to sell the toy to Hasbro, but at the time they rejected the spinners.[4] Hettinger's patent expired in 2005 after she couldn't afford to pay the US$400 renewal fee.[2]

In 2017 fidget spinners became what USA Today called "a national phenom".[5] Several print and web media outlets published stories citing Hettinger as the original inventor, including Money,[1] The Guardian,[2] The New York Times,[6] and the New York Post.[7] However, a Bloomberg Technology article directly challenged the media coverage as a story that had "spun out of control", confimed with Hettinger that there was "no evidence of a direct connection between her own plastic disc and the fidget spinners that are popular today", and noted that even if Hettinger had renewed the patent it would still have expired in 2014, years before the rise in popularity of fidget spinners.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 Calfas, Jennifer. "Meet the Woman Who Invented Fidget Spinners, the Newest Toy Craze Sweeping America". Money. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  2. 1 2 3 Luscombe, Richard (2017-05-05). "As fidget spinner craze goes global, its inventor struggles to make ends meet". The Guardian. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  3. ↑ Baratz, Shira (2017-11-03). "The Fidget Spinner Myth, Debunked". Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  4. ↑ Yadav, Nandini (2017-05-30). "Meet Catherine Hettinger, the woman who invented the fidget spinner two decades ago". BGR India. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  5. ↑ Pisani, Joseph (2017-05-16). "Fidget spinners: How they went from being a toy to help autistic kids to being a national phenom". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  6. ↑ Williams, Alex (2017-05-06). "How Fidget Spinners Became a Hula-Hoop for Generation Z". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  7. ↑ Miller, Joshua Rhett (2017-05-05). "Woman who invented fidget spinners isn't getting squat". New York Post. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  8. ↑ Brustein, Joshua (2017-05-11). "How the Fidget Spinner Origin Story Spun Out of Control". Bloomberg Technology. Retrieved 2018-10-01.


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