The bouncy castle was invented in the early 1960s and took off almost immediately because of the sheer amount of fun it is to bounce around and jump on an inflatable structure.
However, there is a transatlantic debate about who invented the bouncy castle, with Americans claiming credit for the invention as well as the British.
The truth is rather more complex than that.
The technology that underpins bouncy castles was actually developed by a plastics specialist by the name of John Scurlock. He had worked for NASA previously and had designed inflatable tent covers for tennis courts, which would deploy in the case of rain.
However, once he saw his colleagues have fun walking and jumping around on the covers, he had the idea to hire out the covers themselves as an amusement platform.
Mr Scurlock would later found Space Walk with his wife Frances to sell these platforms, with the idea that the bouncing simulated walking on the moon.
However, despite this, perhaps Mr Scurlock’s greatest contribution is when he took the idea and created the safety air cushion, which is a giant shock-absorbing crash mat that has saved countless lives when deployed during high-rise fires, as well as enabled death-defying stunts.
However, bouncy castles being used for entertainment may in fact pre-date Mr Scurlock. In 1961, a group of university students in England designed the first bouncy castle with walls as part of a fundraising event, almost a decade before Mr Scurlock would do the same in the late 1960s.
Whilst the evidence surrounding this is largely circumstantial, it would explain why bouncy castles are castle-shaped rather than house-shaped, as well as the name.
Castles are far more common in the UK than in the US, and it is possible that two genius minds came up with the same idea at the same time.
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