Name: Fidget Spinners: The Toy That Changed America
Uploaded: 2026-03-16T17:05:19.000Z
Duration: 7 min 46 s
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Bill Clinton was sworn in for the second time as U.S. president.

The United Kingdom transferred the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China, effectively ending the British Empire.

Scientists cloned a sheep at the Roslin Institute in Scotland.

And Katherine Hettinger, an inventor from Tulsa, Oklahoma, filed a patent in Washington, D.C.

for what was then called the spinning toy.

What the world knows now as the fidget spinner was an invention born out of pain.

In the early 90s, living in Florida, Hettinger was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the skeletal muscles.

I couldn't pick up her toys or play with them at all, hettinger says of her then young daughter.

So I started throwing things together with newspaper and tape, then other stuff.

It wasn't long until that semblance began to take shape.

Pettinger flew with her daughter to our nation's capital to patent her new invention with the anticipation perhaps of a gold rush.

Shopping for the next furby that was the goal at the sixth annual Toy and Decoration Fair at the Metro Toronto Convention center, our own Young at Heart reporter Brian Hatchell stopped by.

These small plastic figurines come in dozens of shapes and sizes and cost about a buck each.

The 1990s were of course, no stranger to toy crazes.

Whether it was Crazy Bones or Pogs, Furbies or Tamagotchi, every year the world was once again possessed with a new favorite toy.

No one could guess what was going to be next.

Toy makers would have paid handsomely to anybody who could.

But each time, the new craze seemed to poignantly with the national character.

I don't think there's anything tremendously philosophical about it.

I don't think there's anything metaphysical.

I just think it's so much fun to watch suck it up and squirt it up with a gak back.

Pump it up and blow it up with a gak and flager.

If Katharine Hettinger returned from Washington D.C.

with magnificent images of gak swirling around around in her head, who could blame her?

And for a while, it looked like those gak soaked dreams would become a reality.

The mammoth toy company Hasbro agreed to test Hettinger's finger spinners.

Unfortunately, in the end, they decided not to move forward with the production.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

And for two decades, the spinning toy passed out of all knowledge.

Until when chance came, it ensnared a new generation.

They are popping up more and more in schools, and

stores are really having a hard time keeping them on the shelves.

We'll call them fidget spinners, fidget widgets, or whatever you'd like.

You just kind of put on your finger and spin it around like this.

Though no one can say when exactly the fidget spinner came to America.

In late 2016, reality TV star Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the United States.

All cell phones had lost physical buttons in favor of touchscreens.

And two brothers, mark and Matthew McLaughlin, had just unexpectedly raised $6 million for a trinket called the fidget cube.

It's obvious to everyone that the fidget cube is fun.

Citing a study from the Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, a claim was made that these game changing toys could actually help those afflicted with ADHD to focus better.

Engaging in fine motor activity, the study said, may assist students with ADHD in resisting the pull of distraction.

And then two days before Christmas, fidget spinners, dormant for almost two decades except in certain underground fidget circles, exploded like lightning onto the scene.

It's more exciting than this makes it seem.

These days, fidget spinners are everywhere.

They're in office cubicles and playgrounds, in hospitals and locker rooms, even in the White House.

Everything must be perfectly done, and they weren't working on a production line.

And you have to get so many pieces done per hour.

And it does extend to you, as you look at it, the sense of serenity.

For months, the spinner's medical benefits were hotly contested by news websites.

With nothing better to do, apparently, they were banned from classrooms across the globe.

You could find them everywhere and nowhere.

That, of course, is the great tragedy of this story.

In 2005, in the long, dark calm before the fidget storm, Hettinger was forced to let her patent expire because she couldn't afford the $400 renewal fee.

Since then, the inventor of the fidget spinner hasn't seen a dime of the profits of the most successful product of all time.

Anything really new in thought and in material life has to have its source in something that you have to call spiritual.

Nobody can be really creative unless there's something spiritual behind it.

I mean, who invented the house or who invented any of the things we have?

Probably someone engaged in some kind of search.

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