Athletes - George Nissen

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	Athletes - George Nissen

George Nissen, (Born 1914 in Blairtown, Iowa) is an American gymnast and inventor who developed the modern trampoline and made trampolining a worldwide sport.

Nissen became a keen gymnast in high school and won three NCAA gymnastics championships while a student at the University of Iowa. He had seen circus trapeze artists use their safety nets as an elastic bed to rebound and perform additional tricks. He thought that this would be a useful training tool for his tumbling. In 1934, Nissen and his coach Larry Griswold built the prototype trampoline from angle iron with a canvas bed and rubber springs. Nissen used it to help with his training and to entertain children at a summer camp.

After he graduated in Business Studies in 1937, Nissen and two friends toured the United States and Mexico performing at fairs and carnivals. While in Mexico, he heard the word trampolin, springboard in Spanish, and decided to use it for his bouncing apparatus. He trademarked the word in an anglicised form. He built a few trampolines and promoted the sale of his trampolines by touring performances which did gradually increase sales. In 1941, he and Griswold set up the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

During World War II, the trampoline was used to train pilots by getting them used to orienting themselves in the air. After the war Nissen continued to promote the trampoline and began touring in Europe and later the Soviet Union promoting both the sport of "rebound tumbling" and his trampoline equipment. Nissen set up a branch plant of his company in England in the 1950s but by this time other manufacturers had started to make similar equipment and eventually, although the word trampoline was originally a trade mark, it became a generic word for rebound apparatus. Nissen's company ceased operations in the 1980s.

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