Original subtitles

Did you know there was once a time

when kids played with a science kit

that was actually radioactive?

You could create your own atomic cloud.

It was awesome, and also ridiculously dangerous.

Do you remember playgrounds before safety standards?

If your childhood starts

from a place of torture devices for fun,

you can handle almost anything life throws you.

Or when the hottest new toy came with a blow torch?

They're creating 1,200 degree molten glass.

So they decided, hey, let's just give 'em to kids.

See what they do with it.

But what an idea, what an idea.

These are the things we used to do

for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom,

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous? Certainly.

Deadly? Occasionally.

But boy, wasn't it exciting?

Remember back in the 1980s when kids roamed free?

There were fewer rules, fewer worries,

and a whole lot more adventure.

And for a kid who craved freedom,

there was probably no place less supervised

than a park in Vernon, New Jersey.

In the '70s and '80s, water parks are a new concept

and Gene Mulvihill comes up with an idea for Action Park.

He's gonna be in the center of it all

and he markets it as the park

for the ultimate thrill seeker.

It's got cliff diving,

air slides, rapids, waterfalls!

Gene Mulvihill kind of had this grandiose vision

of he was going to be the next Walt Disney,

but Action Park was probably one of

the most ill-advised parks

in the history of amusement parks on Earth.

Every one of my friends that went

came back with a cast and stitches.

We would pull up to it,

talking about which dangerous ride

that we were gonna go on to prove how tough we were,

and our parents were like,

"Here's money, get in there!

We'll be at the bar."

At the time in New Jersey,

there's an advisory board for amusement park rides,

but not a regulatory agency.

So Mulvihill doesn't need any permit

when he goes about building this thing.

With nothing holding him back,

Mulvihill dreams up one of the park's

most unforgettable rides.

It's the nation's first looping water slide,

the Cannonball Loop.

So the Cannonball is a 60 foot enclosed water slide

that has a 360 degree loop

that spits you out at the bottom.

It defied every engineering principle,

every mechanism for safety or risk.

When I look at this, I'm like,

this clearly was designed by someone

who has no engineering experience.

And guess what? It was!

Gene Mulvihill designed the Cannonball Loop

on the back of a napkin.

He's not an architect, he's not a designer,

he's not an engineer.

He has no business building this thing.

The Cannonball Loop was so dangerous looking

and so ill-conceived,

that him and his workers

didn't want to try it out and test it.

So Gene gets his son to test this water slide.

His son doesn't even have enough faith in Gene,

he decides, "Hey, I'm gonna go down it, Dad,

but I'm gonna go down it in full blown hockey gear."

Now this is a slide designed

for people in bathing suits, okay?

Not hockey gear.

Gene Mulvihill using his son to test out this ride

just says so much about attitudes

around parenting from that era.

Then Mulvihill starts paying park employees,

mostly high school students, to go down.

Mulvihill offers them a hundred dollars

to be the guinea pigs, essentially.

And so one by one,

they go down the water slide

and there's a problem.

When they enter the loop,

the riders have to have enough speed

to make it all the way around the loop.

If you didn't make it, you'd fall backed down the tube

and now, you're really stuck.

You can't go back up the 60 foot incline

and you can't go up the loop.

What do you do?

The only way to get out, eventually,

is they'd lower ropes down the tube

where the kids can latch onto it,

and then they pull them all the way back out.

They finally decide

that there's enough people getting stuck

that they have to create this hatch

to get people out.

This was a ride that had its own escape hatch.

That's how bad it was.

But amazingly, getting stuck

is not the worst possible outcome.

People would come out and be like,

"Why am I bleeding from here, why am I bleeding from here?"

It's a water ride, how are people getting cut?

They'd open a hatch and they'd see

that people were losing their teeth on the ride.

The teeth would get embedded into the ride

like shards of glass

and then we would just go on it

and shoot around and get cut up by people's teeth.

People's teeth!

The Cannonball Loop causes so much carnage

that responsible adults are forced to intervene.

So many people had been injured

that the advisory board said,

"Hey, we gotta put the brakes on this."

The ride is only open for a month,

but the park itself hangs on for another 11 years.

A lot of these things that we talk about

sounds kind of dangerous and perhaps too risky

for children to be engaging with,

but as someone that, like, lived through that era,

there was a sense of pride

in acknowledging and surviving the danger.

That was Action Park,

and I couldn't wait to go back next year!

One ride Action Park didn't have

is the most popular ride in America today,

a roller coaster.

And if you think modern coasters

are bigger and badder than ever,

you'd be wrong.

Coney Island in the 1880s

is where the entire world comes to play

and be mystified and astounded,

and the marquee attraction of the day

was the Switchback Railway,

and it was raking in the modern equivalent

of $22,000 a day.

The Switchback topped out at six miles per hour.

This is really slow compared to a modern roller coaster.

But think that back then,

not only were roller coasters the new thing,

but very few people were driving around in cars

so it was actually pretty exciting.

The people who own the amusement piers begin to think,

well, how can they up the ante?

How can they make it go faster?

How can they increase the thrill?

What they come up with

is the first American coaster to go upside down.

It's called the Flip Flap Railway.

And at the time, it was the fastest

freestanding rollercoaster in the world,

because it has to be.

The key to making this rollercoaster work is speed,

so that once you start going around the loop,

you don't stall at the top and fall down.

Because there's nothing

but your own body weight and G-force holding you down.

You have no seat belt, you have no harness,

you have nothing but yourself, God, and the wind.

The Flip Flap Railway a circle

that's about 25 feet in diameter

and in order to generate enough speed,

there's an almost pure vertical drop

where the cars reach 45 miles an hour.

To put it in perspective,

the first auto race in the US is held

the same year the Flip Flap opens,

and the cars in that race average seven miles per hour.

Seven.

So the Flip Flap is extremely fast,

and even in today's standards,

45 miles per hour on a rollercoaster is getting it.

The speed is ahead of its time,

but as far as safety measures,

they're making that up as they go along.

In the late 1800s, there was no real regulation.

I mean, amusement parks were new,

and so this was all experimental.

Modern roller coasters

are made with this teardrop shape,

that way you pull less G-forces at the bottom

than you otherwise would in a circular design.

Just for perspective,

a space launch generates three Gs.

Six Gs is the maximum

a human being without protective equipment

can really stand.

So the riders of the Flip Flap,

they will pull 12 Gs.

This is not safe.

So what 12 Gs means is,

you'll feel a pressure 12 times your own body weight

pressing down on you.

So that means a 50 pound child would feel

600 pounds of invisible weight pressing down on them.

The scariest rollercoaster

that any of us have been on today

tops out at about five Gs.

These people were putting these poor suckers

on a wooden trolley cart that whipped around like that.

Astronauts couldn't put up with it,

do you understand what I'm saying?

Like, astronauts training to go to space

don't deal with that many Gs.

By today's standards,

we get on these roller coasters and we feel at home.

We have seat belts, we have harnesses.

Everything is holding us in.

Not then.

People are without a harness,

just with enough money to ride the rollercoaster

and a little bit of a death wish.

People were passing out,

they were getting bloody noses,

like, they were seeing God.

Their brains were rattling around their skulls,

they were getting flattened like pancakes,

and then they'd have to pay a nickel or something like that

for the pleasure of it.

Chances are, if you ride the Flip Flap once,

you are never riding it again.

The Flip Flap Railway was so bad,

it started to be called

one of the unholy terrors of the beach.

And in 1901, New York City finally just shut it down.

A kid's science kit today might teach some simple physics

or maybe some color changing chemistry,

but I guarantee you it wouldn't come close

to the experience you got from older science kits.

In the early 20th century, A.C. Gilbert was one of

the most famous toy makers in America.

In fact, he's the guy who invented

the immensely popular and successful Erector set.

On the heels of his success,

Gilbert starts producing a line of science kits for kids,

including a chemistry set that comes out in 1920.

Gilbert's kits are actually meant

to teach the youth of America

to be our future chemists.

Professional chemists at this time

had to make their own beakers,

their own glass equipment.

So to make the experience complete,

A.C. Gilbert comes out

with the Gilbert Glass Blowing Kit.

And it comes with its own blowtorch.

If I had gotten this kit as a kid,

oh, this would've been amazing.

I would see glass blowing on television

and I thought that was amazing,

and now I could play with fire

and blow glass in my own room?

Yeah, great.

The instruction manual asks you

to take one end of the blow pipe,

dip it into the molten glass,

roll it and implement it into the shape

that you intend to make,

and then blow the 1,200 degree molten glass

until it expands into a balloon shaped bubble;

then remove glass, let cool.

Voila!

As someone who has blown glass before,

it's really, really dangerous.

These children are melting immense amounts of glass

to create flasks and beakers.

It's really kind of hard to imagine

putting this in the hands of an eight or 9-year-old

and just telling them, "Best of luck to you, son,

and we'll see you at dinner time."

It was really a very different world back then.

Today's chemistry sets don't even have burners,

let alone blow torches.

But back then, the mindset was about

preparing kids for adult life.

Playing with fire was part of that.

By the late 1940s, Americans were preparing

for a completely different kind of future.

And once again,

A.C. Gilbert was there to get the kids ready.

In the wake of World War II,

kids were into science,

they would soon be into the space race.

Kids loved building things

and there was all this interest in the modern world.

In 1949, A.C. Gilbert teams up with Uncle Sam

to make a new science kit for kids:

the Atomic Energy Lab.

So here's what the ad says.

I mean, imagine turning on the radio in the 1950s,

"Atomic Energy Lab, with real Geiger counter, $49.50.

Boys, explore the secrets of the atom!

Prospect for uranium!"

Everyone's involved in this, to the top levels of government.

Nuclear scientists are working on this thing

with Gilbert and his team,

creating these instruments and an experimental manual.

The Atomic Energy Commission is even involved.

The A.C. Gilbert Atomic Energy Kit

actually came with its own cloud chamber,

so you could create, like,

your own little miniature version of the Atomic Cloud.

I don't know what kid wouldn't wanna play with it!

But in order to make an atomic cloud,

what do you need?

The Atomic Energy Lab has, in it,

actual radioactive sources.

It comes with four different samples of uranium ore.

The kit arrived with the samples in sealed jars,

but once you take them out,

now it was exposed radiation.

You can't just simply put it back,

the radiation's escaped from its container.

This kit has uranium ore, alpha emitters,

beta emitters, and gamma emitters.

All of this is bad stuff.

We have labs around the country right now

that use these.

I used to run those labs.

Let me tell you what the protocol is:

they're kept in a lead safe

and when you put it into your experiment,

you have these tweezers

that are about a foot and a half long

so that you stay far away from it.

So they decided, "Hey, let's just give 'em to kids.

See what they do with it."

Just invite the uranium into your bedroom,

into your living room, in your kitchen.

See, I'm not a radiologist nor a physicist,

and even I know kids should not be seeing

the intricate paths of electrons in a cloud chamber.

Like, is this only sold in Los Alamos?

Radiation, over time, alters your DNA,

it alters your cellular structure.

And it leads to abnormal cell growth

and it leads to cancers,

so you could have devastating effects

from a radioactive toy.

This lab is clearly

one of the most dangerous toys of all time.

The Atomic Energy Lab

stops being produced after a year,

and it is not the outcry of concerned parents,

it is not the scientific community

reacting to harmful radiation.

No, Gilbert himself pulls it from the market.

When it debuts, its $49.50,

which is the equivalent of like, a $600 toy today.

It was just too expensive

and families didn't want to pay that amount for a toy.

When it comes to play,

maybe it's best to keep things simple.

Kids can be delighted by the simplest things.

You give them a box, they'll play for hours.

For me, one of life's greatest pleasures

came in a little jar with a wand.

What is it about human evolution

that makes us attracted to spheres?

When you have a little kid, whether it's a bubble or a ball,

they love 'em!

But one of the first things you learn,

playing with bubbles,

is you try to touch them and of course, you can't.

They pop immediately.

But in 1970, toy designers developed a miracle product.

Super Elastic Bubble Plastic!

Squeeze it out and blow it up!

The idea was, what if you could create a bubble

that just stuck around

and became more like a ball that you made yourself?

The way it worked,

you squeezed this really stretchy polymer out of a tube,

attach it to the end of a straw,

and you could blow beach ball sized bubbles

that wouldn't pop.

Basically, you defy the rules of bubble making.

It's really exciting.

If you were a kid,

these were the greatest thing ever.

You wanted to pinch it on the sides

'til it faintly resembled a matchstick.

Didn't want it too thin,

but you wanted most of the thickness on the top.

Mother of pearl.

The thing about Super Elastic Bubble Plastic is,

they weren't easy to blow.

They weren't like soap bubbles that you can just make,

they were this plastic chemical compound.

You had to try multiple times just to get it to work.

You had to blow from the soles of your feet

and you would give it that first blow

and you pop blood vessel in your eye,

and nothing would happen.

So what would you do?

You'd inhale, right?

And the thing was, it had this strong smell

because it was made of polyvinyl acetate,

ethyl acetate, and acetone.

In other words, its toxic as hell.

Polyvinyl acetate is essentially wood glue,

ethyl acetate is used in cleaning solvents,

and acetone is nail polish remover.

And it's all done in a putty

that you then put on a straw and you inhale!

Super Elastic Bubble Plastic impacts your lung functioning,

affecting your breathing,

and then impacts your nervous system

leading you to feel jittery.

Kids are throwing up after playing with it

and they're reporting burning sensations

in their lungs and in their throat.

Conventional wisdom would dictate,

parents would go, "Whoa, my kids are inhaling toxins?

Let's get this off the market immediately."

But that's not what happened.

Oddly, it's not the toxins themselves

that worry '80s parents,

it's something else.

Now, the thing about the Super Elastic Bubble Plastic

and its strong smell is that it had a surprise,

and if you smelled it up close and got a nice whiff,

you got a buzz, you got a bit lightheaded.

If you were looking for just a slight little high,

you could just start huffing Super Elastic Bubble Plastic.

And so this comes butt up against Nancy Reagan

and the whole, "This is Your Brain on Drugs"

anti-drug campaign that started in the '80s.

When it comes to drugs and alcohol,

just say no.

Parents and teachers and school principals worry

that it's a gateway drug,

possibly leading to worse things

and so they need to curtail this.

Super Elastic Bubble Plastic

is taken off the market in the mid-'80s.

Not because it was made of poison,

but because they were afraid

kids would be getting high from it.

Even now, it's still lingering in my nose,

like, in a bad way.

Dangerous toys came in all shapes and sizes,

and temperatures.

Just ask anyone who had toys that cook.

Easy bake, easy bake, fast as you can!

In 1963, the Easy Bake Oven is unveiled.

They're so successful

that 20 million are sold in three years.

Rival toy companies are scrambling

and they think, "If Easy Bake Oven is marketed towards girls,

what would appeal to boys?"

What they come up with

puts a whole new spin on baking toys.

Creature from the Black Lagoon!

It's the 1960s, the height of sci-fi culture.

Creepy things are all the rage.

So what if we make a toy that allows people

to build their own creepy things?

Now you can make

all kinds of like these

with Mattel's wonderful Thing Maker.

So in the wake of the Easy Bake Oven,

they came up with a thing called the Thing Maker,

and it was awesome.

You got to make eyeballs, and stars, and teeth.

So you'd make these creatures in something called a maker.

You'd get a mold and it was like a real die cast mold.

You'd pour in this stuff called plastigoop,

and then put it in your childhood kiln,

then you would remove this scalding hot thing,

and cool it in a cup of water,

and you could have a toy.

It was super fun, exciting,

and also ridiculously dangerous.

It turns out, this machine packs a punch.

Where the Easy Bake Oven took great pains

to be something where the heat source was guarded,

the Thing Maker didn't really do that.

What was so wild about the Thing Maker

is that it's essentially just a hot plate

that plugs into the wall,

and then given to children

to play with on a carpeted floor.

The surface of the burner itself

can get up to 400 degrees.

The outer edges of it can actually reach 200 degrees.

Yeah, kids were gonna get burned.

The problem with the Thing Maker

is there's no indicator saying

that it's hot enough to start the baking process,

and there's no indicator to tell you

that the baking process is done.

And when you think it is time that the mold is done,

you have to grab a little wire grabber

to pull the mold out.

That's a little hard to squeeze.

As a kid, a kid's probably gonna be struggling.

This is sort of like the game Operation,

but instead of just getting a little sound,

a little buzz, there's the chance of like, you know,

getting burned with molten plastic.

Even if the mold is done

and the plastigoop has properly baked,

there's still a searing hot aluminum mold to contend with.

By the 1980s,

enough hands and fingers are burned

that regulators step in.

President Richard Nixon signs into law

the Child Protection and Toy Safety Act,

and for the very first time,

the US government is able to ban any toy

that presents a mechanical, electrical, or thermal hazard.

Any toy oven or Thing Maker

with an exposed 400 degree hot plate

cannot be used safely, it just isn't,

so it's taken off the market as a result.

I'm sure there are adults today

running around the world with Thing Maker scars.

There is nothing like a backyard barbecue.

I love a great hot dog.

Fun times with people that you love,

and what makes the experience even better?

A few family friendly games!

Or were they?

Before the post-war period,

the backyard was kind of a utilitarian space.

After 1945, with suburbanization and single family homes,

the backyard becomes an extension of the house.

In the den, families are playing Monopoly and Yahtzee.

Out in the backyard,

they're playing a new game called Jarts.

Jarts is a pretty simple game.

Its darts to be played on the lawn.

The Jart itself is this winged plastic dart thing,

but the point of it is made out of this heavy metal.

You're supposed to throw them up into the air

and they're supposed to arch

and then land down into the circle.

My first thing was, screw the circle.

We don't need that.

We're just gonna throw these things up

as high as we possibly can,

until if we can get to stick perfectly in the ground,

because that was victory.

By 1986, there's somewhere between

10 million to 15 million sets of Jarts

in homes across America.

Jarts may seem like child's play,

but only if your child's name is Brutus.

Historically, the Jart is based upon

this ancient Roman weapon of war,

a weapon called the plumbata.

And so Roman infantry men were given these things

and they would throw them up as high as they can,

and they were meant to come down to damage their enemy.

It's been calculated that a descending Jart,

when it hits something,

it can apply 23,000 pounds of force per square inch.

To put that into context,

consider that an F-16 fighter jet

with all its compliments of weaponry,

weighs about 23,000 pounds.

Imagine applying the weight of an F-16 in a square inch.

That's what a Jart's giving you.

I had my own experiences with Jarts.

Fortunately, I got out unscathed, unscarred,

but a friend of mine,

they were playing with Jarts and the Jart went up.

When it came down, it landed into her head

requiring an emergency room visit, an ambulance ride,

and a surgical removal of the Jart from her skull.

However, if you're wondering if she's okay,

there was no long lasting effects, allegedly.

And it wasn't just Jason's friend

who suffered a Jarts related injury.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission

investigates the safety of toys.

And from 1972 to 1986,

something like 6,000 separate Jarts injuries were reported.

A week before Christmas in 1988,

30 years after Jarts were first introduced,

the Consumer Product Safety Commission

bans them from being sold in America.

Today, kids battle with Nerf guns and Super Soakers.

But back in the day, it was all about futuristic ray guns.

In the 1940s, American kids are obsessed with Buck Rogers

and one of the things that kids love about Buck Rogers

is his ray gun.

So in the 1950s,

the Austin Manufacturing Company outta Michigan

comes up with this amazing looking toy

called the Austin Magic Pistol.

The Austin Magic pistol is cool.

It's bright red, it's big, it's chunky.

It looks like the phaser guns of the comics.

And what it does is equally cool.

The Austin Magic Pistol

can shoot ping pong balls

up to 100 feet away.

This little gun achieves such power and speed

thanks to some literally explosive technology.

The Austin Magic Pistol

doesn't accelerate its projectiles

through a spring loaded mechanism

or anything like that.

It accelerates them through the use of magic crystals

that you load into the back and then blend with water.

The magic crystals are made of calcium carbide,

which today you'd find on pretty much any list

of hazardous materials,

because mixing water with calcium carbide

creates acetylene gas.

That's right, the same acetylene that powers a blowtorch.

It's literally one of

the hottest burning materials you can buy.

There are actually stars

whose surfaces are that temperature.

It can burn at upwards to 5,500 degrees.

You think this is safe for children?

Have fun, kids!

When you pull the trigger,

there's a flint that creates a spark

that sets off the calcium carbide.

That reaction then pressurizes the barrel,

then fires this ping pong ball out of it at high speeds.

You have a firearm!

They're selling a firearm to children.

It's a low powered firearm, yeah,

but it's still a firearm.

You think, well, ping pong balls are immensely light.

However, an ultra lightweight ping pong ball

traveling at high speed at close range,

probably gonna leave a bruise.

It's also shooting out a flame and sparks,

and sometimes the flames and sparks

would come out the back of the gun

so they would hit your wrist.

If there was any kinda damage or dents,

that back little panel could actually fly off

during the explosive event,

splashing your face with hot metal, explosive flames.

Doesn't sound like so much fun at that point.

So what happens to the Austin Magic Pistol?

Well, following many reports of accidents,

several states pass laws

making it illegal for a toy gun to discharge

using combustible materials.

And while you can sometimes find

a few vintage ones for sale online,

good luck buying one legally today.

Today, because it uses a chemical explosion

to propel a projectile,

most states classify the Austin Magic Pistol

as an actual firearm.

Any parent knows there is nothing worse

than a toy that makes a lot of noise.

But there was a 1960s classic

that had more to it than just its annoying sound.

In 1968, the world is introduced to Clackers.

And they're the fidget spinner of the day.

I'm an adult, I assume I've acquired

all my hand-eye coordination development.

It's not easy.

I don't know how you're supposed to use these.

You do really feel like this could be something

that could get annoying to adults.

Miracle Clackers, Click Clacks, Clickers,

they're all the same type of toy,

the same, basic, balls on a string,

makes a lot of noise.

Clackers were developed

based off an Argentinian weapon called a boladero

that they use to rustle cattle.

With the toy version, instead of bagging a steer,

the goal is to move your hand up and down,

creating a rhythmic clack as the two balls collide,

impact, fly away, and come back again,

thus creating a rhythm

and the clack that they're famous for.

Clackers are about as ubiquitous, at one point,

as yo-yos and hula hoops;

they are everywhere.

Unbreakable, Miracle Clackers

are for everyone, even the little guy!

They're popular.

42 million of them are produced.

Over 1,600 companies across forty countries

are manufacturing clackers.

They've gotta get in on the trend.

What parents don't realize

is that clackers aren't just annoying,

they're also dangerous.

Since 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration

has been protecting children

from chemical, flammable and radioactive

dangers in their toys.

You would think that a toy like the Clackers

would not fall into any of those categories,

but actually, it does.

The initial design had glass balls at the end of the strings,

and when they were left in the sun,

they would just focus the sun's light

through the lens of the glass ball

and ignite anything sitting next to it.

Early versions of clackers are made from tempered glass,

which is four times stronger than regular glass.

So in terms of specific injuries

that clackers can cause,

there are black eyes, blunt force trauma,

permanent eye damage.

These are not garden variety playground injuries.

These things are clacking together hard

and sometimes they'd shatter,

creating a cloud of shrapnel, sharp shrapnel.

If your clackers survive not being shattered

and splintering your eyeballs with particles of glass,

you can still always have the pleasure

of getting a hand caught in it, chipping a tooth,

or even worse, getting a concussion.

So at a point,

they move clackers away from this tempered glass

to an acrylic plastic,

but that hard acrylic would still shatter sometimes,

which is just as bad as glass.

Clackers are eventually taken off the market,

but not before they make headlines

for a very unexpected reason.

So there's a fascinating story involving clackers,

which takes the clackers in a place

you wouldn't expect them to go.

It's March of 1971.

A gentleman named Diego Ramirez

is boarding a plane in New York City

to go to Puerto Rico.

And as they're in the air, he gets out of his seat

and begins walking up and down the aisle,

clacking his clackers.

And as you can imagine, if you're in that plane,

well, you're immediately annoyed.

Diego Ramirez pulled a flight attendant over

and told her, "There will be annihilation

if you don't take this plane to Havana."

They do redirect the flight.

They land in Havana, Cuba.

And to their credit,

Castro's police force immediately arrest

the man upon landing.

And as it turns out, he had no bomb, he had no gun.

He just had a pair of clackers.

Toys come and go, but there's one place

that every kid remembers: the playground.

But the swings and slides for most 20th century kids

were a far cry from the ones kids play on today.

The late-1800s into the 1900s,

millions of people arrive from Europe primarily,

and they are crowding into these neighborhoods

of New York City, and Boston, and Philadelphia,

piled on top of each other,

absolutely nowhere for kids to play.

So where do they go?

Out into the streets.

They'd be getting into trouble, getting into fights,

and we're talking thousands of kids.

They are involved in gambling, drinking, smoking.

What kids do when they hang out on the streets.

They're also getting run over by trolleys.

Mothers, community leaders, politicians,

everyone starts to look for

healthy alternatives for these kids,

and what they come up with are playgrounds.

The idea behind playgrounds

is to create a local spot

where kids can get all their bottled up energy out.

They've got everything we think of

that a modern playground would have,

swings, and monkey bars, and slides.

Any kid who's gone down any metal slide

knows that steel gets really, really hot;

like 150 degrees hot.

Your skin makes this screeching sound

as you get stuck going down.

But there was one legendary piece of equipment

that was on nearly every playground

until it went extinct.

One of the most popular pieces of playground equipment

is the Miracle Whirl.

It's a metal disc on an axis.

You run top speed, grab a handle,

and when you feel it's going fast enough,

you sort of throw caution and your life to the wind

and just jump on.

The park that I grew up had two Miracle Whirls.

It served one purpose,

and that was to see who could throw up the fastest.

It's a vomit machine.

There is always some kid spinning so fast

that other kids are puking.

And if they're not puking, they're falling off.

The Miracle Whirl's design

has numerous potential pitfalls.

The only thing holding you on this ride

is the strength of your grip,

a child's grip.

If for some reason you were spun

from the high end to the low end,

you can have your legs trapped under the low end.

And should you be catapulted from the high side,

you're not landing on

today's recycled rubber, modular mats.

Growing up in the 1970s,

there was no padding on the ground.

You took chances.

You're landing on whatever was around

that the town had.

Could be wood chips, could be asphalt,

could be bare earth, could be bricks.

The Miracle Whirl goes through

several safety redesigns through the decades,

but eventually falls out of favor

in the '90s and early 2000s.

When you're being raised in a world

where your parents are happy to put you on the Miracle Whirl,

you know, you survived it.

But I just think that, like,

if your childhood starts from a place

of torture devices for fun,

that you can handle almost anything life throws you,

I think.

But I don't have kids.

Of course, you don't have to be a kid to have fun.

In fact, some rides aren't meant for kids at all.

In the early 2000s,

play for an unprecedented number of Americans

came in the form of boating.

And what outing on the water

would be complete without boat toys?

Trust me, put your life jackets on for this one.

Recreational boating hit its peak in 2005,

and at that time, there was something

like 80 million Americans

spending their weekends and summers out on the water.

And what do people love to do when boating? Tubing.

The most fun part is when you get a little airborne,

but it's like, for a fraction of a second.

So somebody got the bright idea,

"What if we could make that airborne time

last even longer?"

What I love about Americans, you got a boat,

let's go out on the water and have a good day.

Not good enough.

Let's get a rope and let's put a tube on it.

Not enough!

What if, like, there's a device on the tube

that lifts the tube into the air

and flies it around?

In the fall of 2005,

the introduction of Kite Tubes

takes tubing to new heights.

That's wild, man.

Kite Tubes,

they don't just bounce on a couple of waves,

they're made to take flight.

When you hit the wave,

you lift on the handles

and now the tube goes airborne.

Going up in the air 20 feet

is nothing for a Kite Tube.

And depending on weather conditions,

you could even go higher than that.

It's tube, kite, air, boat.

People loved it.

In the first nine months or so,

they're selling 2,000 Kite Tubes a month.

The Kite Tube attracts so much attention,

it's named Product of the Year

by the Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association.

It's an honor that's given a little too soon.

When you're in the Kite Tube, you're not even strapped in.

There's no safety precautions.

You've got two little handles,

then you got your feet in this little holster,

but that's it.

There is no steering mechanism,

there's no braking mechanism.

If something goes awry,

you have no control.

You're crashing back down to Earth.

Whoa!

Traditional tubing,

which stays on the water's surface,

is dangerous enough.

For Kite Tubes, when you add higher speeds and height,

now you're really getting in a dangerous realm.

When you hit 25 miles per hour,

you get about 10 feet of air.

But you go a little faster,

you're 20, 30, 40 feet,

you're like, four stories high right now.

That's a high fall.

If you fall from that height,

the water is not going to be cushiony and soft.

It is going to be like smacking a brick wall

at 50 miles an hour.

Oh, [bleep].

So of course, there are dozens and dozens of injuries.

People would break bones, would knock out teeth,

would just skip like a stone across the water,

and two people actually die.

The Kite Tube's popularity

is quickly overshadowed

by its reputation for injury and death.

Kite Tubes are only around for about a year

when they're taken off the market.

The Kite Tube is a little bit like Icarus.

It flew too close to the sun,

and it maimed and killed too many people,

and it was gone.

But what an idea, what an idea.

Looking back at our bygone activities,

whether it was Jarts or glass blowing kits,

or looping roller roller coasters without a harness,

there was such a fine line between play and peril.

Sure, it was more dangerous,

but that's what made our hazardous history

such an adventure.