Did you know in 1841 Connecticut banned nine-pin bowling to stop gambling which lead to the invention of 10-pin bowling to circumvent the law ?

Did you know the original Furby was released in the fall of 1998 by Tiger Electronics and was created by Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung, it became an immediate holiday craze and a cultural icon, selling over 40 million units in its first three years ? (The U.S. National Security Agency banned the toy from its headquarters in 1999. Photography and audio-visual recording equipment are prohibited in NSA headquarters, and the agency was worried that the toy might unintentionally record and repeat classified information.)

Did you know the Game of Jaws was invented and released by the Ideal Toy Company in 1975 to coincide with the release of the blockbuster film Jaws ? (The action-suspense game, which involves removing plastic "junk" pieces from a rubber-band-powered shark's mouth.)

Did you know the Speak & Spell was introduced by Texas Instruments at the summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978 and it was developed starting in 1976 by a team including Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz, marking the first educational toy to use a single-chip speech synthesizer to reproduce human speech without tape ? (The Speak & Spell was sold, with regional variations, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. The voice in the toy was provided by Mitch Carr, a radio anchor at KRLD in Dallas,Texas.)

The Hoppity Hop (or hopper ball) was invented in the 1960s by Italian rubber manufacturer Aquilino Cosani ? (The idea was patented in 1968, and the product was introduced to the U.S. market by the Sun Company that same year. It was later popularized in the UK as the "Space Hopper" in 1969 and was also known as a skippyball, kangaroo ball, bouncer, hippity hip, hop ball and some others.)