Pedro Edralin Flores was a Filipino businessman and yo-yo maker who has been credited with popularizing Yo-yos in the United States. He patented an innovation to yo-yos that used a loop instead of a knot around the axle, allowing for new tricks such as the ability to "sleep."
Between 1928 and 1932, Flores started and ran the Yo-yoManufacturing Company in Santa Barbara before selling the company and trademark to Duncan who continued to market and sell Flores yo-yos alongside the Duncan line. Flores initially made yo-yos for neighborhood children by hand, but soon started buying machinery to produce them more quickly. Approximately a year after Flores opened his yo-yo business, his company was selling 300,000 yo-yos annually. Flores has been credited with popularizing the yo-yo in the U.S., but he never claimed to have invented the yo-yo. Yo-yos were introduced to the Philippines in the 1800s. The word "yóyo" was a Tagalog word that means "come and go" or "come back." Flores is sometimes referred to as the original patent holder of the yo-yo. Although he didn't patent the first yo-yo in the U.S., his patent included the Filipino innovation of using a loop instead of a knot around the axle. This is known as an "unresponsive yo-yo" and allows for additional tricks such as the ability to "sleep." The ability to do tricks was one of the main selling points for Flores' yo-yos, and he created some of the first yo-yo trick competitions. Other types of yo-yos had already been patented prior to the company's existence. Flores stayed involved with yo-yos most of his life. He founded a yo-yo manufacturing company in Santa Barbara, California, in 1928, founded the Flores Corporation in Hollywood and cofounded Flores and Stone in Los Angeles c. 1929. In the 1930s, he promoted yo-yo contests along with Duncan. He cofounded the Chico yo-yo company in 1950 and founded the Flores Corporation of America in 1954.
Duncan
Between 1930 and 1932, Flores sold his interest in his yo-yo manufacturing companies for greater than $750,000, to Donald F. Duncan Sr., which during the depression of the 1930s was a fortune. On this transaction Flores was quoted saying "I am more interested in teaching children to use the yo-yos than I am in manufacturing of yo-yos." Taking his own words to heart, he became one of the key promoters in Duncan's early yo-yo campaigns. During 1931-1932, Flores was instrumental in setting up a large number of the promotions in the cities where the early Duncan contests were being held. In relation to his contests run just 2 years earlier with his Yo-yo Manufacturing Company, the new Duncan contests were vastly different. These contests now required a series of tricks similar to modern day contests with ties being broken by the number of loop the loops completed.
