In 1986, a third-grade student in the Bronx got a familiar school assignment: draw something you wish you could have.
Tahira Reid Smith loved Double Dutch. She was an only child. To jump, she normally needed two other people available to turn the ropes.
So she drew a machine that would do it for them.2
The poster won first prize. Then the idea waited.
Forty years later, Reuters filmed Reid Smith, now an engineering professor, jumping in front of that same school with a real machine.2
A childhood idea returns in engineering school
In the Reuters video, Reid Smith says she learned Double Dutch around age five. The drawing came in 1986, then she barely thought about it again until studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.2
Her own timeline fills in the middle.1
At RPI, an introductory engineering-design course focused on sports and recreational activities. The old idea returned. She developed concepts, filed an early patent and kept working on the prototype in another design course.1
Her timeline places the first working prototype around 2000. Another patent was issued in 2003.1
Then Double Dutch went dormant.1
Reid Smith continued an academic career in engineering and design, including years at Purdue before later becoming a full professor. Her former Purdue profile confirms her mechanical-engineering and design work.3
The childhood object did not immediately become a startup. It passed through university, patents, a career and a long period in which very little happened publicly.
Why automate a social game?
Double Dutch uses two ropes turning in opposite directions. Reuters notes that it traditionally requires two people to turn them in addition to the jumper.2
At first, replacing those two people can sound like removing the social part that makes the activity valuable.
The video offers a more practical use.
Pamela Robinson, founder of the 40+ Double Dutch Club, says a turning machine could let people jump even if they do not turn ropes themselves, and could help beginners by providing a controlled pace.2
That is her assessment, not a controlled learning study. But it identifies a simple constraint: practicing alone is difficult when the activity requires two other people before the first jump can happen.
A machine does not necessarily replace social Double Dutch any more than a tennis ball machine replaces playing tennis with another person. It can create a practice mode.
The public sources stop before the motor diagram
The basic problem sounds simple: two motors, two ropes, done.
The motion is less trivial. The ropes have to turn in opposite directions with repeatable timing. Speed has to be controllable. The hardware needs to leave a usable space for the jumper rather than becoming the largest obstacle in the room.
The sources we verified show the prototype and its history but do not publish enough current engineering detail to describe the present motor architecture honestly.
That missing detail is worth respecting. A maker story does not become better when the reporter fills empty space with an imaginary bill of materials.
The documented design constraint is already strong: Reid Smith wanted to practice an activity that normally required three people while she was alone.2
The project returns in a different ecosystem
Reid Smith's site says she later revived the dormant project, worked with product-design firm Speck Design and established Jump Dreams Inc. in Pennsylvania.1
That does not establish that Jump Dreams is a mass-market product available for purchase today. The sources we checked show a company and a demonstrated prototype, not broad commercial availability.
Invention stories love jumping straight from prototype to “coming soon to every school.” The real scene needs less decoration: an engineer returned to her old school with the object she had drawn there as a child.
A very long prototyping loop
The timeline also challenges a common creation myth: if a good idea does not immediately become a full-time project, it has somehow been wasted.
Reid Smith worked on the machine at university, filed patents, reached a working prototype, then let Double Dutch sleep through a substantial part of her career.1
The idea was not dead. It simply was not the priority.
When it returned, she had decades of engineering, design, research and teaching behind her. The childhood idea could be revisited with far more tools than she had in 1986.
Creative projects are often retold as straight lines: idea, prototype, launch.
Jump Dreams looks closer to what many projects actually become: an open loop placed on a shelf, picked up years later, and finally meeting the time, knowledge or context it needed.
The first prototype did not take forty years to build. But roughly forty years after the school drawing, the idea made it back to where it began, this time with the ropes actually turning.