Ok, so, the first thing I want to say is that there are two different legends about the origin of pogo sticks.
The first one, the one that I heard, was that pogo sticks were originally used in Borneo as part of ritual sacrifices. Or just rituals. That one came from QI and I liked, but there apparently isn't much evidence on that one. Darn.
The second I heard is about a guy from Burma who was so poor he couldn't buy his daughter, Pogo, slippers, so she used a jumping stick to get to the temples to pray without bringing in a lot of mud.
Both of these sound like awesome stories, but there isn't a lot of evidence about either.
In the realm of things that can be proved and known, we know that the first ones with springs in them came from George Herrington in the late 1800's, then the ones with double footrests instead of having one for each foot, came about because of a German in 1920, and the double handle came about a year later. The official patent happened even later, in the 1950's, when someone decided that they should probably be made out of metal instead of wood. That's when we got the Pogo Stick as we know it.
Since then, the Pogo Stick has been used to set several world records and to do a lot of things I don't think the creators thought this would do. Among those are that there is a record of the highest number of consecutive jumps, achieved in the 1990's and holding today, at over 177,000. There is a record of someone using the pogo stick to travel over 37 kilometers. There were a few couples that got married while pogo-ing, and I have no doubts that there are more at the Pogopalooza, an annual festival somewhere in the United States that celebrates people's extreme love of pogo sticks, will do so in the future.
More recently than 1950's though, the Pogo Stick got powered up so people can do 'extreme pogo' and do tricks. You might look that up for the interesting acrobatics they can do, among other things. They've had a record set at the highest jump being over 9 feet up, one guy jumped over a taxi cab on the David Letterman show, and often do a lot of tricks similar to those of bicycles, during the time they have in the air.
Sources:
Hopping Stilts and Chorus Girls - a History and Etymology of "Pogo" Sticks
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pogo Sticks
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