This butterfly was put onto an alternate versioned card labeled as No. 707 B. The front of the card has a very different design compared to the design on model No. 707 also seen in this museum. The back of this No. 707 B card does not have any printing while No. 707 has printing. Perhaps the "B" meant "blank" or "blank back". Duncan literature from this time period suggests that it stood for bagged or poly-bagged. The yo-yo model is identical for both versioned cards. Originally sold for 69¢. Blue lacquer with aluminum flecked finish.
About mid 1962 or early 1963, Duncan began to make the change from using three digit product stock numbers to four digits. They also switched over from using polybags to bubble carded product. As such, it is fairly easy to date these early poly-bagged Duncan yo-yos.
The Duncan Butterfly was first released in 1958. A yo-yo demonstrator named Wayne Lundberg introduced the idea for reversing the traditional tournament-shaped wooden halves and making a yo-yo that had a wider string gap. The wider gap helped kids perform more complex string tricks. While the actual Butterfly design has been around since 1878 (see patent 207527, by William Katz, for "Improvement in bandelore toy", August 27, 1878), Duncan was the first company to actually mass produce them. The Butterfly yo-yo was changed by Duncan from wood to plastic in 1968. In the words of Bob Rule, long time yo-yo player and last demonstrator on Duncan's payroll, "Probably the advancement I see the most is the Butterfly invented by Wayne Lundberg. I called it a bicycle with training wheels but had to accept it as it helped the players advance in skill so fast."
