As of 2017, the patent status of the various fidget spinners on the market was unclear.^[9]

Catherine Hettinger, a chemical engineer by training, was initially credited by some news stories as having been the inventor of the fidget spinner, including by media outlets such as The Guardian,^[10] The New York Times,^[11] and the New York Post.^[12] Hettinger filed a patent application for a "spinning toy"^[13] in 1993 and a patent was issued, but Hettinger allowed the patent to lapse in 2005 after she could not find a commercial partner.^[10][9] A May 2017 Bloomberg News article showed that Hettinger was not the inventor of the fidget spinner, and Hettinger agreed.^[9]

In an interview appearing on May 4, 2017 on NPR, Scott McCoskery described how he invented a metal spinning device in 2014 to cope with his own fidgeting in IT meetings and conference calls.^[14] In response to requests from an online community, he began selling the device he called the Torqbar online