The first jungle gym was meant to hack kids' brains

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I'm intrigued by the notion of using VR to give kids an insight into non-euclidian geometry.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/chasechapmanb 📅︎︎ Jun 26 2023 🗫︎ replies

This is so cool! Thanks for sharing! I want to learn more about the gunpowder powered pitching machine haha. The dad seems like he was a super interesting dude.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/lickachiken 📅︎︎ Jun 27 2023 🗫︎ replies
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Climbing frames like this, Americans call them jungle gyms, they used to be all over, in kids' playgrounds and schools around the world. These days, they've mostly been replaced by designs that are a little less geometric and perhaps a little more safe. But this: this is the first one. Someone had to invent it. And that someone was called Sebastian Hinton. Technically, there was at least one prototype before this one, but this was the first solidly-constructed, modern climbing frame, the type that was sold under the trademarked name of "Jungle Gym". It was installed at a school here in Winnetka, near Chicago, in 1920, was used for 90 years, including being relocated to another school, and it now sits here, in the Winnetka Historical Society's back garden. I'm not allowed to climb up this, by the way, partly because it's historic, and partly because I really don't think my US medical insurance would cover someone in his thirties falling off a jungle gym. Now, this was a pretty good invention for the time. As the patent says, "the facilities for climbing available to the average child are limited, "and generally speaking somewhat dangerous". "I have reduced--" I don't know why I'm doing that voice! He was American in the early 20th century, he wouldn't have sounded like... ..."I have reduced the danger of climbing to a minimum." For 1920, he was probably right, but he is optimistic. The patent mentions that you might tie some ropes across the bottom to help catch a kid if they fall, or put fence wire round the outside, or even put it around a swimming pool, but, ach, that's probably not needed. "A child falling in the structure "will have so many opportunities to catch a bar or vertical "that it is almost impossible that he will fall through it to the ground." The idea of a child slipping, hitting their head, and then ragdolling down to the floor doesn't seem to have occurred to him. But he does emphasise safety, and that it must be constructed with the strength to handle dozens of children swinging around on it together. He covered his bases. The text of the patent expands to cover basically any arrangement of perpendicular pipes. Like -- ow -- these. There's also a reference in there to playing "three dimensional tag", and that's where the story gets interesting for me. Because while Sebastian Hinton patented this, he got the idea from his father, mathematician Charles Hinton. Charles has an interesting biography. He was fascinated with the idea of the fourth dimension. He wrote the first popular essay on it in 1880, he invented the word 'tesseract' for a 4D cube, along with the words 'ana' and 'kata', as the 4D equivalent of 'left' and 'right'. That was all Charles Hinton. Who also invented the first baseball pitching machine... ...although it was powered by gunpowder and reports differ on how well it worked and how many injuries it caused. Charles was also convicted of bigamy for being married to two women at the same time. Like I said, interesting biography. Anyway, according to Sebastian, when he was growing up, his father Charles built what was basically a jungle gym out of bamboo, a big structure of cubes like this. And Charles would get the children to play a game: he'd call out mathematical co-ordinates on the grid, something like "X3 Y2 Z4!", and the kids would have to race to the first to get there. His logic was that humans mostly walk around in two dimensions, but we can understand three. So perhaps if you can get kids to move around three dimensions intuitively, while their brains are developing, they'd be able to understand four. Did it work? Well, not in that way, the kids were much more interested with just playing around with it as a climbing frame, and none of them apparently developed any four-dimensional insight. But years later, the adult Sebastian patented this. It's one of those inventions that had to happen at some point: if not here, someone else would have figured it out. But the size, shape, and design that was in schoolyards around the world? That's down to Sebastian Hinton, his dad, and an attempt to teach the fourth dimension.
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Channel: Tom Scott
Views: 2,134,187
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: tom scott, tomscott
Id: rn_8GXNN7_Q
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Length: 3min 43sec (223 seconds)
Published: Mon Jun 26 2023
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