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 These days, they've mostly been replaced by designs that are a little less geometric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.
I'm intrigued by the notion of using VR to give kids an insight into non-euclidian geometry.
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.