Origins: The Jungle Gym

 The Jungle Gym turned 100 years old last year, sort of.  The patent filed by Sebastian Hinton was approved in 1923, starting off its worldwide replications.  However, Sebastian Hinton was not really an inventor -- he was a patent attorney in Illinois, so he wrote a good patent.

  The idea and the basic structure was dreamed up and built many years before by his father, Charles Hinton, who was an inventor (he created the first baseball pitching machine.  Unfortunately, it was powered by gunpowder.)  Charles Hinton also wrote scientific romances in the era of H.G. Wells' classics, but chiefly he was a mathematician.  And so the purpose of his jungle gym was to...teach his children math.

Charles Hinton came from a radical but highly educated family in the UK.  His mathematical interest was what he called the fourth dimension, within which exist the three dimensions we know.  Or something like that.  (It wasn't the Wells' version of the fourth dimension, which was time.)  In the late 19th century, when he proposed his ideas (more influential now than then), he came to believe that people couldn't understand his fourth dimension because they really didn't know the mathematics of three dimensions.  

So to teach his children how three-dimensional math works, he built a backyard structure to illustrate it, and encouraged his kids to identify the junctures of the x, y and z axes by climbing to each point and calling it out.  They climbed all right, but they ignored the math lesson.

Charles Hinton built his structure out of bamboo, since he was in Japan at the time.  Later he moved to the US, taught at Princeton (where he invented the pitching machine), and worked at the US Naval Observatory and the Patent Office, though he never bothered to patent his "climbing frame."

Years later his son Sebastian suddenly remembered it, and described it to an educator at the progressive school system in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, who encouraged him to build a prototype.  It was tweaked, and eventually kids in Winnetka were climbing on the first jungle gyms (one of which still exists, also made of wood) and Hinton filed his patent.  He didn't personally profit by it or see its success, for this is also the centennial of his death.

The patent referred to the structure as a version of tree branches upon which "monkeys" climb.  Experts say it's really ape species that do this kind of climbing, but kids are often called monkeys. and the name stuck for one part of the jungle gym: the monkey bars.  The jungle gym has been varied over the years, getting more elaborate and more safety- (and lawsuit-) conscious.  But something like the original still features in many if not most playgrounds and a lot of backyards.

There have been a few notices in the media of this centennial, notably the NPR All Things Considered segment by Matt Ozug.  But no one answered the question that I had (nor did they ask it):  The name "Jungle Gym" seems like an obvious pun on "Jungle Jim," of comic strip, film, radio and TV fame.  But is it?

Nope.  Sebastian Hinton patented what he called the "junglegym" in 1923.  Jungle Jim didn't appear in the newspaper comics pages until 1934.  Jungle Jim was created by comics artist Alex Raymond (with writer Don Moore) as a lead-in to Raymond's other famous hero, Flash Gordon--they both appeared for the first time on the same day.  The other thing that seems obvious about Jungle Jim is true: he was created to compete with the wildly popular Tarzan, who started out in a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, then swung into the movies (the first Tarzan in silent pictures was Elmo Lincoln, of Knox College) before dominating the funny papers starting in 1931. 

So is it the other way around?  Jungle Jim comes from the Jungle Gym?  The official story is that Jungle Jim Bradley was named after Alex Raymond's brother Jim.  But did the brothers ever play on a jungle gym as boys?  I await the definitive Alex Raymond biography to answer that question.