![]() To this day, kids sometimes still stumble across it, and Treishman has to politely tell them to stay off. (Courtesy of Winnetka Historical Society) Hinton’s original jungle gym, pictured here in the 1930s at the Horace Mann School before it was moved to the Winnetka Historical Society. That artifact is a 100-year-old jungle gym - the first real version. “We just have this laminated sign that says, ‘Please do not climb on this artifact. “We currently don’t have a historical plaque on it,” she says. ![]() But for visitors who walk through a small gate into the back yard, surrounded by 20-foot tall conifers, there’s a little bit of a hidden treasure, says Mary Treishman, the executive director of the Winnetka Historical Society. Inside, the 30,000 artifacts range from typewriters to vacuum cleaners. It never becomes sort of the cultural mainstay that is now ubiquitous on most playgrounds.” The difference between monkeys and apesįrom the outside, there’s nothing remarkable about the old Victorian home at 411 Linden Street in Winnetka, Illinois, which these days serves as the headquarters for the town’s historical society. Or, as Fannin says, “It only stays in Hinton’s backyard. If that dinner party had taken place anywhere else in the world, this iconic piece of equipment may never have existed. Soon after, Hinton began filing his early patents for the design, which he registered to something he called JungleGym Inc. Fannin says he imagines Washburne’s eyes widening before telling Hinton, “We need to build this in the schools!” So, as Hinton was describing his dream climbing structure, the dinner party was stacked with educators, including the superintendent of the Winnetka City Schools, Carleton Washburne. The village was taken with the educational philosophy of John Dewey, which called for “whole child education.” This meant not just teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, but also how to be healthy and active humans. Winnetka at this time was a hotbed for progressive education. He dreamed of recreating the bamboo climbing structure of his youth - minus the not very fun math games - and he started describing his plans at a dinner party one night. I don’t remember anything about the math, but I remember that it was so fun,'” says Fannin.īy now it was the early 1920s, and the junior Hinton had moved to Winnetka, Illinois where he worked as a patent lawyer. But years later, Hinton’s son Sebastian would recall how much fun it was to climb and swing on them. And those bamboo cubes never amounted to much. If that does not sound like a fun game to you, you are not alone. “He would say, ‘X2, Y4, Z3 - go! And all the kids would race each other towards the correct coordinate,'” says Fannin. He labeled the bamboo in all three directions, Fannin says: “Where the junctions would be, he would put X, Y, Z coordinates.” Then he attempted to turn these stacked cubes into a game. To pull this off, Hinton built his children a series of stacked bamboo cubes. His solution was to train young children, namely his own kids, to internalize the third dimension. His model of a tesseract as a way to represent the fourth dimension in geometrical space has since inspired a long lineage of science fiction writing and movies - from A Wrinkle in Time to Interstellar. Hinton was a mathematician who explored the concept of the fourth dimension and how to represent it. It turns out that the history of the jungle gym, and its sibling the monkey bars, is full of weird and delightful twists and sub-plots that take us from Japan to suburban Chicago and touch on child development theories and, yes, theoretical math. We will save all of that for the biopic, because for the purposes of this story, Hinton was the unintentional inspiration behind the jungle gym - the patent for which has just turned 100. And when he was convicted of bigamy in the 1880s, he was forced to move his young family to Japan where he found work teaching mathematics. He also practiced polygamy, which was against both the mores and laws of his native England. He wrote sci-fi stories before there was sci-fi - he called them “scientific romances.” At Princeton, where he worked for a time as mathematics instructor, he invented a baseball pitching machine powered by gunpowder. Or, more specifically, with a British mathematician who, in the late 1800s, was intrigued by the fourth dimension and how to teach disinterested children about it.Ĭharles Hinton wore a lot of hats. This story starts in the fourth dimension.
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