The first jungle gym was meant to hack kids' brains
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2023
- Well before the first climbing frame was patented as "jungle gym", mathematician Charles Hinton thought they might be able to teach kids four-dimensional thinking. ■ Thanks to the Winnetka Historical Society! More from them: www.winnetkahistory.org/gazet...
Original patents referenced:
patents.google.com/patent/US1...
patents.google.com/patent/US1...
patents.google.com/patent/US1...
patents.google.com/patent/US1...
Also referenced is "Winnetka: The history and significance of an educational experiment", by Washburne and Marland.
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This feels like a video I'd have made years ago! Just me, a GoPro, and an Interesting Thing. (And speaking of interesting things: I've got a podcast about interesting questions! You can listen for free here: lateralcast.com )
Wait how did you send this 11 days ago-
@@turtlelazers476 Turns out Tom Scott is the next "Doctor" candidate!
@@turtlelazers476 he uploads the videos days in advance and then sets a release date/time
@@cmplord1657I do the same :)
The simple videos are often the best! I wouldn't mind more like this 😁
I love the idea that since everything was inherently dangerous in the 1920's, the selling point at the time was always "this is marginally less dangerous than it could be"
I mean, compared to, say, climbing a random tree, this thing *is* much safer.
Not _safe_ so much as...less likely to kill you.
I miss how tolerant society used to be to minor injuries.
Now, thanks to lawyers, we're metaphorically bubble-wrapping children.
@@MonkeyJedi99 That's probably more to do with parents.
@@MonkeyJedi99 Would you like to visit asbestos land?
So in summary, a pioneer in studying the fourth dimension, let his kids play in three dimensions and gave his marriage a second dimension?
@@bensaveragefan5177 You have a point.
@@rasputintzar6500 Null
@@rasputintzar6500 What is left is to turn to the imaginary.
@@_Quxyz …and points are 0-D
I love when people coordinate running jokes like this.
When I was a kid, we had a big steel jungle gym on the school property. In kindergarten, I watched as dozens of fifth grades were gathered around, each one pulling simultaneously on a pipe, trying to yank it straight out of the ground. The theory was, if they all pulled together, they could pull up the entire jungle gym. And they were right! The entire thing came up and the kids all cheered uproariously as it toppled over. It was one of the best examples of child teamwork I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, we never got a new jungle gym. The empty wood chipped lot sat vacant through the entirety of my elementary school career, only living on in legend
Pikmin brained
they were so busy wondering if they could, they never stopped to question if they should :( rip jungle gym
Godly, not going to lie.
Acheivement unlocked!
Let me guess, inner city?
I was that kid, who ragdolled down one of these when I was 4 or 5. Can confirm they are dangerous. And fun. And dangerous.
How hurt were you after the fall?
Nice to see you’re able to form sentences and remember your childhood 👍
I fell off one in 10, hurt a little, but it's really fun.
You forgot dangerous.
How was the fall
It certainly "hacked" my brain in kindergarten when I fell through one of these and was knocked out cold. Maybe I was viewing the fourth dimension.
Don't they say the fourth dimension is time? So it kind of worked since you were unconscious for a moment of time.
@@danruegamer4531 The fourth dimension in our universe is time, as we have 3 spatial dimensions (that was can prove) and 1 temporal dimension. What they're talking about is a hypothetical fourth spatial dimension.
We dont know if time is a dimension. If time was a dimension it would be possible to travel it. However this doesn't seem to be possible. At least we have no observable evidence of such possibility. Thus we do not know if time is a dimension or if it's artifact of something else entirely that we experience as such.
@@sk-sm9sh well he traveled it... one way but still
Not everyone can process that kind of information.
Now I want to see a sci-fi series based upon the tiny percentage of children who really did learn fourth-dimensional geometry from jungle gyms, and gained strange new dimension-hopping powers as a result.
Henry Kuttner wrote one! It became the movie The Last Mimzy
There's a movie with Hayden Christiansen as the main actor and it was titled "Jumper"!!! 🤠👍
This also reminded me of enders game. That book doesn't expand into the fourth dimension, but kids are taught intuitive understanding of movement in three dimensions.
In another timeline, you already wrote that series.
All mimzy were the botogroves and the momgraths outwabe.
The end leaves you and one of the main characters with a sinking horror. It's been imprinted on my brain since I read it due to the many unanswered questions it raises.
Edit: My 2 am brain forgot to add a subject. This is about the short story by Henry Kuttner.
One of my favourite pastimes as a parent of a young child used to be going to playgrounds, looking at the equipment there, figuring out what the inventors expected kids to do, and then watching how they _actually_ used them. (Running up slides, etc.)
It's a tale as old as time for inventors/designers. You intend something to be used one way and inevitably somebody will use it in some other way you'd never even considered and they break the hell out of it!
Kids do the same thing. Did anyone intend for someone to climb the outside of the tube slide? No. Are we going to figure out if it's traversable? Absolutely!
It was really interesting to learn the origin of the Jungle Gym, but learning about the inventor's father gave this story a whole new dimension!
leave.
I see what you did there.
Another fun fact about that family: Sebastian's maternal grandfather was George Boole, who founded math logic and after whom "boolean" is named.
I'm gonna have to get some biographies for them. Thx. I knew the term was named after a person, but didn't know his lineage. Thanks.
Damn. A family of innovators, it would seem.
That's true! Or false!
...I'll get my coat.
i am now convinced the removal of jungle gyms is a conspiracy to make us dumber. i never played on one as a kid
@@hjalfi I see what you did there.
I agree that the original Jungle Gyms are designed sub-optimally for safety, but I think the modern "spiderweb" climbing structures are darn near perfect. Sadly, I don't see them in playgrounds nearly as often as I wish, but when I do they make me smile. Climbing around on those giant pyramid-shaped rope structures was always a highlight of my playground trips as a kid. I think climbing structures are a fantastic way for kids to learn muscle coordination and to conquer their fears of heights in a safe environment.
There was one in my elementary school!
Here in France I often see pyramid rope structures in park playgrounds, never in schools though.
The old metal ones were the best. If you got hurt on one of those, you got smarter and climbed back up.
I had one in my town growing up. Made of rope fixed by metal fixings. Went up real high but because of its structure it made it very hard to fall off
Spiderweb rope structures on playgrounds are very common in Germany, at least where I live.
Absolutely one of my favourite things growing up. I wish they would make an up-scaled version for adults!
Adults would get drunk, climb to the top, and then fall to their deaths. Ironically, adults are probably less trustworthy than children around playsets.
Put it next to the bouldering wall or in a Planet Fitness...
Visit st Louis missouri
This is one of the few times I'm glad I'm not super tall, as I can still fit in/on most playground equipment (including most variants of jungle gyms).
that exists it's called "scaffolding"
It's weird, I've never thought of the jungle gym having an inventor.
I've always just kinda thought it was the type of thing that was so obvious that it kept being invented over and over by different people who all realized that kids loved to climb.
I'm impressed it stayed in active use for that long. There's something quaint about what some might consider a historical artifact continuing to be used for its intended purpose
But don't you know? Any child that uses that WILL DIE INSTANTLY!
@@Alacritous I'm outside your house with a jungle gym, come out
@@Alacritouscan confirm, I'm the person who is in charge of clearing all the bodies from my local park's jungle gym, the moment a child touches it they do indeed, as you say, instantaneously die.
@@AlacritousI'm unironically curious about how many injuries (or deaths) were attributed to this specific climbing frame. Surely at least one(?), considering it was in use for over 90 years...
@@Garwinium as one of the kids who died from the jungle gym, i can confirm if you touch it you die
We had the semi-circle jungle gyms at my elementary school. One was rather large; I used to climb it, perch myself at the peak, and then sit there all recess. Then other kids would come up and ask me questions and I would dole out my 10-year-old wisdom.
Relatable 😅
The childhood equivalent of the wise old hermit on top of the mountain 😂
Oh great student of the convex polyhedral climbing apparatus, what is you wisdom?
@@dylanwight5764Adding a miniscule pinch of salt in your pasta cooking water makes the flavour slightly more accented and intense.
@@SympatheticArsenal My brother in Christ, are you implying there are people in the world who DON'T salt their pasta water? What kind of horrible bland-ass pasta are you people making?!
I grew up playing on this exact structure in grade school!! Kids would dare each other to hang on the top bars and dead drop straight down to the ground through the cubes. We took our class photo on this too :)
Oh I had forgotten about the drop. Thanks for reminding me 😂
I couldn’t believe it when I heard him say Winnetka! Many memories were made on that jungle gym!
This is the real reason equipment like this is banned. It doesn't matter how relatively safe you try to make it, the users will inevitably find the most dangerous way to use it until there's no other choice but to make it nothing but bubble wrap, haha.
Knocked an eye tooth out doing exactly this maneuver in about second grade. The playgrounds in my kids’ schools didn’t have jungle gyms but did have these large umbrella-esque pieces of equipment wherein the top “umbrella” part would spin and you were to hang on and spin around. They were quite fun! Then kids figured out that you could hang on and have two other kids stationary underneath, spinning it for the rest and getting the equipment up to Mach 6. One kid flew off and broke his arm and the next day all of them across the school district were bolted through so they couldn’t spin anymore. Kids have an amazing capacity to work together for chaos.
@@stephgreen3070 our school had a spinning umbrella, but it was so tall nobody could use it, so kids would use their jackets as handles. the teachers yelled at people, because theirs hands would slip off the fabric, and they'd fly off.
My school climbing frame was made out of triangles that decreased in size to the top to make it domed. Being a 'reading, crafting and singing' type person, I never made it past row three but I still think it was such a cool design.
I was the "cool kid" who would stand at the very top of those. Felt like I was at the top of the world.
Mine was too. I loved climbing on it, but also falling down into the center and collecting the quarters that had fallen out of upside down kids' pockets unmissed 😂
Never thought I'd hear Tom talk about a child "ragdolling down to the floor" but here we are.
One for the memes
oh... is this a gaming only term? I'm so used to it can't even tell
@@AfonsodelCB I think it may have originated as slang in gaming. maybe
Ragdolling down the fourth-dimensional plinko
You clearly don't know Tom well if you didn't expect him getting to that at some point.
Tom comes across enough weird things, so much so that I wouldn't be surprised if he were to find out how Aliens (or their perceived existence) caused some kind of weird interesting factoid nobody'd have thought about.
I loved jungle gyms like this as a kid, they were so fun. It became a bummer when the school I went to replaced it with a big, modern wooden structures that look cool until you get on it and then realize it's just some planks that go up to a slide and somewhere you can play tic-tac-toe.
Not neccesarily bad. My favorite as a kid was a village type of playground, with three buildings and a penn connected by slighly raised sidewalks amidst sand. One building was two stories high and had a big slide, the second was only the ground floor but had a table and benches and the third was only a small piece of roof like you would place over a wate trough for horses. The penn had square netting on one side to climb out, big windows on two other sides to climb in, and from the window of the tall building you could jump right into the middle of it. It was perfect for playing tag for days on end for the four of us
I felt the same way. I would have loved the (far more dangerous) old version. to the dome, or village replacement I they installed. then they removed the dome. luckily I moved on at that point, but I wonder how "fun" my old schools playground is now. probably a lot more safe, though I never got hurt on those old things when I played on them elsewhere. guess I was one of the lucky, or more coordinated ones.
@@sjonnieplayfull5859I love how even as adults, we have these vivid memories of the playgrounds we were at as children.
@@Snowstar837 my memories of playgrounds and playing on them as a kid feels like a completely different life to me. I used to be outside all day, every day, and now I barely step outside for more than groceries or work. What they described above would have been my dream playground. I loved the old ones so much, but also because of the memories I made while playing on them. I wish I could go back and experience it all over again.
Mfw society isn’t designed like a huge jungle gym: fine I’ll do it myself
Jungle Gyms and Tesseracts being directly linked is the coolest fact I learned in a while.
There used to be one just like that in a playground in Prenton, on the Wirral, in England, where my Gran lived, and I'd play on it sometimes when we visited. It remains, to this day, one of my favourite pieces of playground equipment. Simple, yes, but highly versatile for imaginative play, and very satisfying for physical scrambling. Thank you, Mr Hinton 😊
All of our playground equipment was built over asphalt. It gave us a marvelous incentive to develop our skills.
Asphalt with a sprinkle of broken glass. The good old days 😅
Alas, gone are the days of the endless summer of our misspent youth...
In the late 1960s we called them 'monkey bars' and the set installed at my elementary school was not just installed on asphalt in was installed on asphalt that had embedded pea gravel. Risk assessment was an Olympic sport at that time. We also had a great school nurse 🙂
I'm kinda partial to the mid 2000's "let's try to minimize broken bones" philosophy. I may have fallen into splintery wood chips, but I never actually broke a bone. It was definitely possible: my brother managed to do it several times, but you had to actually be suicidally reckless in order to earn yourself the kinds of injuries that my parents received regularly on their late 1960's playground.
If not asphalt, then real dirt....not bouncy rubber pads.
How did we boomers EVER survive???
I love how Tom not only switches between the different UK/US terms "climbing frame" and "jungle gym", but also between the pronunciations of "patent"
He pronounces the noun /ˈpeɪtənt/ and the verb /ˈpætənt/. No irregularities here.
@@KidariHengnim I probably couldn't keep up with such a subtle use of English.
@@KidariHengnim that's true, he's consistent in that way, but I meant that conventionally, patent (both the noun and verb) are pronounced with [eɪ] in British English and [æ] in American English, rather than with one sound for the noun and the other for the verb.
@@danlyle531 source?
Up until today, I never knew "Jungle gym" meant climbing frame. I figured it had to be more elaborate
Considering they built skyscrapers without harnesses this was child's play haha, and honestly i grew up using them and think some of the new playgrounds are kinda silly & over engineered but the jungle gym taught me lots of lessons about maths/physics/probabilities and geometry that i probably wouldn't otherwise know.
Thanks Tom
The most shocking fact from the video for me is that Tom is still in his thirties. I am only a few years older and it seems like he has been around for ever
Wtf Tom is 30? He’s been around for ever I used to watch him when I was in my teens
I find it strangely appropriate that a 'toy' developed for schools came from the desire to educate children.
Nothing strange about that imo
I find it strangely appropriate that "farts" being released out of asses come from the digestive system having gas inside of it
And then it quickly became a competitive sport for adults
I.e. parkour tag
I find it strangely appropriate to write a reply in similar form
Wait how are you looking at this to find it strange? I'm actually curious now xD
A lot of children's playground equipment is also designed to help teach "risk assessment" when it comes to jumping across or holding onto something.
Very interesting stuff!
I've noticed a lot of newer playground equipment is actually a lot more obviously dangerous than what I grew up with in the 90s. Grade schoolers would get bored with the intentional way of using the equipment and would start climbing on the outside and tops of structures and jump from heights. Now there are more ropes, completely open drops with no railing.
"The risk I took was calculated, the problem is I've got straight D's in math."
- some kid, probably
Because this is one of primary NEEDS of developing brain. It is said that kids need/want to learn to control -speed, height, fire and sharpness(pointless)- a knife in general.
@@ZacDonald They also don't have a lot of safety rails above the ladders/entryways now.
I was a taller kid for my age and would always hit my head on those full force.
@@A_barrel As a tall one myself, this is very true
I remember as a kid, watching the America cartoon "Recess" and thinking how amazing their jungle gym looked. I honestly dreamed of having something like that in our school.
Instead, our school had large section of flat asphalt, and a small patch of grass. We were expected to just find something to keep us entertained by ourselves. This was in the late 90's/early 2000's
I grew up in Winnetka (in the 1960’s) and loved the jungle gym. It’s one of the reasons we wore shorts under our dresses - so we could hang upside down!
Having literally watched a three-year-old "ragdoll down to the floor" on a jungle gym almost exactly like the one shown in this video, it astonishes me that the inventor hadn't conceived of it. It's also a terrifying thing to watch and I'm really glad the kid I was babysitting for at the time was largely unharmed!
I totally agree, these kinds of things have a minimum age where you may not be dextrous/strong enough to grip the bars, and a maximum age where you are too large to climb it easily.
Ragdolling around keeps the energy of single impacts low. Kid was largely unharmed. Win for the construction I guess?
Kids bounce, so it’s very difficult for them to get truly hurt.
@@somebod8703that's the spirit. Let the impacts continue until morale improves.
Eh... Kids are squishy
Am I the only one who is shocked at how small they are? Yes I know I was smaller then, but still, they seemed so big when standing on the top
The one at your school/playground also might have been a bit bigger than this one.
Oh, gad, it's so amazing how much bigger one remembers things being... I've had that experience with so many things!
Not all of them are this small. There is still one very close to my home and it's at least twice as big as this one
The one in the video is definitely on the small side
I remember one built sorta like a cylindrical tower that the playground monitors would yell at you for climbing too high on, but l did it anyway all the time, and it felt gigantic. Saw the same one again as an adult... and it was still huge, maybe 8 to ten or more feet tall. I think it had some kinda rubber matting at the bottom for rudimentary fall protection and burning you in the summer, but somehow we survived it
As a kid, I often played in hose. In those that I remember, the rods where welded together. The vertical poles where deeply set in concrete cylinders entirely buried in the ground. Also, they where larger that the one we see here.
I'm always impressed by this man's ability to find genuinely interesting things to talk about for topics that I would normally never think about. Very good video 👍
Surprisingly, learning that jungle gyms existed to manipulate children’s brains into understanding the fourth dimension isn’t the strangest thing I’ve heard from Tom Scott.
To be fair, there are a number of people who developed extraordinary skills - including amazing insights into Maths - after hitting their head hard. And while that might not be the sequence of events Hinton sought to provoke, it could've worked.
EDIT: To those of you who are asking "who": Jason Padgett, Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, Leigh Erceg
Emmett Brown, for example.
is this "number" zero?
@@doooofusno
Do you have any source besides fiction or your own imagination
ah yes, -brain damage- *stimulating neural plasticiy*
Very interesting! I grew up about 30 miles from Winnetka and had a similar Jungle Gym at my school and I can attest that thing was the focal point of almost every 15 minute recess. Kids were ALWAYS on it.
Absolutely feela like an old school Tom video, and thats absolutely brilliant!
As part of the 30's club, I feel your pain through moving throughout the frame!
The fact that we have directional terms for the fourth dimension is honestly the most surprising thing out of all of this. And that it was thought about such a long time ago. Well done!
To me they are clearly "backwards" and "forward", since as I was taught in high school, the fourth dimension is time. Maybe this guy didnt like Einstein so much 🙃
@@eliezra83771 we're talking about four spatial dimensions no ackshuallys. Time is a temporal dimension. Go ahead, build your time based playground. I'm sure people will love it until you're sued for a horribly gruesome death.
@@eliezra83771 no, it's important to make a distinction between backwards and forwards in time versus in space; iirc these directional terms are most commonly used in the 4d cubing communities so backwards and forwards are used to refer to literally backwards and forwards. you have up and down, forwards and backwards, left and right, and additionally ana and kata.
@@eliezra83771 the fourth spatial dimension is not time
our universe has 3 spatial dimensions, 1 time dimension
@@eliezra83771 We already use backwards and forwards in three dimensions though. Up-down, left-right, forwards-backwards.
So if you're referring to four dimensional geometry, regardless of whether that dimension is time, you're gonna need another pair of words to describe that axis for disambiguation
From what I understand from the parks classes I've taken, ragdolling to the floor is the point of structures like these even today! The idea is that every time a child hits something on the way down it slows them down, and their injuries aren't as severe as say falling straight to the ground from a tree. Kids will hurt themselves playing, it's part of growing up. The goal is to prevent life changing injuries.
The thing is that if it's made of metal, and every time the kid hits something, it has a good chance of being their head.
@@runefaustblackI've never heard of a kid dying on one of these.
@@naverilllangChallenge accepted.
Another long-lost piece of playground equipment is the "giant's strides". One was installed in the playground of our small church-school in Virginia sometime in the 1960's or 70's. It's still there today, and it still gets used. I think there's only been two broken arms from the thing.
"Giant's Strides" used to be a popular playground piece, but they're practically all gone today. They're jolly fun -- Flying around in a circle on chains, leaping five feet into the air, and coming within inches of braining yourself on the metal pole in the center on each downswing. It's no wonder they've been passed over for safer options. But I am glad we still have ours.
I remember climbing on one of these as a child in the 70s - it was a bit more 'finished' than this - it had red-painted ball finials on the top corners and all of the joints were key-clamp type. I also remember it being a lot bigger than this, but that's probably just because I was smaller!
I love how Tom's pronunciation of "patent" changes through the video. Accents and language is so fun!
"When in Rome" xD
@@3nertia When in Wome
@@Adam-oc6pq Wome, wome on the range ...
0:56 "paytent"
1:17 "paytent" (maybe even "paytend"?)
1:50 "paytent" (idem)
2:03 "pahtented"
3:21 "pahtented"
@@peperoni_pepino Not all heroes wear capes; thank you for your service!
Tom could literally start any video with 'the title is strange, but hear me out!' and it would be worth the watch every single time.
I clicked on the video, Tom, I'm here to have my interest engaged and my curiosity piqued for the next 3 to 8 minutes. You haven't needed to sell me on one of your videos for years!
“I promise this video about microwaves is interesting” is literally one of his video titles.
@@tompatterson1548 Incidentally, that's the one that I used to win an argument with my gf before we were dating (and winning said argument is part of the reason we *are* dating).
@@Rot8erConeXThe last sentence is probably an interesting story.
There was a bigger wooden one of these in my pre-school, and the most fun was to be had climbing to the top middle and refusing to come down. They were, as Tom shows, very adult-unfriendly.
the most surprising thing i learned in this entire video is that some people call it a "climbing frame" (which makes more sense to me)
i love the rest of this informative & entertaining video, math & science concepts just don't surprise me as much as learning random bits of linguistics haha
Thank you for the video
These days they are made of rope, hung off a high frame, and likely installed over sand or other soft flooring. It's also laid out irregularly, without straight paths down directly to the ground like this stacked cube design. Safety net layers are easily blended in, allowing them to get extremely tall while still staying safe. It's an almost perfect upgrade.
Those aren’t the same thing, similar yes. But not a Jungle Gym.
They’re called a Rope Pyramid or Net Climber.
I have never seen one. Granted I don’t have kids but I’ve been to a lot of parks with the dog. Maybe they are not a thing in the UK.
Yes, so when you fall you obliterate your nutsack
@@KatharineOsborne There's one in central park in Scunthorpe (The subject of another of his videos)
@@ObsessiveGeekpeople call them that casually all the time.
This was my jungle gym when I was at Crow Island in Winnetka in the 1990s. Never thought it was odd or notable until now, but we were taught about its history and significant and just kept climbing it!
This one was at Crow Island School, but I recall playing on an identical model across town at Greeley School in the 1970s. I assume they had one at Hubbard Woods School as well.
This made me happy, thank you for making this! Keep doing what makes you happy! :D
Teaching kids to understand 3 dimensional space physically is a genius idea. That jungle gym is way too small but I imagine on a much larger scale and redesigned for the upscale it would work. I feel like that would be a lesson best taught in a low gravity environment so that dude was way ahead of his time
Please see: Ender's Game!
As a police officer in Winnetka for 3 decades I responded to several kids who were hurt playing on this at Crow Island School over the years. Thankfully none were hurt badly, just some scrapes, bruises and a broken finger here and there. Crow Island School was always an innovative place, as was Winnetka as a whole, both still are and I am blessed to have made a career there.
But do you have any reports on them learning to conceptualize the fourth dimension?
Why would a policeman be called out to a kid getting injured on a piece of playground equipment?
@@charlie_marrowKarens
@@charlie_marrow Because you'd whine if they weren't?
@@charlie_marrowI'd imagine they have a low enough crime rate to permit them to. Plus it's good for the agency to have the public to perceive them as the kind to tend to hurt children more than it is to perceive them as the jerk that pulled them over on the street.
I once did one of those indoor skydiving tunnels. One thing I noticed was that humans are very used to navigating their bodies in 2 dimensions since gravity holds us firmly to whatever is under us. In the tunnel you essentially take gravity away. So while controlling your body in the left/right, forward/back axis was fairly straightforward, up/down did not come naturally and required a significant increase in mental power. So I think he was on to something with the learning in 3D..
A good path to 3D navigating is scuba diving around and inside structures.
maybe like we're used to space travel or something..or being a sea creature. =\
I spent a lot of time in wind tunnels, and up and down were the easiest directions to move in.
I did start SCUBA diving at 16, so there was nothing unusual about moving in 3 dimensions.
that's because each dimension has exponentially more variables than the last
I really liked this vid.
The info about the jungle gym and the uncut slip up was enjoyable.
Seeing this image startled me, because my elementary school had this same device, down to the double-height vertical door openings in front. Ours was silver and used smooth welded joints instead of wire-tied ones, but the geometry is unmistakable.
Thank you for a nice memory, for letting me know it's called a Jungle Gym, and - most remarkably of all - for informing me that its inventor's father coined the term "tesseract" for the four-dimensional cubes that fascinated me in my later childhood.
That's "jungle gym." "Jungle Jim" was a 1930s newspaper comic strip.
Weird how the biggest takeaway I got from this video was that Tom was in his thirties.
Me too lmao. I was surprised that he is in mid 30 then thinking again maybe not so surprising but still can't stop thinking about it.
he's actually turning 40 this november
@@SoftHandMcKeenext year
I legit thought he was in his 50s
i think at this point tom could say any age from 22-70 and i'd believe him
I'm mid-30s and I still maintain that the very best playground equipment ever was the jungle gym made of giant rubber bands that they had at Discovery Zone. That thing was SO MUCH FUN. I would love to play on one even now that I'm old-ish :D
I kinda remember that commercial... Going
D Z , discovery zone
Jungle gym was my favorite playground equipment when I was a kid. It never dawned on me how old it was.
This is my hometown and I had no idea this existed! Thank you Tom for teaching me about my local history
I climbed these as a child in the 60s. Never fell through one, nor saw anyone fall through, but the concept was something I comprehended could happen to me then (I was a cautious child). My grandkids play on similar devices - but the metal tubes have been replaced by tightly bound ropes. And the ones they play on today are vastly more complicated (to me) than the simple, cubic geometries I was conquering back in 1967. And safer, thanks to the ropes being much more forgiving of a small head or arm falling onto it than a piece of iron. Oh, and the play surface of hard cement (1967) has been replaced with a shock absorbing, 3 inches of rubber.
Too soft. How will they be prepared for battle in the Thunderdome?
@@TorquemadaTwist Strategic, 3-dimensional thinking. That's why we have them spend 10 hours per day on immersive games!
@@tscoffey1 I guess Tina was wrong, we do need another hero.
Same. Played on them lots as a kid in the 60s, never saw any serious injuries and I def slipped a few times...
My grade school had one into the 70's. The surface was sand. There were ring, board swings (replaced with rubber straps as they broke, damn it), a magnificent slide, pull-up bars of three heights... We were spoiled and never knew it.
This is amazing never making redundant video tom. godspeed brother
In 1982, my kindergarten class had this exact jungle gym structure. I remember going up to the top was really scary. A year later, on a different jungle gym, I got kicked down from climbing up and ended up breaking my front tooth on a lower bar. Had to have the dentist extract it. Thankfully, it was a baby tooth.
I love these and are scared of them at the same time.
I had something exactly like that at my school when I was a kid. Same basic design, just the pipes were held together differently. Then you say Winnetka, and I went to school 10 miles over in Arlington Heights. What made these utterly safe is that they were mounted into a asphalt base, so if you fell off you knew it was going to hurt which made you more careful. :-)
psh they would have been so much safer if placed over a pit filled with spikes! then they would be super careful =P
Reminds me of the joke proposal for how to reduce car crashes: just have everyone have a giant spike pointing at their chest from their steering wheel.
what fascinates me the most about this:
- that he mentioned playing 3D tag... It really reminds me of the structures in Chase Tag championships
- that a thing like this can even be patented. It's a freaking scaffolding. Sure, you can construct it and sell it.. but patent it?
It’s the specific shape and intended use that’s patented not the materials it’s constructed from.
You can actually patent something that already exists as something else if you find a new function for it, its why its really important to spend a lot of time writing a patent, because if you miss some use case/shape/material composition, someone can patent those differences and sell them.
Welcome to America!
0:52 the US insurance wont cover him falling for jungle gym😂😂
I have to say, this absolutely reminds me of a 'jungle gym' from my elementary school play ground. We had two, maybe three actually. Even the two middle areas with taller access, where framed, seems familiar enough that it might be the exact configuration. That area was always the most dug out. Ours was green, iirc. Also seems like there was one particularly injurious incident in there somewhere. Had NO idea their origin. Thx!
You just unlocked a childhood memory about playing tag on one of the more modern versions of this.
In Germany we have often cone shaped structures with sturdy ropes instead of bars. But the geometric design is probably based on this idea. Absolutely love these things!
Exactly the same thing happened to me when he said “3 dimensional tag”!!
Those have existed in the UK.
Also Canada
I used to climb a virtually identical climbing frame to that in a park near Hall Barn Lane in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire over 40 years ago and I remember really enjoying it. It never did me any harm, and I was told after doing an IQ test that I had strong spatial reasoning, so maybe it did teach me something 😂🤔
we had one not dissimilar in a small town outside Stockholm Sweden. If my memory serves me still it was welded - because we would've cut ourselves on the ends and stumps, and I have no scars from that.
Wow! So much culture can be learned from a simple playground toy. Me, a 90's kid in Brasília, Brazil! So far away from the place of invention.
They have been replaced by safer toys here, too, but it's still kinda common to see in older public playgrounds.
Now I really want to take my kid in one of these and see his reaction!
As an ex-pro musician and teacher, I know a thing or two about the process of practicing and internalising physical movements, it's the same for any musical instrument, sport or martial art. Looking at this thing, getting any child to master it would be the equivalent of becoming a concert pianist. It would require a few hours a day practice over many years to develop the physical prowess (probably similar to an olympic gymnast) to master it (to climb about in there with any degree of speed without slowing down by constantly knocking their head or knees etc). By the time a child would become competent enough, they'd probably be too big to play on it anymore. Still, fun video... in a mad kind of way! 😅
I never saw one of these before and I strikes me as strange how small the gaps are. I doubt a 12 year old could comfortably fit his shoulders between those gaps to move around horizontally at some height. But I guess it beats the rug beater.
I love that one of the safety ideas was to build it around a swimming pool, what could possibly go wrong?
Apparently he couldn't imagine a kid hitting their head on the metal frame and not being able to save themself when they fall
No consideration given for the corrosion that will occur around a swimming pool?
Oooh. Build it on or in one. That would’ve been so funz
I love the idea of a game combining thinking in 3D and climbing. Sadly it never took off
I know I would've liked it as a kid.
I mean, Groundies is sorta like this 3D tag concept, if you think nerdily enough about it
Would love it if you delved into this subject more. I’ve read conflicting articles on how much playground safety can help or hinder childhood development.
Fascinating origin for my favorite 1970s piece of playground equipment. I fell hard from the overhead monkey bars due to arthritis and low upper body strength when i was about ten. This let one use lower body strength, too, making it more balanced for kids with different body types.But you're right, we had a lot of incredibly unsafe equipment; what kids have today looks fun as well as safer.
Well, if we just redefine the fourth dimension as "pain", then maybe it wasn't a failure.
In my elementary school, I think I knew someone at each grade level who broke their arm on some variant of this thing.
well, pain does seem to have a time dilation effect.
I've always considered the term "jungle gym" to refer to a bunch of different designs for things kids climb on.
My elementary school had a big dome shaped one with hexagonal holes all over it. And I've seen them with pyramid shapes too.
@@CoryPchajekReally? Doesn't seem like a very strong building material, especially for rambunctious kids.
@@stupidas9466😂😂😂
My school had a gigantic cylindrical one that took me years to realize was insanely dangerous, the one in this video looks insanely safe by comparison.
Oh god I remember the dome type with hexagonal holes! Great fun to climb all the way to the top then hop into it from there
My hometown's central park had an Eiffel tower shaped structure that is a thick metal tube with a bunch of ropes as bars. Absolutely loved that thing growing up, I wonder if it's still there nowadays
I remember it at my school - haven’t thought of this in years! Thanks for bringing it back to mind.
I don't think I've ever seen a jungle gym like this. The ones I've seen are half domes, and since they are made of triangular sections of steel, inherently very stable.
The one I had at PlayCentre was very similar to this, although the pieces were welded together and it may have been a bit shorter. I don’t recall any injuries happening on it. PlayCentre was a pre-school concept which used to be popular in New Zealand, we were aged from I think 2 and a half to under 5 years.
I am a physical education student, who has previously studied engineering. It's needless to say I love this, but I'm saying it anyway: I love this.
Typed it twice.
I loved these as a child. Just about every New York City playground had one. They were very easy to climb, and practically invited kids to do so because that's just about all you can do with them because they were so Spartan. As I grew I learned to climb just about anything and this might have been the seed.
There was one of these at my primary school in Australia in the 1970s, we loved it!
0:47 "Someone in his thirties" - Wait, what?
Omg, i was so shocked! But then again, I don't know how old I expected him to be either
We had EXACTLY this jungle gym in the playground! Late 1970s. I was watching this video and remembering.... that's where I scraped my knee, that's where Joel slipped off and banged his head so hard he got sent home, that's where Krista tried to jump off and landed wrong and twisted both ankles.....
There was macadam under there, kids. Nothing to catch our fall. So if we all seem a little loopy, maybe it just comes from multiple small concussions from falling off ridiculously unsafe playground equipment.....
That which does not kill me, makes me concussed. I think that's how that go... what what's that ringing sound?
This was my childhood go to! I loved the jungle gym. Just looking at the one in your video brought back many, many memories. Our school's jumgle gym was that exact version.
I just went to visit this today! It was a great time visiting the Historical Society's museum, takes around an hour.
When I was growing up, jungle gyms were on top of concrete or asphalt in playgrounds. The falls into the ground were worse than anything that happened on the gym itself. We used to play a lot of 3D tag on those. Good times. Now they have different designs and also are using bark or shredded tires, which are a lot safer for falls.
Yah, even the jungle gyms I played on as a kid in the 80s and 90s had sand or gravel -- or at least dirt -- under them. Hard pavement does _not_ sound ideal there!
@@AaronOfMpls Nope - sadly sand and gravel came a lot later. Our playgrounds were mostly concrete, so they weren't exactly forgiving if you fell.
@@Erik_The_Viking You must've gone to different schools and playgrounds than me, then.
We had a few of them of different designs, some over asphalt and some over pea gravel. Never saw anybody get seriously hurt, but the fact that you could get scraped up taught you very quickly how to climb safely while having a lot of fun. I still think they were way safer than many of the other questionable structures I used to climb.
I hate thinking about Tom Scott's age for some reason. He's not in his thirties, he's a timeless being.
What? Like a Time Lord?
@@TorquemadaTwist A Tom Lord.
An eldritch being with no beginning and no end
I teach year 3, and give my students some time every week to use the climbing frames, monkey bars and balance beams in the KS1 yard. Building the upper body strength is so important for improving handwriting
Ha! I live two blocks away and I know one of the board members of the society! Glad you visited and I hope you enjoyed!
Well now I'm curious about that gunpowder powered baseball pitching machine
My elementary school had a jungle gym of this exact design. I remember the double-tall openings on the side. I also remember us racing through and swinging under the horizontal bar that cut across the straight path through the middle. IIRC, there were also some side paths inside that were double-tall making a mix of through and under / over to move around the interior. This was in the southern US in the 1980s.
We have a metal climbing dome at a playground I grew up next to. The top of the dome was about 6-7 feet in the air (maybe more) with the bars forming triangles that had 2-3 foot sides.
That thing was dangerous but was very fun. We would spend our days climbing to the top then dropping down onto the wood chips.
My primary school has the exact same design of jungle Jim, except it was welded together. The two cubes on top and the missing bars are unmistakable. The good old days where survival of the fittest outweighed protecting children from harm.
This was absolutely fascinating! I think we had one of these at my elementary school, in fact! But the coolest part is definitely the 4D stuff. Really, even using jungle gyms as models of 3D coordinate systems is cool, but trying to extend that to teach 4D is awesome in a bizarre way. Charles Hinton definitely seems like a fascinating person.
Not all playing can be perfectly safe, and they're fun to climb on. I did so as a kid, though we didn't have a "full" one like that at my school.
We had one exactly like that, but painted green where I grew up in Wisconsin.
Played on a similar construction in the 70s. Great fun. All the playground stuff (jungle gym; swings; see-saw; roundabout; slide) was set in concrete bases. If you fell off, you got hurt! Taught us to be careful.
Those things were the catalyst for the event that made me tear my tongue through a bite. Memories of a lifetime.
Edit: And I did fall right through to the ground.
I remeber seeing one several years ago that was well over 12ft tall, the kids LOVED it. Had a massive web of bungee cords in the dead space, and several warning signs too. Even the kids want a little danger
When I was about 5, I was playing on one of these in South Africa. I was swinging from one of the top bars and one of my "friends" tickled me and forced me to let go, I ended up landing awkwardly on my wrist, which led to a break through both wrist bones. I still suffer from occasional pain nearly 30 years later.
we had one of these old style jungle gyms at my house when i was a kid! we also had a dome shaped one too - and a metal swingset and slide! none of us ever got seriously injured playing on these things and we always had fun!
The one my friends and I played on back in the day was the same geometry as this one but all welded steel with rounded corners. There was lower likelihood of nasty gashes from pipe ends and bolt heads.
By age eight, we had exhausted the supply of interesting things to do on it, so we switched to climbing the nearby A-frame swing set, also welded steel, which offered a much more challenging climb, more altitude and fewer obstacles on the way from the top to the floor. 😁
Never fell off of either rig.