Tom Scott is in the US now, and like most overseas visitors, had to buy health insurance to cover his trip. But he's not taking any chances by climbing on the world's first jungle gym on display in Winnetka, Illinois. The jungle gym, sometimes called monkey bars, was developed by Charles Hinton and patented by his son Sebastian Hinton in 1923. They story we didn't know was the scientific goal of the climbing toy. The reason it didn't make much difference to the children who climbed it was because by the time kids started school, they already knew how to climb trees, fences, and hills. The jungle gym just made it fun for everyone to join in together. Setting one on a school playground gave us the added thrill of possibly falling on gravel or pavement instead of plain grass or soil. Read the story of the first playground jungle gym at the Winnetka Historical Society.
I remember being seven, alone, as usual, and too high in the angled, slippery, too-big-around to hug sycamore tree in the front yard of a house my mother was selling for the real estate company she worked for. I felt I couldn't move without slipping over and crashing down. Electrified with fear of being discovered and declared an idiot for getting myself into this, let alone fear of falling and dying, I clung, breathing shallowly, /solving the problem/. It turned out that by wiggling slightly, waiting a moment, wiggling again, and continuing in this way I could inch down the incline to where my foot could touch a projection. And eventually down on the ground I determined never to be so stupid as to do anything like that again. /Nothing/ you see on teevee is real. Nothing they tell you or show you. Tarzan? Hah. It's all stories, for fun, or for breakfast cereal or tennis shoes. That was what I learned from climbing trees.