A jungle gym (called a climbing frame in
British English
British English is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom, especially Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to ...
) is a piece of
playground
A playground, playpark, or play area is a place designed to provide an environment for children that facilitates play, typically outdoors. While a playground is usually designed for children, some are designed for other age groups, or people wi ...
equipment made of many pieces of material, such as
metal pipes or
rope
A rope is a group of yarns, Plying, plies, fibres, or strands that are plying, twisted or braided together into a larger and stronger form. Ropes have high tensile strength and can be used for dragging and lifting. Rope is thicker and stronger ...
s, on which participants can climb, hang, sit, and—in some configurations—slide. Monkey bars are a part of a jungle gym where a user, hanging in the air, swings between evenly spaced horizontal bars. The term "monkey bars" is sometimes used to refer to the entire jungle gym.
History
The first jungle gym was invented in 1920 and patented by lawyer
Sebastian Hinton in
Chicago
Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...
.
It was sold under the
trademark
A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...
ed name Junglegym. Hinton's second prototype "jungle gym" is still standing at the Winnetka Historical Society where it was relocated from the
Crow Island School in
Winnetka, Illinois
Winnetka () is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States, north of downtown Chicago. The population was 12,475 as of the 2020 census. The village is one of the wealthiest places in the United States in terms of household income. It was ...
.
The term "monkey bars" appears at least as far back as the 1930s, though Hinton's initial 1920 patent appeals to the "monkey instinct" in claiming the benefits of climbing as exercise and play for children, and his improvement patents later that year refer to monkeys shaking the bars of a cage, children swinging on a "monkey runway", and the game of "monkey tag".
When Sebastian Hinton was a child, his father, mathematician
Charles Hinton, had built a similar structure from bamboo with the goal of enabling children to gain an intuitive understanding of
three-dimensional space
In geometry, a three-dimensional space (3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a mathematical space in which three values ('' coordinates'') are required to determine the position of a point. Most commonly, it is the three- ...
through a game in which numbers for the x, y, and z axes were called out, and each child tried to be the first to grasp the indicated junction. Thus, the abstraction of
Cartesian coordinates
In geometry, a Cartesian coordinate system (, ) in a plane is a coordinate system that specifies each point uniquely by a pair of real numbers called ''coordinates'', which are the signed distances to the point from two fixed perpendicular o ...
could be grasped as a name of a tangible point in space.
[J' is for Jungle Gym"](_blank)
from Winnetka, Illinois Historical Society
Safety
To reduce the risk of injury from falls, jungle gym areas often have a thick layer of
woodchips
Woodchips are small- to medium-sized pieces of wood formed by cutting or chipping larger pieces of wood such as trees, branches, logging residues, Tree stump, stumps, roots, and wood waste.
Woodchips may be used as a biomass solid fuel and are r ...
, sand or other impact-absorbing material covering the ground. The American
National Safety Council
The National Safety Council (NSC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, public service organization promoting health and safety in the United States. Headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, NSC is a member organization, founded in 1913 and granted a congress ...
recommends that playgrounds have at least of such material.
Gallery
Image:Climbing-thing.jpg, A small jungle gym
Image:ManonMonkeyBars.jpg, Hanging from monkey bars
Image:RevJungleGym MobiusClimber.jpg, Landscape structures mobius climber
Image:RevJungleGym SpacenetClimber3040.jpg, Landscape structures spacenet climber
File:Boy in front of jungle gym, 1967.jpg, Boy in front of jungle gym, 1967
File:Jungle gym.JPG, A jungle gym in a school yard in Sweden, 2012
File:Japanesehighschoolgirlonmonkeybars-dec19-2014.jpg, Japanese schoolgirl on some monkey bars ( 雲梯), 2014
File:Råcksta jungle gym.jpg, A jungle gym in Sweden, 2016
USMC-16939.jpg, Military variant of the monkey bars
See also
*
Jungle Jim (disambiguation)
*
Outdoor playset
*
Brachiation
Brachiation (from "brachium", Latin for "arm"), or arm swinging, is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their arms. During brachiation, the body is alternately supported under each forelimb ...
References
External links
* {{Commons category inline, Jungle gyms
1920 introductions
Playground equipment