The first jungle gym was meant to hack kids' brains

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/ )

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"

So in summary, a pioneer in studying the fourth dimension, let his kids play in three dimensions and gave his marriage a second dimension?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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 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

Absolutely one of my favourite things growing up. I wish they would make an up-scaled version for adults!

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 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.

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.

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 :)

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 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.

Never thought I'd hear Tom talk about a child "ragdolling down to the floor" but here we are.

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