page_title: Jungle gym
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Jungle gym / History
caption_attribution_description: Dome climber, playground equipment, Lifetime Products, Backyards Inc
context_page_description: The jungle gym, also called monkey bars or climbing frame, is a piece of playground equipment made of many pieces of material, such as metal pipe or rope, on which participants can climb, hang, sit, and in some configurations slide.
context_section_description: The first jungle gym was invented in 1920 and patented by lawyer Sebastian Hinton, in Chicago. It was sold under the trademarked name Junglegym. The term "monkey bars" appears at least as far back as the 1930s, though Hinton's initial patent of 1920 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". Hinton's father, mathematician Charles Hinton, had built a similar structure from bamboo when Sebastian Hinton was a child; his father's goal was to enable children to achieve an intuitive understanding of three-dimensional space 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 could be grasped as a name of a tangible point in space.
  Hinton's second prototype jungle gym is still standing at Crow Island School.
caption: A home-use dome climber
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