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Inside the weird and delightful origins of the jungle gym, which just turned 100 : NPR
by thenewgreen

    Charles Hinton wore a lot of hats. He wrote sci-fi stories before there was sci-fi — he called them "scientific romances." At Princeton, where he worked for a time as mathematics instructor, he invented a baseball pitching machine powered by gunpowder. He also practiced polygamy, which was against both the mores and laws of his native England. And when he was convicted of bigamy in the 1880s, he was forced to move his young family to Japan where he found work teaching mathematics.

    We will save all of that for the biopic, because for the purposes of this story, Hinton was the unintentional inspiration behind the jungle gym — the patent for which has just turned 100.