Sunday, April 18, 2010

Question 565: Monkey instincts

The first 'X' was invented in 1920 and patented by lawyer Sebastian Hinton in Chicago.It was sold under the trademarked name 'X'. Hinton's patent of 1920 claims the benefits of exercise and play. Hinton's chief goal, however, was to enable children to achieve an intuitive understanding of 3-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. What is 'X'?

Answer: Monkey bars/jungle gym. Cracked by all.