I've heard that explanation before and I believe it just as much as the
story about Delilah's cutting off Sampson's HAIR to cripple his strength!
(You might wonder how they grew back, however. I don't have an answer for
that.)
Regards, Neil Tucson, AZ
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas E. Bryant [mailto:saltracer@awwwsome.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 11:08 AM
To: Land Speed
Subject: History Lesson
List,
Thought you might enjoy "the rest of the story". Bob Brissetti sent this
to me and I thought it was good enough to pass on.
Subject: Brass Monkey
This is your history lesson for the weekend:
A Little historical information:
In the heyday of the sailing ship, every ship had to have cannon for
protection. Cannon of the times required round cast iron cannon balls.
The Captain wanted to store the cannon balls so that they could be ready
for instant use when needed, yet would not roll around the gun deck.
The solution was to stack them in a square based pyramid next to the
cannon. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had
four, the next had nine, the next had 16, and so on. Four levels would
provide a stack of 30 cannon balls. The only real problem was how to
keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the
higher levels. To do this, they devised a small plate, called a "monkey"
with one rounded indentation for each cannon ball in the bottom layer.
When iron was used to make this plate ("monkey"), the cannon balls would
rust to the plate. As a result, these plates were made of brass to
prevent this problem--thus the name "brass monkey."
When temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. As it
got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would
get smaller than the iron cannon balls they were holding. If the
temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the
indentations spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Thus it was,
quite literally, "COLD ENOUGH TO FREEZE THE BALLS OFF A BRASS MONKEY."
And all this time some of you thought we were talking dirty.
Tom, Redding CA #216 D/GCC
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