Subject: Brass Monkey
Every sailing ship had to have cannons for protection. Cannons of
the times required round iron cannonballs. The master wanted to store
the
cannonballs such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet
not roll around the gun deck.
The solution was to stack them up 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 sixteen, and so on. Four
levels would provide a stack of 30 cannonballs.
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 brass plate ("brass monkey") with one rounded
indentation
for each cannonball in the bottom layer.
Brass was used because the cannonballs wouldn't rust to the "brass
monkey," but would rust to an iron one. 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 cannonballs 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."
--
Natasha Flazynski
http://www.ciscobot.com
My Cisco information site.
http://www.botbuilders.com
Artificial Intelligence and Linux development
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