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The Brass Monkey: Myth or Fact?
Oregon Magazine ^ | August 4, 2002 | Larry Leonard

Posted on 08/04/2002 5:13:20 AM PDT by WaterDragon

(Our pal, Camber, the old son-of-a-gun, found this one in his email box. It's been circulating on the net. Is it myth?)

In the heyday of sailing ships, all war ships and many freighters carried iron cannons. Those cannon fired round iron balls. It was necessary to keep a good supply near the cannon. But how to keep them from rolling about the deck....?(snip)

Click here to read complete article.


TOPICS: Activism/Chapters; Culture/Society; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; US: Alaska; US: California; US: Idaho; US: Oregon; US: Washington
KEYWORDS: archaeology; brassmonkey; cannons; ggg; godsgravesglyphs; history; iron; storage
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To: Rockpile; archy; harpseal
Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII

As for Brass Monkey...........

In the heyday of the sailing ship, every ship had to have cannon for protection. Cannon of the times required round iron cannon balls. The master wanted to store the cannon balls such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet 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 ("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. —Author Unknown

And Archy.....as to the Missing Hmong ect ect , I suspect that some very rich Christans In Action got a cut of that Chiefs miscount......:o)

Stay Safe !

21 posted on 08/04/2002 1:57:19 PM PDT by Squantos
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To: All
I think the article tells it true.
22 posted on 08/04/2002 5:13:53 PM PDT by WaterDragon
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To: Squantos
"Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII"

Hi Squantos, One of the flying magazines two or three years ago had a debate going about this topic. Some were claiming 30 cal WW I belts, some 50 cal and others various different explanations. But they were all wrong.

The phrase refers to chain in muzzle loading naval guns. I doubt they had 50 cal machine guns during the reign of Henry VIII :}

You know, we sure see a lot of dogmatic statements and explanations of things nowadays that are just flat wrong. Also see a lot of quotations attributed to famous people who did not make them. But maybe that's not new, just spreads faster with the web I guess.

One real famous example you hear all the time is about something having "bugs" in it came from the first computer. Only problem is this is an old saying that derived from literally having bugs in it--like some Army chow. It definitely predates the 40s.

Another word was doughboy. Everbody thinks of it as dating from WW I but it goes back to the Mexican War. Or to use that one in a sentence:

Rockpile's Great-great Grandfather was a doughboy gravel-cruncher when he was Captain Arthur MacArthur's First Sergeant in New Mexico Territory.

23 posted on 08/04/2002 6:03:26 PM PDT by Rockpile
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To: Rockpile
Great lineage, Rockpile!
24 posted on 08/04/2002 7:51:07 PM PDT by WaterDragon
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To: Rockpile
http://www.yaelf.com/nineyards.shtml


We can muddy this up for years......:o)


Stay Safe !
25 posted on 08/04/2002 8:27:45 PM PDT by Squantos
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To: WaterDragon
Brass monkey? Phaghh. In MY day, they were gold ...


26 posted on 08/04/2002 8:31:57 PM PDT by strela
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To: archy
Arch and all,

I usually see this attributed to the LLDB (Vietnamese SF). As far as anyone can tell the real reason for LLDB was so that USSF and yards could practice hating the same people.

Of course, that was all before my time.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F
27 posted on 08/04/2002 10:10:34 PM PDT by Criminal Number 18F
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To: archy
I also heard that there was a reward system for the Montagnard who kept his gear in the best condition. You can see the modern incarnation of this in military housing by looking for the sign, "Yard of the Month".
28 posted on 08/04/2002 10:20:31 PM PDT by Hillarys Gate Cult
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To: WaterDragon
My dad remembers his grandma and her sisters talking about being in Little Rock in the Occupation and at as I recall Ft. Defiance, Ft. Selden and Ft. Union. He mentioned them talking about "young Dougie" but they were older than him and girls to boot so I don't know how much they'd of had him hang around. You know them little boys were pests:} BTW if I'm remembering right this would have been a 13th Infantry rifle company.

By the by, he also said that a lot of officers like to take some of their ncos they trusted with them when they went to new commands cause they didn't know what type of finangling might have been going on before they got there. Had never heard of this but I reckon it was so.

29 posted on 08/04/2002 11:19:02 PM PDT by Rockpile
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To: Squantos
Whoever thinks that cannon balls were stacked next to the cannon like a pyramid aboard ships... or even on fort walls has not seen a cannon rigged for either use... or fired WITH a cannon ball in it. Movie representations fire blank loads and the recoil is totally artificial.

Cannon have a disconcerting reaction to being fired... they recoil... violently. Cannons on ship or in forts were secured to the bulkhead or to the fort wall with large ropes that were connected to rings on the cannon carriage and then looped and tied around the knob like bulb on the rear of the cannon (to prevent the cannon becoming "loose" and careening around the deck). Even with this rope to contol recoil, the cannon could bounce around quite a bit. Stacking the balls nearby in such a manner would result in all 30 of the balls rolling around the deck if the cannon struck even one.

I have built several scratch built models of warships with cannons fully rigged and a couple of cannon models complete with decks. In all that I have researched, the cannon balls were kept in a line in a wooden board with holes cut into it somewhere toward the mid-deck... or next to the gunwale away from the cannon rigging.

It is only on battlefields or field camps next to field artillary pieces do you see the pyramid stack where the cannon balls have been moved from the caisons for convenience.
30 posted on 08/04/2002 11:58:11 PM PDT by Swordmaker
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To: Rockpile
Bugs predated computers but they did find a real bug in an early computer. It caused an malfunction, so they preserved the bug in the engineering notebook. I have seen the photograph.
31 posted on 08/05/2002 12:03:09 AM PDT by Chemnitz
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To: Swordmaker
The way I had this term described to me was that the brass monkey was actually quite tall and just a sort of square box with high sides that the stack of cannon ball was in. This was necessary due to the pitch and rool of the ships deck in foul weather. I had never heard of or seen the rack with individual round depressions or rings that held just a first level of cannon balls describe here .

When extream ice conditions prevailed the ice ,as it formed ,would get in between the individual cannon balls and make the stack rise and or deform enough to make one or two fall off the top.

I have used ice to break rock as the chinese quarry workers did in days past. Ice is very powerful and would IMHO and experience knock the balls off a brass monkey if sea spray and extream cold were contributing to the buildup and expansion.

Stay Safe !

32 posted on 08/05/2002 7:25:34 AM PDT by Squantos
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To: Rockpile
I have also seen the phrase "the whole nine yards" referenced to WW I airplane ammo belts. The explanation is totally bogus.

If you have ever seen the 19th century poem about the English ships going to fight the Scottish freebooter--the one with the phrase "though I be wounded I am not slain, I'll lay me down and bleed awhile and then I'll rise and fight again"--well there is a statement in it about loading up nine yards of chain for the cannons.{To take down rigging I presume}. This poem was based, I think, on a much older song/poem from maybe the 1500s.

I'll see if I can find a link for this.

Possibly the epic*The Earl of Morray*? I believe you may well be correct about the derivation of the *whole 9 yards* reference being of Scottish derivation, but from another context, the payment of loyalist/mercenary Scots with yardage of Warclan plaid, suitable for kilts or other uses. One of those who had fought well but had been slain or seriously injured was said to have truly earned his *whole 9 yards....*

This was a bit before the general introduction of belt-fed automatic weapons, though the British *Puckle Gun*, a forerunner of the Gatling, was not so far in the future. The details of it's patent, from a period during which Crown Patent Law stipulated that descriptions of the hopeful designs must be submitted in poetic form, makes for entertaining, as well as fascinating, reading and research.

-archy-/-

33 posted on 08/05/2002 8:21:50 AM PDT by archy
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To: Squantos; Rockpile; archy; harpseal
Rockpile wins the brass ring.....whole nine yards refered to lenght of 50 caliber ammo belts for aircraft mounted guns in WWII

My copy of "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" disputes that. It claims:

. . it arose among construction workers, the nine yards referring to the maximum cpapcity a cement-mixer truck can carry - nine cubic yards of cement.

34 posted on 08/05/2002 8:52:16 AM PDT by jackbill
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To: FrogMom
Now tell them about "Balls-to-the-wall"!

From:

http://members.aol.com/MorelandC/HaveOrigins.htm

A very colorful phrase, one needs to be careful when using "balls to the wall".

Although its real origin is very benign, most people assume it is a reference to testicles.

In fact it is from fighter planes. The "balls" are knobs atop the plane's throttle control. Pushing the throttle all the way forward, to the wall of the cockpit, is to apply full throttle.

Alternatively,

Early railroad locomotives were powered by steam engines. Those engines typically had a mechanical governor. These governors consisted of two weighted steel balls mounted at the ends of two arms, jointed and attached to the end of a vertical shaft that was connected to the interior of the engine. The entire assembly is encased in a housing.

The shafts and the weighted balls rotate at a rate driven by the engine speed. As engine speed increases, the assembly rotates at a faster speed and centrifugal force causes the weighted balls to hinge upward on the arms.

At maximum engine speed - controlled by these governors - centrifugal force causes the two weighted balls to rotate with their connecting shafts parallel to the ground and thereby nearly touching the sides - the walls - of their metal housing.

So, an engineer driving his steam locomotive at full throttle was going "balls to the wall". The expression came to be used commonly to describe something going full speed.

35 posted on 08/05/2002 9:08:15 AM PDT by jackbill
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To: jackbill
I was familiar with the railroad roots.

This is fun stuff!

36 posted on 08/05/2002 2:56:37 PM PDT by FrogMom
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To: Chemnitz
Re: 31 Used to work with a guy who was employed as a tech at Aberdeen working on some roomsized computer for the Army. Eniac/Univac/something? He recounted about how they had trouble with moths being attracted to the tubes.
37 posted on 08/05/2002 7:02:36 PM PDT by Rockpile
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To: FrogMom
This was an entertaining thread. :}
38 posted on 08/05/2002 7:08:44 PM PDT by Rockpile
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To: Rockpile
Here's another trivia test: where did the phrase "there's more than one way to skin a cat" come from?

;)

39 posted on 08/08/2002 7:59:41 PM PDT by Siegfried
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To: blam; FairOpinion; Ernest_at_the_Beach; SunkenCiv; 24Karet; 3AngelaD; 4ConservativeJustices; ...
Absotively, posilutely the last GGG ping from me tonight, and possibly for the rest of the week (until the Saturday digest). I'm not taking the week off per se, I'm just lazy, and I'm sure everyone now has plenty to read for the next six days. One last one (although, the first to show up, as I did them in reverse alpha, in order to stack them up alphabetically from top to bottom in your "comments" pages) from the "iron" keyword search, for the "Thoroughly Modern Miscellany" category.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest
-- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

40 posted on 03/13/2005 7:27:22 PM PST by SunkenCiv (last updated my FreeRepublic profile on Sunday, March 13, 2005.)
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