71st Issue: Joan Hinton and her Family

Everyone’s talking about nepo babies lately, well I’m going to get in on this trend. I found this woman named Joan Hinton, and turns out her whole family going back generations is notable for various reasons. Warning for mention of depression and suicide later on in this issue.

Let me start at the beginning. Joan’s great-grandfather was George Boole, her grandfather was Charles Howard Hinton, her father was Sebastian Hinton, and her mother was Carmelita Hinton. I’ll explain what each of these people were famous for before I get to Joan, who was my starting point for this whole thing!

George Boole’s name may ring a bell if you’re into math. He was a 19^th century self-taught mathematician, philosopher and logician. He worked on differential equations and algebraic logic, and invented Boolean algebra. Don’t ask me what that is.
 

He taught himself mostly as a kid because his parents didn’t have a ton of money, and he became a teacher when he was sixteen, the breadwinner for his parents and siblings in Liverpool and Doncaster. He was lucky to make friends who lent him mathematics books and calculus textbooks. It took him a long time, but he did finally master it. When he was nineteen, he started his own school, and he ran schools after that. He also joined the Lincoln Topographical Society and presented a paper on polytheism in Egypt, Persia, and India. Not sure what that’s got to do with topography but it’s nice to know he was well-rounded. He became well known in his area and started a building society.

George started corresponding with other mathematicians and started studying more advanced algebra and publishing research papers. He was then appointed as the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College in Cork. He married and lived there for a while, winning awards for his math and logic related research. He even received a bunch of honorary degrees, and wrote treatises on differential equations and symbolic logic. Anyway a lot of his descendants became famous but I”m only writing here about the ones who are interesting to me. Sorry to the others.

Back to Joan Hinton, her grandfather was Charles Howard Hinton. Charles’ father James was a surgeon who traveled to Sierra Leone and was an advocate of polygamy. You can read his page if you want but I’m not going to get into it or I’ll be here all day. His sister, Ada Nettleship (great name) was a costume designer and a proponent of Rational Dress. Anyway, Charles studied math and science. He invented a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team while he was a professor there. He brought the machine to University of Minnesota and taught there until he got a job at the US. Naval Observatory. He also examined chemical patents for the US Patent Office. Some other cool things that Charles Hinton did was talk about the fourth dimension and invent the concept of a “tesseract” which personally I mostly know from A Wrinkle In Time. He also wrote a science fiction book called An Episode of Flatland or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension in 1907 where two dimensional characters have adventures and then eventually understand the concept of a third dimension.
 

Again, back to Joan Hinton! Her father’s name was Sebastian Hinton, and he lived in Chicago and worked as a lawyer. In 1920, he invented the first jungle gym! Well, he was the first to trademark it anyway. His second prototype is still standing at Crow Island School in Illinois. He said he invented it so that children could use their “monkey instinct” to climb and play to get exercise. He actually was inspired by his father, Charles, mentioned above, because he built a similar structure for kids to play on so they could understand three dimensional space better. The game he proposed was to yell x,y, and z coordinates and the kids had to find them. It didn’t catch on.

Sebastian Hinton’s wife, and Joan Hinton’s mother, was called Carmelita Hinton. Her father was a women’s rights advocate and encouraged Carmelita to follow her dreams, but her mother tried to make her more traditional. It didn’t work. She went to Bryn Mawr, and then lived at Hull House in Chicago where she was secretary to Jane Addams. After she got married to Sebastian, she opened a school based in her house and a nearby playground, where her husband worked on the jungle gym.

Unfortunately Sebastian suffered from depression, and though he checked himself into treatment, he committed suicide there. Carmelita left her school and taught at other schools for a while. Then in 1934, a friend of Carmelita’s from Hull House sold her a farm in Putney, Vermont, where she founded The Putney School, the first coeducational New England boarding school which featured a progressive education and a progressive farm. She ran it for twenty years and focused on the value of manual labor, art, and music.
 

Now finally to Joan Hinton who started my journey into this family. Joan was born in Chicago. Her sister, Jean Hinton Rosner, was a civil rights and peace activist. Joan graduated from her mother’s school, and was so good at skiing that she qualified for the 1940 Winter Olympics, but they weren’t held because of the war. She studied science at Bennington College, and got a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1944.

Carmelita worked as a nuclear scientist in Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project during World War II. She knew what she was making, but she didn’t know that the United States was going to use it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She left the Manhattan Project, very disillusioned, and lobbied the government to internationalize nuclear power.

Joan’s brother William had traveled to China already and wrote a book about land reform in communist occupied China, so Joan went too, in 1948, to work for Soong Ching-ling, the widow of President Sun Yat-sen. She wanted to be friends with local communists , and married Erwin Engst, another westerner living in China who was a dairy cattle expert. Apparently they lived in caves for a while and then moved to Inner Mongolia, working on a state farm without electricity or radio. In 1952, Joan went to the Asian and Pacific Peace Conference where she denounced the bombing of Hiroshima. The United States government thought that meant she’d help the Chinese develop nuclear weapons. She and her husband and three children moved to Beijing in 1966 to start working as translators and editors. She became a permanent resident but kept her US citizenship because she said it made it easier to travel.
 

Joan and several other Americans living in China made a big poster that they put up demanding that they not be treated higher than Chinese people and that they be allowed to be involved in the communist movement and cultural revolution. Mao Zedong saw it and said that revolutionary foreign experts and their children should be treated the same as the Chinese. Soon after, they worked in agriculture at the Beijing Red Star Commune.

By 1996, Joan was disillusioned. She didn’t like how the “socialist dream fell apart” and thought that some of the economic changes were “betrayals of the socialist cause”. When her husband died, her kids moved to the United States, and Joan lived in Beijing alone. She protested the war in Iraq before she passed away in 2010.