Swing
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a seat suspended usually by cords, so as to move freely to and fro like a pendulum. Swinging was no doubt an early form of amusement. A cut on a Greek water jar of the fourth century B. C. represents a lady seated in a swinging chair, while another, evidently a companion or servant, stands behind and sends her flying through the air, just as children swing each other nowadays. For want of ropes, colonial children cut off grape vines near the root and swung to and fro, clinging on with their hands; or two vines were cut off and bound together and provided with a seat. Were it not for the slight friction of the bending cord, and the resistance of the air, a swing would go on forever, but for the reasons mentioned, the "cat will die," if given time. It is quite possible for one who understands the method to keep himself going, and even to increase the height to which the swing rises. By standing up and facing each other two persons can do this more successfully than one. Although centrifugal force prevents a person from dropping out of the seat, the swing should not be permitted to pass through much more than one-third of the circumference of a circle. In order that a swing may go to and fro in a straightforward manner, the upper ends of the cord should be fastened on an exact level with each other. The trapeze and similar pieces of apparatus familiar in the circus and the gymnasium have grown out of the swing.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, the swing was still a homemade thing of ropes and cut grape vines, and the article's chief concern was keeping the cords level and not letting the "cat die." The hardware is now regulated rather than improvised: American public playgrounds follow the Consumer Product Safety Commission's playground handbook (first issued 1981) and the ASTM F1487 standard, which set chain lengths, spacing, impact-absorbing surfacing under the arc, and flexible rubber or belt seats in place of the rigid wooden plank; heavy animal-figure swings and multi-child gliders have largely been withdrawn as strike hazards. The physics the entry sketched by feel — that a rider can pump higher by standing and shifting weight — is now treated as a textbook case of driving an oscillator by varying its effective length, and the vase scene it describes is generally linked to the Athenian swinging rite of the Aiora. The one thing the 1910 writer could not have anticipated is the word itself: since the 1930s "swing" names a style of jazz and dance before it names a seat on a rope.
Written for this edition, 2026.