Hinton was a fascinating character. Many photos of him, his family and acquaintances as well as the infamous baseball cannon are here: http://www.academia.edu/1

Hinton was a fascinating character. Many photos of him, his family and acquaintances as well as the infamous baseball cannon are here: http://www.academia.edu/1710283/Charles_Howard_Hinton_Pioneer_of_the_Fourth_Dimension http://www.academia.edu/1710283/Charles_Howard_Hinton_Pionee.... Hinton provides detailed instructions to make tesseracts in his book, but care must be exercised in playing with these too much: "A shudder ran down my spine when I read your reference to Hinton's cubes. I nearly got hooked on them myself in the nineteen-twenties. Please believe me when I say that they are completely mind-destroying. The only person I ever met who had worked with them seriously was Francis Sedlak, aCzech neo-Hegelian Philosopher (he wrote a book called The Creation of Heaven and Earth) who lived in an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire." The letter from Hiram Barton, “a consulting engineer of Etchingham, Sussex, England” responding to Martin Gardner about an article of his on Hinton’s cubes. BTW, his son, Sebastian Theodore Hinton invented the jungle gym (http://winnetkahistory.org/gazette/j-is-for-jungle-gym/ http://winnetkahistory.org/gazette/j-is-for-jungle-gym/) based on his father's prototype.