It’s Cold Enough To Freeze The Balls Off A Brass M

[Garry Comber]

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When your hanging about in a field with your dogs this time of the year and someone says to you “Its cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” I wonder how many people know where the expression comes from or indeed what it exactly means!

Many, many years ago in the days of sailing ships with cannons etc., it was always necessary to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannon on the war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about on the deck was a problem.

The best storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon.

There was only one problem -- how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others. The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a Monkey. If this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rust problem was to make Brass Monkeys.

Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey.

Thus, it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey

[SIZE=14pt]And all this time, you thought that was a vulgar expression, didn't you?[/SIZE] (w00t) (w00t) (w00t)

 

[meddling]

When your hanging about in a field with your dogs this time of the year and someone says to you “Its cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” I wonder how many people know where the expression comes from or indeed what it exactly means!
Many, many years ago in the days of sailing ships with cannons etc., it was always necessary to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannon on the war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about on the deck was a problem.

The best storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon.

There was only one problem -- how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others. The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a Monkey. If this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rust problem was to make Brass Monkeys.

Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey.

Thus, it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey

[SIZE=14pt]And all this time, you thought that was a vulgar expression, didn't you?[/SIZE]  (w00t)   (w00t)   (w00t)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

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You appear to be a fount of all knowledge...or full of useless information :- " :lol: :thumbsup: - Very interesting though thanks! :thumbsup:

 

[gabbitas31]

(w00t) You learn something new every day. very interesting. :thumbsup: Diane

 

[peppermint lady]

thanks for that gary when im racing tomorrow and someone says that phrase i will be able to tell them what it means :lol:

 

[Carol Jepson]

Garry, I bet you made all that up and it's still a vulgar expression! (w00t) :lol:

 

[urchin]

Yup I knew that i did!

but then i'm full of useless information!

 

[dawn]

I had heard this previously and had heard that it was wrong. So I have just googled the phrase and come up with amongst others:

Origin

 

Some references say that the brass triangles that supported stacks of iron cannon-balls on sailing ships were called monkeys and that in cold weather the metal contracted, causing the balls to fall off. The derivation of this phrase is difficult enough to determine without such tosh

 

The Royal Navy records that, on their ships at least, cannon-balls were stored in planks with circular holes cut into them - not stacked in pyramids. These planks were known as 'shot garlands', not monkeys, and they date back to at least 1769, when they were first referred to in print.

 

On dry land, the obvious way to store cannon-balls seems to be by stacking them. On board ship it's a different matter. A little geometry shows that a pyramid of balls will topple over if the base is tilted by more than 30 degrees. This tilting, not to mention any sudden jolting, would have been commonplace on sailing ships. It just isn't plausible that cannon-balls were stacked this way.

 

For those wanting a bit more detail, here's the science bit. The coefficient of expansion of brass is 0.000019; that of iron is 0.000012. If the base of the stack were one metre long the drop in temperature needed to make the 'monkey' shrink relative to the balls by just one millimetre, would be around 100 degrees Celsius. Such a small shrinkage wouldn't have had the slightest effect. In any case in weather like that the sailors would probably have better things to think about than coining new phrases.

 

Now, to the real origin of 'cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey'. Anyone looking for the origin of this is likely to be put off the scent by the 'balls' in the phrase. Of course, the way we now understand the phrase is that it is cold enough to freeze one's testicles off (ladies needn't feel left out, they have the alternative 'as cold as a witch's tit in a brass bra'). Once we realize that the phrase is seen in print many times in various forms well before any variant that mentions balls, it becomes clear that trying to explain what balls were being referred to is something of a fool's errand. Were the two explanations above not counted out already we could probably discount them on this count too. There may have been some journalistic coyness about using the current version of the phrase - it is, after all, commonly understood to refer to testicles. That's view is backed up by the fact that there are almost no citations of the balls variant in any US newspaper, even up until the present day.

I wouldnt like to comment on who is right or who is wrong, simply because I don't know.

It would be nice if the cannon balls one were right though