"It's so easy, you could teach a monkey to do it!"

I hope you found my last post to be more light-hearted than some of my other posts.  That was absolutely my intentions - we could all use a little more levity in our professional (and personal) lives.  Here's another lighthearted post for you, but one that I hope you will find interesting.  Have you ever heard (or ever personally used) the saying, "It's so easy, you could teach a monkey to do it!"  I'm not sure where that saying comes from, but perhaps it's related to the "Monkey See, Monkey Do" teaching concept, where students learn how to do something after their teacher models the behavior or task of interest.  

Actually, wouldn't it be more impressive if we could teach a less intelligent animal to perform a task?  Monkeys are very intelligent (maybe just as smart as humans), so I'm not sure the old cliché makes sense.  Most animals are a lot smarter than we typically give them credit (see for example this video of an octopus opening up a jar from the inside or this post from the Audubon Society talking about research showing that birds have the intelligence of a five-year-old human).  And, as it turns out, there is at least one famous example of a monkey working on the railroad!

"Signalman Jack" was the name of a Chacma baboon who served as an assistant to railway signalman James Wilde for the Cape Town-Port Authority Railway service in South Africa during the late 1880's.  Apparently Wilde was known to all his friends and co-workers as "Jumper" because of his habit of leaping from one railway car to the other, even when the train was moving.  Predictably, one day in 1877 Wilde mistimed the jump and fell under the moving train, and while he survived, he ended up losing both legs at the knee.  He managed well despite his permanent injury with the help of two wooden peg legs and a small wooden trolley, which allowed him to continue to work at the Uitenhage train station.

And then he met Jack.  One day a few years later, Wilde (still known as "Jumper" by the way) was visiting the market and saw a baboon driving an oxcart.  He was so impressed that he bought the baboon and made him his pet and personal assistant.  At first, Wilde trained Jack to push him on the trolley on the half-mile commute back and forth to work every day, but soon Jack was also helping with household chores like sweeping the floors and taking out the trash.  

Back in those days, whenever a train approached a station, they'd too their whistle a specific number of times to alert the signalman which tracks to change.  Jack was able to watch Wilde perform this task enough that he eventually could do it on his own!  Jack was able to do the job so well, in fact, that soon Wilde didn't even have to supervise him.

Of course, one day one of the train passengers saw the baboon manning the train switches and complained to the train company.  Wilde wrote the railway superintendent, George B. Howe, "Jack knows the signal whistle as well as I do, also every one of the levers."  Howe would later visit and personally witness how well Jack worked on the job, deciding to keep both Wilde and Jack on the job.  He wrote about Jack, "It was very touching to see his fondness for his master.  As I drew near they were both sitting on the trolley.  The baboon's arms around his master's neck, the other stroking Wilde's face."

Jack was given an employment number and was paid 20 cents per day and half a bottle of beer weekly for his services!  He worked for the railway for nine years, and died of tuberculosis in 1890, never having once made a mistake.  Apparently his skull is in the collection at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa.