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In mid-December 2015 a meme that claimed the term monkey wrench was first used as a derogatory term concerning its African-American inventor Jack Johnson, started circulating online: While the central theme of this meme (that white people used the term monkey wrench as a racial slur to demean its inventor) is false, the meme does have some truth to it. Jack Johnson was the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, and he did patent a type of wrench in 1922. Johnson's patent, however, did not mark the invention of the first adjustable wrench, nor did it spawn the origin of the term monkey wrench. Johnson's patent was merely an improvement on a previous design and had little bearing on the history of the tool, which can be traced back to the 1840s. In February 2005, the Jim Crow Museum published a brief history of the wrench in an attempt to answer a question about Jack Johnson and his 1922 patent: ALthough the Jim Crow Museum stated that the monkey wrench was named after its inventor, Charles Moncky, not all historians agree. Herb Page, for example, wrote in a 2002 article entitled Reach for the Wrench in the Fine Tool Journal that Moncky was neither responsible for the tool's invention nor its name, and that the latter stemmed from the wrench's appearance: In summation, while boxer Jack Johnson did patent a type of wrench in the 1920s, it was not the original monkey wrench. Furthermore, the tool was not named monkey wrench in an attempt to demean its inventor, as the term monkey wrench had been in use since at least the 1840s and most likely referred to the tool's original twist the tail method of adjusting the jaws.
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