Sammy White's Moments Of Glory

The 1911 Harvard-Princeton game was a doozy that followed a fourteen-year span during which the schools did not play one another. Few conferences existed around the turn of the century, and they focused on eligibility requirements rather than scheduling, so when one school upset another, they stopped playing one another. But Harvard and Crimson decided to let bygones be bygones in 1911 and scheduled an early November game at Princeton's Osborne Field.

The game was notable not only for the play on the field but also for events that occurred above the stadium. During a tight battle, the crowd's attention was diverted by a hot air balloon that hung over the stadium for a bit. More noteworthy was a Wright biplane piloted by Robert Joseph Collier, an aviation enthusiast and publisher of Collier's Weekly. Flying both Harvard and Crimson pennants, the plane's only passenger was James Hare, a top photographer of the day, who, among other things, took the first photograph of a football game from an airplane.

('Princeton Beating Harvard, The First Football Game Photographed from an Aeroplane,' Collier's Weekly)