Today's Tidbit... Keeping in Touch When Away
How do you keep track of the score when your favorite team has an away game? Do you travel to the game? Monitor scores on the web? Watch it on television? Listen to it on the radio? Watch it at your home arena or stadium with thousands of other fans?
Fans have many monitoring options today, but once upon a time, none of those options existed. Instead, ardent fans hung out at the local newspaper office, where updates arrived by telegraph. Some newspaper offices set up scoreboards displaying scores and details of key games. In locations like Ithaca, the only score that mattered was Cornell’s, so they likely had a clerk pop his head out periodically to update the crowd on the latest score.
Game monitoring and simulations increased in sophistication over the next few decades. Several companies sold scoreboard systems that displayed information, sometimes including a simulated football field that showed the ball's progress down the field.
Radio put an end to many of these gatherings, but if you’ve ever watched a game at a bar with a bunch of people wearing the same color clothes, then one of your ancestors might have stood outside the Ithaca Daily News that day in 1906.
And in case you had not heard, Princeton won 14-5.
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