Watching Baseball in 1895

This from Unca at Micrographia. Google has recently has recently scanned most of the U.S. patents back into the 19th century. Up till now, it was almost impossible to search online for patents before 1976 (you had to know the patent number). There’s some wonderful items on baseball (make sure you also search on "base ball" and use the advanced search to limit to years, etc.), one of which is this "Base Ball Game Illustrating Apparatus" from 1895.


As with later devices such as that depicted in the movie Eight Men Out and one I saw on display at the Field Museum in Chicago several years ago, the device tracks the status of the game as relayed via telegraph. This device allows for the manual manipulation of the players from behind the apparatus.