As NFL and College Summer Football Camps begin opening across the United States, I'm reminded of the amazing ingenuity that is applied to communicating the action on the field to those outside the stadium...even in 1924.
I had the honor of keynoting Discover Kalamazoo's Annual Tourism Week event this May at Western Michigan University. There, I was amazed to see one of the first Grid-Graphs used to "broadcast" the action from an away game back to students on campus (click image to enlarge).
Someone at the opposing stadium would telegraph the play by play results to WMU, where an operator would activate lights on the big board to the student body. The type of play and its result would be shown on the bottom, who made the play on the side...and, my favorite, a unique way of revealing the score on top.
That took the student servers and me some time to figure out as I waited in the wings to go on stage. And, then, it hit us: By lighting up a combination of 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32, one can make any number up to 63.
Pretty amazing stuff for 1924.
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