This is the last part of the strange innovations
series!
"Electric
base-ball register" (John M. Humphreys, 1903)
Most baseball patents are simply oddities, little
detours lost to history. John Humphreys' idea, though, was straight out of a
sci-fi novel. Just look at it:
Humphreys, like O'Neill before him, wanted to come up
with a way to remove what he viewed as the game's "great defect – when
the umpire is often enabled to practically decide the game."
Rather than anything so primitive as a bell in a base,
though, he had a much grander idea: an entire electric signal system. His
invention would include a series of circuits set up across the infield that
would send electric currents whenever a fielder had caught a ball.
Unsurprisingly, Humphreys' system was a bit too
convoluted to ever gain widespread popularity.
Read more about the strangest inventions in baseball
history in our previous publications.
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