The Technological Revolution and American Physical Education and Sport 1850-1930

1
The Technological Revolution and American
Physical Education and Sport1850-1930

• KPE 260 Winter, 2001
• Dr. D. Frankl

2
General Events

• An Ever Changing Landscape
• A move from agrarian to urban and industrialized
  sport
• Organization, Journalistic Exploitation,
  Commercialization, intercommunity Competition,
  Decline of Puritan Orthodoxy, English Athletic
  Movement, New Immigrants, Frontier Traditions of
  Manliness and Strength.

Betts, J. R. (1953, September). The technological
revolution And the rise of sport, 1850-1900.
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XL, 231-56.
3
The Early Nineteen Century

• National Independence
• New Technology in England
• Industrialization
• Urbanization

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A move from agrarian to urban and industrialized
sport
Percentage of labor force in agriculture
1990
1900
1800
Year
5
A move from agrarian to urban and industrialized
sport
1800
1900
1990
6
James Bryce, a British observer, wrote in 1905

• Sport occupies the minds not only of the youth
  at the universities, but also of their parents
  and of the general public. Baseball matches and
  football matches excite an interest greater than
  any other public events except the presidential
  election, and that comes only once in four
  years...The American love of excitement and love
  of competition has seized upon these games.

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John R. Betts, American Sport Historian

• The technological revolution is not the sole
  determining factor in the rise of sport, but to
  ignore its influence would result only in a more
  or less superficial understanding of the history
  of one of the prominent social institutions of
  modern America.

http//www.rrhistorical.com/
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Yankee Ingenuity

• The steamboat and railroad
• The telegraph
• The penny press
• Light bulbs
• Bicycle, streetcars and automobile
• Camera, rubber, and mass production of sporting
  goods

T. Edison
Henry Ford
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Organized Sport in America During the Pre-1800
Period

• As unbelievable as it may seem to us today, no
  organized spectator or participant sport
  activities existed in North America prior to the
  1800s (Eitzen Sage, 1993).
• Some of the reasons follow
• Long hours of work for mere survival
• Puritanism the most powerful social institution
  placed restriction on sport and play

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The Late Nineteen Century

• The Post-Civil War years saw a diffusion of
  leisurely sport activities from the upper to the
  middle and to the working classes.
• Of all the new activities baseball football saw
  the greatest and most rapid growth.

Which is the currently fastest growing sport in
America?
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Soccer in America

• 1609--Soccer played at Jamestown
• 1863 adoption of London Rules
• 1880 11 players
• Immigrant Eras, 1875-1894 (soccer seen as the
  un-American game Baseball is Americas pastime

1904soccer included as an official Olympic sport
in St Louis, the U.S. played
1914--The U.S. Football Association (USFA), now
U.S. Soccer Federation, was granted full
membership in FIFA
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Contributions by Immigrants

• Immigrants settled in cities and were not as
  religious as the local puritans.
• British Immigrants
• German Immigrants
• Irish Immigrants

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Baseball Trivia Name the Athlete

• First player to hit 50 home runs (54) in one
  season (1920).
• First player to hit 60 home runs (60) in one
  season (1927).
• Most home runs in the American League (708).
• Most home runs for a left-handed batter in the
  Major Leagues (714).
• Most home runs on opening days (6)
  

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Baseball Trivia Name the Athlete

• Most seasons as home run leader (12).
• Most years with 50 or more home runs (4).
• Most years with 40 or more home runs (11).
• Most consecutive years with 40 or more home runs
  (7).
• Most RBI's in the American League (2,192).
• Most seasons as RBI leader (6).
• Most games with two or more home runs in the
  Major Leagues (72).

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Liberal and Humanitarian Reform

• The Muscular Christianity Movement
• Members were health and physical education
  activists (Catharine Beecher and her family
  members)
• Intellectuals
• Oliver Wendell Holms (1809-1894)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Oliver Wendell Holms (1809-1894)

• American writer and physician, whose wit and
  intellectual vitality are representative of
  cultivated Boston society of the era.
• Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was
  educated at Harvard College.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 1882) American
Author, Poet Philosopher

• Born in Boston, Massachusetts and widely regarded
  as one of America's most influential authors,
  philosophers and thinkers..
• Explained transcendentalism's main principle of
  the "mystical unity of nature" in his essay,
  "Nature".

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Intercollegiate Athletics

• 1852 first varsity contest between Harvard Yale
• by 1870-1880s intercollegiate athletics in the US
  became an established part of higher education

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The Twentieth Century

• By the 1920s sports has reached a peak and a
  bridge to the modern era sports was established.
• Some sport historians look at the 1920s as the
  golden age of sport. Famous athletes of that
  era were Babe Ruth, Knute Rockne and the four
  horses of Notre Dame, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden
  and Helen Willis Moody.
• Major developments in the last three decades
• (A) Amateur professional spectator sports (B)
  The Fitness revolution

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How Technology Revolutionized Sport

• Transportation
• The Steam Engine
• Boats, Railroads, Trains
• Communications
• Gasoline Engine
• Roads, cars, planes

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Transportation

• Train ride to 1869 1st intercollegiate football
  game (Rutgers/Princeton)
• Train ride to 1887 McGill-Harvard football match
• Horse racing
• Americas 1st heavyweight champion, John L.
  Sullivan, toured the US by train

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Communications Mass Media

• 1733 Boston Gazette publishes first sport story
• 1819 The American Farmer a periodical about
  sports (fishing, hunting, shooting and
  bicycling)
• 1831 The Spirit of Times, weekly on sport
• 1862 Chadwick covers baseball in NY
• 1870 Middie Morgan, 1st female reporter for
  the New York Times

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Communications

• 1844 first telegraph line built between Baltimore
  Washington D.C.
• 1846 The N.Y. Tribune Herald used telegraphs
  for news
• Improvements in printing processes

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Communication The rise of sports journalism

• 1866Cyrus Field lays the Atlantic cable
• 1869 Harvard-Oxford crew race in England reported
  by wire in the US.

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Communication The rise of sports journalism
(Continued B)

• 1876 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the first
  telephone.
• From 1 million telephones in 1900 we have today
  hundreds of millions of phones in the US.
  Canada (8 of world population with 50 of
  phones)

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Communication The rise of sports journalism
(Continued C)

• 1896 Marchese Guglielmo Marconi patented wireless
  telegraphy
• 8/8/1920 radio station Detroit News aired the
  results of the World Series Baseball
• Nov. 1920 a radio station in Pittsburgh began
  broadcasting
• 1920 1st football game broadcast from a radio
  station in Texas

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Communication The rise of sports journalism
(Continued D)

• TV--A recent poll claims that college students
  spend more waking hours watching TV than any
  other single activity!
• By 1940 TVs were marketable and by 1957 TV was no
  longer a novelty
• 1963 instant replay on TV
• 1980s and 1990s are marked by cable TV, PCs, and
  the Internet.

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Additional Technological Developments

• Eastman Kodak developed first mobile camera
  during the 1860s
• 1872 first motion camera effect
• 1879 Thomas A. Edison invented the bulb light
• 1885 electric lights in Madison Square Garden in
  N.Y.
• 1930s baseball night games
• 1830s Charles Goodyears vulcanization of rubber
  influenced sport equipment

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Sport ValuesThe Dominant American Sport Creed

• Character Building (positive deviance)
• Discipline (other imposed)
• Competition (social comparison)
• Physical Fitness
• Mental Fitness
• Religiosity (from Zeus to Jesus)
• Nationalism (EthnocentrismPersian Gulf War)