Searching for the first, in the 1860s
Who invented the game? And why didn’t he apply for a patent, a service available since 1790? Baseball was played in America before Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright were born; both went to their graves not knowing they had invented it. That opens us to a larger story, one that spills out on the web pages of Protoball.
And yet, early baseball patents and advertisements are fascinating because they reveal how and when the new sport — as played by adults — began to penetrate the broader culture. If there was a buck to be made from it, then the audience for the game had grown beyond those who played it.
Francis C. Sebring of Hoboken was the noted pitcher of the Empire club. His “Apparatus for Playing Parlor Base Ball” was depicted in Leslie’s in the issue of December 8, 1866 and advertised for sale in that same month, wholesaled by the Masonic Manufacturing Company and retailed at $3.00 by E.I. Horsman. By mid-January 1867 Horsman and other dealers were advised that supply had run out, and more would be ordered.
Leslie’s described Sebring’s game thus: “This game is designed to illustrate the theory of base-ball, [and was] originally designed for the use of an invalid ball-player, but Mr. Sebring … now presents it to the public as the most attractive parlor game in vogue, and one in every way calculated to attract ladies, youths, and amateur ball-players.…”
I was surprised to note that Sebring’s game was not patented until February 4, 1868, and had been preceded to registration by another table game, that of William Buckley, on August 20 of the prior year. (There is no evidence that his game was commercially produced.) No example of either game has survived, alas — though they could be recreated from their detailed diagrams and designs.
Searching through the government’s records — this is how old boys have fun — I discovered an even earlier baseball patent: Isaac P. Tice’s “Toy Ball-Player,” registered on July 23, 1867. This was not a game but rather a device — one that would later be used to create mechanical banks, with a pitcher tossing a penny to his catcher, past an ever futile batter.
These patented whizbangs were pioneers of fantasy baseball, it occurred to me. Where were the actual implements of the game?
Even earlier than the patent date of Tice’s toy was that for the spring bat of George W. Hill: October 30, 1866. “The nature of my invention consists in making a slit or slits in or through the upper or thick portion of the bat … where it is designed that the ball shall hit, for the purpose of producing a spring, in order that the ball may be sent a greater distance when hit.”
Oh, boy … steroids inside the bat. But the requirement that bats be made entirely of wood — which outlawed the whalebone or rubber spring inside Hill’s bat — led to laminate concoctions. This culminated in Cap Anson’s use of a bat in 1884 that was made of several separate pieces of ash, jointed and glued together lengthwise; in the center was inserted a rattan rod about one inch square, and composed of 12 strips of rattan firmly glued together, running from end to end of the bat. Was rattan a wood or a plant? I leave that to the botanists.
Although laminate bats were made well into the next century (Babe Ruth tried one in 1920), and were not illegal if made entirely of woods with matching grains, Hill’s spring bat did not endure. As it turns out, his innovation did not even make it the first bat to be patented. That was left to the Reed brothers of Philadelphia, who on July 3, 1866, registered a “design patent” (which was the predecessor of the trademark) for a bat with a grooved and/or scored handle.
It was sold, along with Hill’s bat, by Andrew Peck’s New York City Sporting Emporium, but gave way to bats branded by Peck and his new partner, Irving Snyder. But who, one may ask, made bats and balls before the Civil War?
The answer to that lies not in further digging into patents but into the earliest advertisements for baseball wares, a task for another day.
Base Ball Patents was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.