As you settle down to watch the Opening Day night games tonight, you probably won't be thinking about the massive array of lights that illuminate the game. But that blinding artificial sunlight was once a technological phenomenon that stunned fans and had the police threatening to shut it down.
As GE Reports explains this afternoon, the financial logic behind night games was always clear: No one can go to day games during the week—but if there was some way to play at night, the stands might be fuller. Yet it took a GE engineer named Robert J. Swackhamer to propose the idea. In the 1920s, Swackhamer had designed arrays of super-bright lights to keep rail yards operating 24/7. The project got him thinking: Why not use his arrays to keep ballplayers in the field after the sun sets?
