The Original Harvard Invention Dispute

Good morning. It’s April 12. On this date 1877, a Harvard baseball player named James Alexander Tyng wore a strange-looking contraption covering his face while crouching behind the plate against the Lynn Live Oaks. Thus armed, Tyng made only two errors in the game – far fewer than normal.

Jim Tyng had invented the catcher’s mask.

Or had he? The ensuing debate over the provenance of this innovation would last until Tyng’s death in 1931, and it foreshadowed a much higher stakes dispute over the paternity of another, more lucrative, Harvard creation some 127 years after the mask's debut.

More than a century before Cameron Winklevoss and his brother Tyler competed on the Harvard crew team (and, later, rowing in the Olympics), the rules governing collegiate athletics were much more lax.

In those pre-NCAA days, not only did Harvard’s baseball team play semi-pro teams such as the Live Oaks, but eligibility rules were looser, too. Jim Tyng, for instance, played baseball for Harvard for seven seasons.

Tyng was a terrific athlete – he would briefly pitch in the major leagues, the first of 16 Harvard men to do so – but he was put behind the plate by manager Frederick W. Thayer because the previous catcher, Howard K. Thatcher, left school in 1876.

But Tyng was reluctant to get behind the plate. He was afraid of being disfigured back there, and told Thayer as much. Recalling a game in which an opposing team’s catcher had donned some sort of jury-rigged fencing mask, Thayer commissioned a Cambridge tinsmith to fashion a wire-mesh mask with eyeholes along with padded chin and forehead rests.

Tyng tested the contraption in spring training and wore it in that April 12, 1877 opener. “To the ingenious inventor of this mask,” proclaimed the Harvard Crimson, “we are largely indebted for the excellent playing of our new catcher.”

But who was that “ingenious” inventor? Some 125 years later, The Crimson would investigate the Winklevoss brothers’ claim that Mark Zuckerberg appropriated their idea for Facebook. Although not as much money was on the line in the late 19th century, this invention was also subject to litigation and debate.

Thayer, who had a law degree, was granted the official patent in 1878 and he proved willing to defend it in court when various sports manufacturers began producing masks without deigning to pay him royalties. Meanwhile, other catchers began making claims of their own.

Howard Thatcher, then living in Maine, said he’d used one in 1876. Warren R. Briggs, a semipro catcher in New England, weighed in, backing Thayer – sort of – while inserting himself into the discussion. Briggs avowed as to how he’d seen a mask in Thayer’s room in 1875, suggested ways to tweak the design himself, and began using one in 1876.

“So who invented the mask: Thayer, Thatcher, Tyng, or the metalsmith who actually made it?” asks baseball historian Stephen Eschenbach.

“About the only thing that can be said with any certainty,” he added, “is that Thayer didn’t create the mask in a vacuum, and that Tyng went to his grave believing he contributed more to the invention of the mask than he received credit for.”