Steve Rushin’s column in Sports Illustrated this week mentioned that in 1897, Princeton Math Professor Charles H. Hinton invented a baseball pitching machine that fired baseballs (using gunpowder!) through a muzzle that was used by the Princeton Tigers baseball team (pictured right) in batting practice one day.
Harper’s Weekly reported this in it’s March 20, 1897 issue. I couldn’t find the story in the Harper’s archives, but it’s reasonably documented in many other sources.
Hinton’s machine allegedly hurt a few batters, and it’s a fact that the prof was fired himself shortly after this occurred, with rumors being that he was let go in part for shooting a few ball players.
Hinton was an author of a number of science fiction novels that often involved "journeys" into the 4th dimension, and was an avid astronomer. After being axed in New Jersey, he moved on to the University of Minnesota, where he apparently refined his pitching machine to the point where it could vary speeds, and throw curves. He actually had rubber-coated fingers positioned at the end of the muzzle, which allowed for a variety of rotations on the ball.
I'm not sure if he bagged any Gophers while he was up there?
If this sounds like a nutty professor story, all I can add is that Hinton must not have been too crazy, as he later moved on to work for the US Navy Observatory, and then the US Patent office, both located in Washington, DC.
Of note is Hinton may have served one day in prison for being a bigamist, and that he apparently had a massive stroke and died as he was raising a toast to a women philosophers in 1907.
Then, on May 14, 1961, it would appear that Hinton passed through some other dimension or two and came back as an outfielder for the Washington Senators.
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I think this was the plot for Back to the Future 4...
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