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I can’t quite read the print, but is this some kind of early baseball bat with pig skin round it?
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1864 patent for cricket bat
By Will last year, mid-March Leave a comment on this post
Here’s a patent for a cricket bat, filed in 1864 by Philip Caminoni of New York. Coincidentally (or not), John Wisden also published his first Almanack in 1864.
The bat is described as “a circular, oval, or polygonal frame, made of wood of any other suitable material and covered by a piece of parchment or of thin and elastic skin of an ass, swine, or other animal, similar to the skin used for drum heads.”
But looking at it below…what game were they playing back then?
Tags: 1864, cricket-bat, john-wisden, patents, Philip-Caminoni |
5 Responses to “1864 patent for cricket bat”
March 12th, 2007 at 4.07 pm
March 12th, 2007 at 5.50 pm
Seems to be, but it raises an interesting question: was baseball once referred to as cricket? I’m ignorant about its history but if anyone knows…
March 12th, 2007 at 8.39 pm
Baseball is a modification of cricket, so most likely it was refered to as cricket for a period of time.
March 12th, 2007 at 9.26 pm
Baseball is not descended from cricket. At one time in the C19th though cricket was more widely played in the US than baseball.
March 12th, 2007 at 10.19 pm
Okay, it seems modern-day baseball was invented in 1845, 19 years before this patent, in New York, when cricket was still big in the US. So maybe this guy thought he could take the design for a baseball bat, wrap it in pig skin, patent its use for cricket, and hope that everyone started using it.
Perhaps people bought into it, and it had the effect of wiping out cricket.
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