Basketball was invented in 1891 with two peach baskets
A bored gym class, a Canadian instructor, and a janitor's fruit baskets gave the world a new sport.
In December 1891, physical-education instructor James Naismith was told to invent an indoor game to keep restless students at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts active through the harsh New England winter. He wanted something skill-based rather than rough, where players scored by lobbing a ball into an elevated goal that rewarded accuracy over force.
Naismith asked the school janitor for two square boxes to serve as targets. The janitor returned instead with two peach baskets, which Naismith nailed to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, one at each end. He wrote out 13 rules by hand, his secretary typed them onto two pages, and he pinned them to the gym bulletin board.
The original two-page typed rules later sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for about $4.3 million - the most ever paid for sports memorabilia at the time.
The new game spread through the YMCA network within months and grew into a global sport.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
