Cubs Win the 1908 World Series and Chicago Celebrates. Downtown Looking North on State Street at Madison Street.

Dr. Neil Gale identifies the correct subject and date of this 112-year-old photograph. The subject was unknown and thus, mislabeled on the Internet. This is one of a handful of historic photos that we were able to correct the information on Illinois photographs.

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This photo was taken on Wednesday, October 14, 1908, at 1:05 pm (per the Marshall Field clock) as Chicago Cubs fans flock to the streets in celebration of the Cubs winning the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. Game 5 had a 10 o'clock start time. The average time of a 9-inning MLB game is 3 hours. The game was played at Bennett Park in Detroit, Michigan. The image was most likely captured from the photographer standing on the roof of a streetcar.

I contacted the Major League Baseball (mlb.com), then sent my research and photo. They used the photo in an article.

RESEARCH: The handwritten date on the face of the photograph, which was misread as 1909, is actually 1908. I inverted the photograph in Photoshop and used other filters to further deduce the last digit was actually the number 8, not the number 9.

Moreover, at that time in Chicago's history, there was nothing else that would bring such a crowd (today, called a flash mob) out in the streets of downtown Chicago, resulting in bringing traffic to a standstill. News traveled at lightning-fast speed via telegraph, telephone (by 1905, the total telephones in Chicago proper had increased to 100,000) and word of mouth.

Copyright © 2016 Neil Gale, Ph.D.