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

Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D., identifies this photograph's correct subject and date, which is over 110 years old. The subject was unknown and, thus, mislabeled on the Internet. This is one of a handful of historical photos on which I corrected or identified the subject matter.

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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 flocked to the streets to celebrate the Cubs winning the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. Game 5 had a 10am 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 by the photographer standing on the roof of a streetcar.

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

RESEARCH PROCESS

The handwritten date on the face of the photograph (poor penmanship), which was misread as 1909, is actually 1908. I inverted the photograph in Photoshop and used other filters to further deduce that the last digit was actually the number eight (8), not the number nine (9).

Moreover, at that time in Chicago's history, nothing else would bring such a crowd (today, called a flash mob) out in downtown Chicago, 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 by word of mouth.

Copyright © 2016  Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.  All rights reserved.