--- title: Night Baseball and Desegration of the Sport: A Brief History description: How electric lights and integration are connected canonical: https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/ author: Ainissa Ramirez article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-04-28T15:00:32.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:04:21.717Z article:section: History og:title: Night Baseball and Desegration of the Sport: A Brief History og:description: How electric lights and integration are connected og:url: https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0c1f9855b179ed5f/6987ed15e20a87420ca89185/monarchs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 1934 Kansas City Monarchs og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Night Baseball and Desegration of the Sport: A Brief History twitter:description: How electric lights and integration are connected twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0c1f9855b179ed5f/6987ed15e20a87420ca89185/monarchs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Night Games Changed Baseball History > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [Ainissa Ramirez](https://time.com/author/ainissa-ramirez/) ## Ainissa Ramirez Apr 28, 2015 3:00 PM UTC  The Kansas City Monarchs of 1934 pose for a team photo The Kansas City Monarchs of 1934 pose for a team photoTranscendental Graphic / Getty Images by [Ainissa Ramirez](https://time.com/author/ainissa-ramirez/) ## Ainissa Ramirez Apr 28, 2015 3:00 PM UTC J. L. “Wilkie” Wilkinson, a baseball team owner, needed to put more bodies in seats. It was 1930, the year after the stock market had crashed, and the Depression was taking its toll. Not even baseball was safe: One team had folded; a whole league disbanded. Wilkinson owned the Kansas City Monarchs, a winning team, but their daytime games made it impossible for working fans to attend. Additionally, the Monarchs were members of the Negro National League and didn’t have their own stadium. Under the shadow of Jim Crow, where few stores and hotels would cater to them, playing baseball required lots of travel in unwelcoming conditions. And, while mostly black crowds attended the Monarchs’ games, the efforts to attract new white fans were fruitless. Wilkinson yearned for a financial home run and tried everything to keep the team going. In the 1920s, he lowered the price of seats from $1.10 to $.75; he halved the price of tickets for women on Ladies Night. Now more desperate, Wilkinson, who was white, took a bigger gamble. He mortgaged everything he owned to pursue a radical idea: playing baseball at night, when fans weren’t at work. If he could just figure out how to help fans see the game, he figured, they would come. It wasn’t a totally new idea—night baseball had been [batted about by professional and amateur teams for years](http://research.sabr.org/journals/under-the-lights); and a team from Independence, Kans., [lays claim](http://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/independence%5Fks%5Fshulthis%5Fstadium%5Fplaque%5Fmee%5Faugust%5F2014.jpg?n=4833) to hosting the first-ever such home game exactly 85 years ago, on April 28, 1930—but nobody had really made it work as a long-term solution. The technology for nighttime baseball had significantly improved in the years since the first attempts had been made. Help came in the form of a mild-mannered Massachusetts-born General Electric physicist, William David Coolidge, who made floodlights possible. While Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb, his were short lived. The wire threads, or filaments, that they used to generate light burned out quickly or broke. Coolidge worked for years to make filaments with longer-lasting lives. The element tungsten, a silvery metal with the highest melting point on the periodic table, was an excellent candidate for a material, except that it had one major flaw. Tungsten snapped like chalk when drawn into a wire thread. When Coolidge “baked” tungsten, he eventually discovered, it became pliable. And, with Wilkinson’s pioneering idea, it was tungsten wire set in a bulb that would eventually beam light onto the baseball diamond. Wilkinson’s great innovation was to commission the Giant Manufacturing Company of Iowa to make a portable lighting system. Six floodlights on telescoping poles nearly 50 ft. tall were mounted on flatbed trucks located throughout the field. The lights could go on the road with the Monarchs, an advantage not available to some of the other teams that introduced night games that same season. The electric lights were a sight to behold, since fewer than 10% of farms in America had electricity in the early 1930s. The novelty of the portable lights at baseball games, Wilkinson hoped, would act as the flame to the proverbial moth. And it worked. With those lights the fans also saw the dawn of a new era—the beginning of nighttime baseball games, a full five years before Major League Baseball would follow their lead. Attendance that first Monarchs season grew from 5,000 to 12,000 to a peak of 15,000 people. Thanks to their portability, Wilkinson’s lights acted as beacons for fans of all races—and helped the Monarchs survive the Depression, which would have echoes throughout the history of baseball: Years later, Jackie Robinson would get his start with the Kansas City Monarchs, before moving on to the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing his first game April 15, 1947, and opening up baseball even more. _Ainissa Ramirez is a scientist and author (_Newton’s Football, Save Our Science_). She co-hosts a 2-minute science podcast called_ [Science Underground.](www.scienceunderground.org) ### LIFE With Jackie Robinson: Rare and Classic Photos of an American Icon  Jackie Robinson, 1950. J. R. Eyerman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson holds his son, Jackie Jr., as he sits with his wife Rachel on the front steps of their home in 1949\. Jackie Jr. struggled with drug addiction as a young man and was killed, at just 24 years old, in a car accident in 1971. Nina Leen—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson Allan Grant—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Advertisements for The Jackie Robinson Story from the May 15, 1950, issue of LIFE magazine. LIFE Magazine—May 15, 1950  Jackie Robinson poses for LIFE's Allan Grant during filming of The Jackie Robinson Story, 1950. Allan Grant—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Hoping to distract Yankee catcher Yogi Berra and disrupt the pitcher, Bob Turley, Jackie Robinson dances off of third base during the third game of the 1955 World Series at Ebbets Field. Brooklyn won, 8-3, and went on to win the Series. (See the introduction to this gallery for photographer Ralph Morse's story of making this iconic photo.) Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson slides into home in 1956. George Sillk—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen, Iraq's 17-year-old King Faisal II (invited to the U.S. by President Truman) and Jackie Robinson chat in the Dodger dugout in 1952. Yale Joel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson signs autographs and chats with fans in 1955. Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson, displaying the athleticism that defined his play even in the last year of his career, in action during a game against the Giants. 1956. George Sillk—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson slashes a base hit during Game 6 of the 1955 World Series. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Jackie Robinson rounds first during a game against the Giants in 1956. George Sillk—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. Aging but still aggressive, Jackie Robinson bluffs for third after stealing second. George Sillk—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. Daring dash brings Brooklyn's Jackie Robinson charging wildly toward home plate on steal. It came unexpectedly, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra having just told pitcher, 'Don't worry about Robinson. Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Yogi Berra takes issue with the umpire's "safe" call after Robinson's electrifying steal of home in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series. Six decades after it was taken, this picture reminds us of what an intense competitor Berra, like Robinson, really was. Today, he's often regarded a cuddly old ambassador for baseball. But back then, when the game was on the line, Yogi Berra was a warrior. Grey Villet—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  Caption from LIFE. Sagging veteran Jackie Robinson rests in the locker room after game which ended second winning streak and prompted \[manager Walter\] Alston to bench Jackie two days later. The Dodgers went on to win Brooklyn's only MLB championship that year, but '55 was Robinson's second-to-last season as a ballplayer. The toll of "being Jackie Robinson" is evident: the great athlete who broke baseball's color line is 36 years old in this shot, but looks a good 20 years older Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/"},"headline":"How Night Games Changed Baseball History","datePublished":"2015-04-28T15:00:32.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:04:21.717Z","description":"Electric lights and racial integration have a surprising connection","url":"https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/","keywords":["Sports topic","Baseball"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0c1f9855b179ed5f/6987ed15e20a87420ca89185/monarchs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Ainissa Ramirez","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/ainissa-ramirez/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0c1f9855b179ed5f/6987ed15e20a87420ca89185/monarchs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"1934 Kansas City Monarchs","caption":"1934 Kansas City Monarchs","creditText":"Transcendental Graphic / Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3837130/night-baseball-history/","name":"How Night Games Changed Baseball History"}}]}] ```