The bicycle system was essential as there were no telephones, and it worked. Over 1400 copies were sold by the newsboys who reached the Square just four minutes and 54 seconds after the game ended.
Extras Become Features
The next year "sport extras" became a regular feature of the CRIMSON. After the Yale game at Springfield, a football "extra" appeared in Cambridge 20 seconds after the last dispatch was received.
When in 1897 the CRIMSON faced hot competition from the News, a lively daily which for two years gave the editors of the older paper many an anxious moment, the importance of the "extras" was doubled. On one occasion, when the University eleven was away from home playing Pennsylvania, the CRIMSON arranged, at a considerable expense, for a private telephone wire direct from the field. The enterprising and unscrupulous News editors tapped the wire, and great was the consternation of the CRIMSON to find their "extra" almost immediately followed by an identical issue of the News.
Crimson Beats Boston Papers
However, the CRIMSON soon was too much for its energetic competitor, and had the field of "extras" to itself in Cambridge. But competition from the Boston papers is ever present, and after the big games the CRIMSON "extra" is rushed off the press as quickly as possible, so that the copies reach the returning spectators as they cross the Larz Anderson bridge. Today's "extra" will be the first full account of the game to be on sale.
Last year when the CRIMSON published its "extra" on the day of the Princeton game, it was only "the fault of that Princeton guy (Beattle, who ran for a touchdown a minute before the game ended) that we didn't start to run the copies off one second after the game ended," as one of the compositors declared. As it was, only 34 seconds were needed.
Perhaps the most famous of the CRIMSON'S "extras" was published in 1909, when President Eliot resigned. This was a gigantic "scoop" engineered entirely by the President of the CRIMSON, A. G. Cable '09, and the Managing Editor. The news was put into the hands of the public at noon when newsboys ran through the Square proclaiming that President Eliot's 40-year term had ended. The CRIMSON had scooped the world: