History of Springfield, Massachusetts the first American motorcycle company (1901, "Indian"), an early commercial radio station (1921, WBZ, and most famously, the world's third-most-popular sport of basketball (1891, Dr. James Naismith). Puritan fur trader William Pynchon was an original settler of Roxbury, Massachusetts, a magistrate, and then assistant treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1635, he commissioned a scouting expedition led by John Cable and John Woodcock to find the Connecticut River Valley's most suitable site for the dual purposes of agriculture and trading. The expedition traveled either across the inland Bay Path from Boston to Albany via Springfield or, equally likely, along
Skee-Ball Skee-Ball Skee-Ball is an arcade game and one of the first redemption games. It is played by rolling a ball up an inclined lane and over a "ball-hop" hump that jumps the ball into bullseye rings. The object of the game is to collect as many points as possible by having the ball fall into holes in the rings which have progressively increasing point values. Skee-Ball was invented and patented in 1908 by Joseph Fourestier Simpson, a resident of Vineland, New Jersey. On December 8, 1908, Simpson was granted for his "Game". Simpson licensed the game to John W. Harper