Princeton v. Yale, 1903: The Oldest College Football Game on Film

You can thank Thomas Edi­son and his motion pic­ture cam­era for many things: Bike Tricks Caught on Film in 1899; Footage of Mark Twain from 1909; The World’s First (and Slight­ly Scan­dalous) Hand-Tint­ed Motion Pic­ture (1895); The First Kiss in Cin­e­ma, 1896; and now this — footage of the 1903 Prince­ton v. Yale foot­ball game. The two teams were unde­feat­ed, and 50,000 spec­ta­tors were on hand. The video starts with the play­ers tak­ing the field (Prince­ton first, Yale sec­ond) and some panoram­ic views of Yale’s sta­di­um. Then (around the 2:00 mark) we get to the high­lights of the game.

The clip above is appar­ent­ly the old­est col­le­giate foot­ball footage sur­viv­ing today. And, in case you’re keep­ing score, Prince­ton won the game 11–6.

But if you’re count­ing the num­ber of Free Cours­es pro­vid­ed by the two uni­ver­si­ties, we have the score at 38–1, with Yale com­ing out way on top.

via Retro­naut and the Reel Mudd