At the Smithsonian | April 5, 2024

From the JogBra to Gatorade to Breakaway Basketball Rims, Sports Are a Field for Invention

A new exhibition at the National Museum of American History aims to inspire the next generation of innovators

"Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego" looks at scores of innovations that improve performance, ensure safety and more accurately score games. National Museum of American History

Roger Catlin

Museums Correspondent

After his family experienced a serious auto accident several years ago, former NFL cornerback Shawn Springs was relieved to find the vehicle’s airbags worked as intended.

“I saw technology that protected my son’s head in a car crash,” Springs says. “He’s 2 1/2 years old and he gets out and there’s nothing wrong.”

It made him think about his own profession, amid its own growing concern about traumatic brain injury.

“I’m like, well, football’s a series of car accidents. Is there something we can do? Is there technology that we can use to make it safer?” he says.

Working with engineers, university partners, the league and even the United States Department of Defense, Springs created a company, Windpact, that developed airbag-like Crash Cloud technology in helmets, designed to lessen the effect of constant impact.

From the JogBra to Gatorade to Breakaway Basketball Rims, Sports Are a Field for Invention — Several years in the making, the exhibition has a number of interactive kiosks where visitors can “create” their own innovations scattered among more than 60 displayed artifacts. National Museum of American History

It’s one of scores of innovations on display in a new bilingual exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, many of which come from practitioners or athletes themselves as a way to improve performance, ensure safety or more accurately score games. “Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego” at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation tells the stories behind some of the best-known developments of modern sport—from the high-speed photo finish camera to Gatorade to Air Jordans—that came through such trial and error.

“Even if you’re not super into sports, you probably wear tennis shoes,” says historian Eric Hintz, the acting deputy director of the Lemelson Center who co-curated “Change Your Game.”

“One of our big missions is to inspire kids, families and the next generations to look at themselves as inventive and creative,” he says. “The more we looked into [sports], we kept finding innovation technology, whether it’s a tennis racket or it’s instant replay.”

And many of the behind-the-scenes stories, he found, “were super diverse stories—men, women, people from different walks of life, people with disabilities. We made the decision to go for it.”

Several years in the making, the exhibition includes interactive kiosks where visitors can create their own innovations, scattered among more than 60 displayed artifacts that include swimming goggles from 1905 and auto racer Janet Guthrie’s firesuit from 1978.

“We’re pulling on the national sports collection, which is amazing,” says museum director Anthea Hartig. “And then we’ve collected remarkable new objects for the exhibition.”

The show includes types of sporting equipment that visitors may have used themselves, such as a 1964 Roller Derby skateboard with metal wheels and Frank Nasworthy’s improved version with urethane wheels, as well as many variations of what would become a standard snowboard.

“And then it’s that meld of scholarship, design, technology—all to help people understand what it means to inculcate and honor your own courage to solve problems and your own courage to invent and to see something you want to change,” Hartig says.

After a 1978 hang gliding accident, Marilyn Hamilton worked with a pair of friends to invent a light, easy-to-maneuver wheelchair, using materials from hang gliders. She used her Quickie wheelchair, as she called it, to help win the wheelchair tennis championship at the U.S. Open.

Arthur Ehrat was a farmer from Southern Illinois who was commiserating in the 1970s with a local coach about slam dunks in college basketball that often resulted in shattered backboards. “He developed this idea of a breakaway rim where the rim would flex if you dunked, but the spring would snap it back into position,” Hintz says. And where did the inventive farmer find the right spring for the innovation? “He found it on a John Deere tractor.”

In that same decade, as women increasingly took part in sport, they struggled with a lack of supportive undergear. It made jogger Lisa Lindahl think, “Guys have jockstraps. Why couldn’t we do something like that for women, for a different part of the body?” Hintz says. Lindahl contacted costume designers Hinda Miller and Polly Palmer Smith. They went out and bought some men’s jockstraps, took them home, cut them up and fashioned a crude prototype of what would become a sports bra.

“It was very simple,” Hintz says. “It was scissors pulling apart a thing and then stitching it back together in a way that made more sense. I can hardly think of an invention in this gallery that has more impact.”

And it made for some iconic moments in sports, such as when U.S. women’s soccer player Brandi Chastain tore off her jersey in celebration after scoring the deciding penalty kick in the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final.

“I was 10 when Title IX passed,” Hartig says, referring to the 1972 law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. “And you can truly say that invention changed my life,” she says of what Lindahl named the JogBra, “And the way in which we could express ourselves physically. It enabled me to play sports.”

Speaking of spontaneous sports celebrations, teams might be dousing coaches and standout players with jugs of plain old water had it not been for the invention of Gatorade by kidney function specialist Robert Cade, who theorized that sluggish second-half play by University of Florida football teams might be caused by dehydration.

Scrupulously studying the salts and sugars in players’ blood and urine after games, he concocted the easily absorbed beverage that hydrated players more quickly. Cade’s Osmometer, with which he checked these levels in the 1960s, is part of the exhibition.

“That’s what a lot of these inventions you see in the gallery are,” says curator Meg Maher. “People who may not be involved in sports themselves but are just helping people solve a problem within sports.”

For people like Windpact CEO Springs, invention is a way to make a family tradition safer.

Springs, the son of NFL running back Ron Springs, was an All-American at Ohio State himself before going on to play for the Seattle Seahawks, the Washington Redskins and the New England Patriots in the late 1990s and 2000s.

“I was able to follow in my father’s footsteps and play nine years in the NFL,” Springs says. “My dad played with the Cowboys, and I was excited about it. And I knew my kids looked at me the same way. Then I’m looking at my dad’s generation and I’m seeing the effects of traumatic brain injury.”

When one of Springs’ friends and mentors in the league, Junior Seau, died by suicide at 43, later studies showed that the former San Diego Chargers star suffered from a chronic brain disease found in other players due to repetitive head trauma.

“I said, ‘Man, how can I make the game change for the next generation of athletes?’” Springs says. After his family’s harrowing auto accident, he thought about those bags that protected his kids. “It absorbed and dispersed energy.”

He started making helmet prototypes that used the same approach. “Now we can have real solutions that can absorb and disperse energy,” Springs says.

And his invention, on display as part of “Change Your Game,” now has the ability to inspire the next generation of inventors.

“When you have the opportunity to come in here and inspire,” Spring says, “That’s a goal.”

“Change our Game / Cambia tu juego” is on display at the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.