Meet me at the scoreboard

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(Image: Scoreboard party for OSU football game vs. Michigan, 1923) The first scoreboards at the stadium, located at the south end, were wooden, hand-operated signs. Beneath the stands, however, an electric scoreboard provided fans a complex play-by-play broadcast, relayed to the operator by teletype, communicated to the crowd by a system of flashing lights. The Alumni Monthly covered one of these “scoreboard parties,” describing “some of the several thousand stay-at-homes who watched the far-off Iowa-Ohio State football game on the big electric scoreboard underneath the Stadium.” In November 1938, electric scoreboards replaced the hand-operated ones at the south stands; these remained in place for nearly 50 years, until the installation of a $1.6 million computerized scoreboard in 1984.