1891 Inventor of Basketball Tells His Story: Radio Broadcast in 1939

James Naismith (November 6, 1861 November 28, 1939) was a
Canadian-born Presbyterian minister who is best known for inventing the game of basketball at a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA in 1891. This interview of him is from a radio program called "We the People" and was aired on Jan. 31, 1939.

Audio has been restored and optimized for maximum clarity.

By 1892, basketball had grown so popular on campus that Dennis Horkenbach (editor-in-chief of The Triangle, the Springfield college newspaper) featured it in an article called "A New Game",and there were calls to call this new game "Naismith Ball", but Naismith refused. By 1893, basketball was introduced internationally by the YMCA movement. From Springfield, Naismith went to Denver, where he acquired a medical degree, and in 1898, he joined the University of Kansas faculty at Lawrence.

This video is made for educational purposes for fair use under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.