a.k.a. V.J.

It’s interesting to me when a community claims to be the birthplace of an everyday item or product. There’s often an element of boasting civic pride that feels oddly out of step with the nature of the item itself.

I lived for a few years in Shrewsbury, Mass., which many regard as the birthplace of the birth-control pill. (The irony of that phrase never occurred to me until just now as I typed it.) It was also said that the nearby city of Clinton, Mass. was the birthplace of the spork. Based on those two innovations alone, the Bay State revolutionized life in the 20th century and beyond.

Syracuse is the birthplace of a few commonplace objects that aren’t widely associated with the city. One of them is the Brannock Device. Most people don’t know that item by name, but almost everybody has had their foot inside one at a shoe store. Another, slightly more glamorous product of Syracuse is something seen regularly by basketball fans around the world: the shot clock.

Many people know Syracuse as a basketball-crazed city, based on the legacy of the Syracuse Orange in college hoops. Less well-known is the fact that Syracuse was once home to an NBA team — the Syracuse Nationals, who eventually became the Philadelphia 76ers. The shot clock was the brainchild of Nationals owner Danny Biasone, who according to some reports, worked out the idea in his bowling alley in the Eastwood section of town. (I only mention that detail because I love the idea that there was an era of the NBA where an owner’s main outside business interest could be a bowling alley in a residential neighborhood.)

Syracuse is quite proud of the history of the shot clock and has a monument to it in the Armory Square district of downtown. The monument is a working countdown clock on a continuous 24-second loop. Today I took a short walk to Armory Square on my lunchbreak to capture some photos of Mr. Biasone’s invention.

Now, if Shrewsbury ever erects a fully functional birth-control pill monument in the middle of town, that’s something I’ll drive back there to see.