Basketball was invented in 1891 using peach baskets nailed to a gymnasium balcony.

In December 1891, physical education instructor James Naismith was asked to invent an indoor game to keep students active during the harsh Massachusetts winter. He nailed two peach baskets to the railings at opposite ends of a gymnasium balcony, wrote up thirteen basic rules, and had his class play with a soccer ball, creating what would become basketball.

Because the baskets still had their bottoms intact, someone had to climb a ladder and retrieve the ball manually every time a point was scored, which made for a rather slow game by modern standards. It wasn’t until 1906 that metal hoops with open nets replaced the peach baskets, finally letting the ball simply fall through, and the sport grew from that gymnasium experiment into one of the most popular in the world.