Bad timing in swimming races: A physicist to the rescue

During official swimming competitions in the “bad old days,” there were judges, armed only with their vision, to determine the sequence of arrival, and there were timers, armed with mechanical stopwatches, to get the times. At the University of Michigan, back in 1953, Bill Parkinson of the physics department, himself a swimmer, started work developing an electronic timing system to eliminate the human judgment and to have the accuracy of which electronics is capable.