The 1918 World Series, the Boston Red Sox versus the Chicago Cubs, was notable for several reasons. It was played, for one thing, as World War I raged, and was, as a result of a battle-shortened ball season, the only Series to be played entirely in September. It featured an up-and-coming young slugger named George Herman Ruth. It remains, despite this, the last Series ever to be played without the scoring of a single home run.

Red Sox fans—particularly those who were also soldiers, stationed 40 miles away from Boston at Camp Devens—were eager for news of the Series' games. And when you're eager for news, you generally want that news to be as up-to-the-minute as possible. But television, at that point, had yet to be commercialized. Same with radio. Newspapers were plentiful, but slow.

You know what communications method was fast and reliable, though? Pigeons. Homing pigeons that doubled as carrier pigeons.

In an article about the Sox-involving Series of 2013, the Wall Street Journal's Brian Costa offers a reminder of the birds that acted, in their appropriately avian way, as precursors to Twitter's instant updates. "The last time the Boston Red Sox clinched a championship at Fenway Park," Costa notes, "they used carrier pigeons to deliver inning-by-inning updates to soldiers at a fort 40 miles away." Handlers attached updates to the legs of their little fliers, and the birds, in turn, flew "home" to Devens, delivering the updates. (The flight took about 40 minutes, generally, unless—as described in the Boston Daily Globe clip above—the animal took an accidental detour on the way back to the base.)