Election night has been a big media event since electric lights first announced the winner in 1892

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Mike Conway, Indiana University (THE CONVERSATION) As election night approaches, Americans will turn to their televisions, computers and smartphones to watch results come in for local, state and national races. Over the years, news coverage of winners and losers has become must-watch programming ‘” even if it is, as longtime NBC election-coverage producer Reuven Frank put it in 1991, ‘œa TV show about adding.’� The main goal of journalists on election night was ‘” and is ‘” to be the first to correctly declare the winner. It’s an attitude driven by the public’s interest in quick results, supercharged by journalistic competition. I have been studying journalism history for more than 20 years and before that worked in newsrooms on election night for almost as long. Through experience and research, I know the rush to announce a winner didn’t start with the internet ‘” or television or radio, for that matter. The public, especially the sector deeply interested in politics, has always wanted to know the results as soon as possible. Another standard of election night, at least in the past century, is that the journalists announce a winner in the presidential race well before all the votes are counted ‘” and weeks before the results are formally certified. Election night 2020 may be very different. The spectacle of election night Starting in the late 1800s and continuing well into the next century, New York newspapers used a vast array of floodlights, magic lantern displays, stereopticon projections, and other dazzling visual pyrotechnics to announce results on election night. In 1892, The New York Herald and the New York World newspapers, as well as the Chicago Herald, used a variety of lighting techniques to signify state and national results in incumbent President Benjamin Harrison’s race against former President Grover Cleveland. The New York Herald used a searchlight at Madison Square Garden and pointed it toward Brooklyn to announce Cleveland’s victory. While these effects were designed to announce the winner before the next edition of the paper, the visual displays also drew crowds, turning election night into an entertainment event. In 1904, when The New York Times moved its offices to a new location dubbed ‘œTimes Square,’� the paper ramped up the election night spectacles and also added a ball drop on New Year’s Eve. In 1928, just in time for Herbert Hoover’s election, the Times unveiled the ‘œzipper,’� a lighted electronic sign with 4-foot-high scrolling letters that circled the building with the latest information. Media historian Dale Cressman considered the quarter-million-dollar sign a combination of ‘œnewspaper promotion, competition, and the desire to be first.’� For more than 30 years, the Times zipper displayed election night results and other major news stories. Broadcasting the election results Eight years before the Times zipper, newspapers in Detroit and Pittsburgh, as well as in other locations, took to the radio airwaves to announce Warren Harding’s election as president. By 1932, the radio networks relayed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory over incumbent Herbert Hoover to the more than 60% of American households that had radios. After World War II, television took over the role of getting preliminary election results out to the public as quickly as possible.