Great moments in Sacrament Program History #76.

You’ve undoubtedly all seen “the wave” where the people in a crowded stadium stand in turn. What you probably didn’t know is that it first took place due to a misprinting of a sacrament program. The meeting took place in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in the fall of 1876.

The program was meant to say, below the hymn “The Spirit of God”:

Thou shalt sing and praise as the spirit moves through the congregation like a fire.

However, the clerk at the time had notoriously bad handwriting and spelling, and sent the following to the printer:

Thou shalt sig and prise as the spirt moves through the congragation like a fier.

The printer’s assistant, doing his best to fix the problems corrected it to:

Thou shalt sit and rise as the spirit moves through the congregation like a fire.

The attendants interpreted this, due in part to an expansive gesture by the chorister, as standing and sitting in today’s familiar wave pattern. After making it all the way down one side across the back and up to the front, even the choir took part. The choir was already standing, and so they raised their arms instead. The congregation took up raising their arms as the wave propagated several more times before dying out along with the final refrain of “Amen and amen.”

It was several years before the wave was replicated at a sporting event, but the cheerleader who created it was a descendant of one of the original pioneers, Nadie Niemand, who was at the meeting and wrote about it in his journal.