Sports photography question

[Griffins]

I agree- I really doubt the images from the 20's were taken by the same camera in sequence.
Images in that era were generally taken with 4x5 press cameras. It's incredibly slow taking an image and reloading for the next one. As Moosedog wrote even with 2 sides to each holder of film 30 seconds is about the quickest to shoot, replace the dark slide, flip the holder, take out the dark slide, and cock the shutter. To the best of my knowledge the first motor drives were made for the Nikon F, in the early/mid '60's and that is when they came into widespread use for sports and fashion shoots.
Most likely for the images of Ruth they were either done with multiple cameras, or more likely just a series of shots taken on different pitches and put together to look like a sequence.

The view camera with multiple lenses could've been an early color camera- we played with one in school, before color film a separate negative would be shot for red, green and blue spectrums and then printed together. There was also a twin lens reflex (picture a rollei, look down the top into the camera, one lens to view and the other to capture the image) that shot 4x5 but those weren't very common and were pretty slow.