Let’s talk about something really interesting today.
Let's talk about something that doesn't have anything to do with Irrigation or Turf Maintenance.
Let’s talk about the golf ball.
This will be a slightly longer post than usual, but trust me, this is deceptively
interesting, and involves a lot of history – ranging from economics to
industrial manufacture and development, cultural boundaries and influence,
capitalism, and standardization of both production and regulation processes. If nothing else, it can make for ice-breaking
conversation for your next Pick-Up-Group (what we weekend warriors
affectionately call PUGs).
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| Bill...Bill...Bill...Steve. Nice to meet you all. |
It’s actually a little difficult to talk about the history
of the golf ball itself without getting lost in the weeds of heavily-contested
Golf History; there is actually a lot of quiet conflict within the very narrow
circles that profess to be the true historians of golf. We’re going to do our best to skirt outside
of those weeds, and restrain the conversation to that little devilish orb
itself…we’ll leave the much-disputed history of the sport for another day.
The history of the golf ball can be traced back to Holland
and before. It began when Julius Caesar
led the Roman Empire into the Lowlands of Gaul in 57 B.C. The Legions brought with them their own brand
of sport, designed to be adaptable and mobile (because the legions were always
on the move). That sport carried the
name Harpastum (which was itself an evolution of the Greek game Harpaston,
roughly meaning “to seize,” or “to snatch away”), and was noted for the small,
softball-sized globe that any soldier could carry with him in his
saddlebag. It was a small leather skin
stuffed to the gills with the hair of various beasts of burden that the Legion
took with them along their expeditions.
It was a full-contact sport and in modern society could be more closely
compared to Rugby or American Football.
But, it’s the ball that is
important here.
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| Excellent form, I say! Excellent! |
The natives of regions occupied and invaded by the Legion would
take this little ball and incorporate it into their ball-and-stick sport of colf, and the ball itself would evolve
into the first form that we have physical record of. This little hand-crafted wooden ball would be
carried north of Hadrian’s Wall past the 2nd century A.D.
Through the next millennia the sport itself evolved into the
various offshoots of Crosse and Mail (what we now know as hockey, croquet, la
crosse, and jai-alai), but the now-wooden ball itself remained the same across
most of the areas in which the games were played. They became a pastime of the military and
shepherds alike, looking to both exercise their accuracy and prove their mettle
to their contemporaries with stakes being bragging rights and rounds at the
local tavern. The noble Scots themselves
would import these wooden balls handcrafted of elm or beech from across the sea
by the barrel-load as late as 1496.
That’s over a thousand years that these balls saw use unchanged across Europe.
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| If I could putt from a kneeling position, I'm sure I could shave at LEAST four strokes off of my game. |
Yet, within the lands of the Dutch, the stuffed-ball still
held sway. Technological advances made it
easier to work leather and stitching became tighter. Water became more readily accessible, and
with it an increased understanding of the science that would come to be known
as thermodynamics. Different skins were
used, different sizes experimented with, and different sports applications were enjoyed (from the “futbawe” to the “golf” first outlawed by James II). Just before the 15th century, the
“Hairy” from the Roman days of yore was replaced with an upgrade – the
“Featherie.”
Introduced in 1618, the Featherie was made by stuffing wet
feathers (preferably goose) into an also-wet pouch of leather (usually cow- or
horse-hide), measuring about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. Then left out to dry in the sun, the feathers
inside would expand while the leather outside contracted (thermodynamics!). Then, the ball would be painted and stamped
with the Maker’s Mark. This yielded a
ball that was quite stiff and reasonably round.
This allowed for a softer and more controlled stroke during
stick-and-ball games; balls played with foot and hand remained stuffed with cow
hair for some time. The Featherie would
remain the single greatest evolution of the golf ball for the next two-and-a-half
centuries.
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| The standard unit for stuffing a Featherie was considered a single top hat's worth of feathers. Hats off to you, sir. |
The Featherie was actually extremely expensive to make, and
became the first historical example of economic exclusivity in the sport
itself. The price of a ball could
actually exceed the price of a club...apply that to modern playability and your
decision to take the safe shot! In this
day and age, conservative play was a matter of economics rather than end-of-day
score, as a shot in the drink could put you out of the game for a considerable
time.
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| An example of a John Gourlay Featherie from the 18th century; made in Scotland and recently sold at auction for £5,000 (!!!). These balls would have sold for 5 shillings each, or about $65 per ball in today's money (ALSO !!!). |
One of the side effects of using such a malleable ball was
that the Featheries would become dented, scratched, and oblong after extended
use. It was cheaper to re-stuff and
re-stitch an existing hide that was already scarred and scuffed than to make a
new one, so a side-industry came about – Featherie Refurbishment. Notable makers and refurbishers in the 17th
century were Andrew Dickson, Leith and Henry Mills, and St. Andrews. And so, in this process of pocket-pinching
sustainability, an accidental discovery was made:
Although the ball
needed to remain as spherical as possible to have the best carry in the air and
roll on the ground, the scratches and dents actually improved ball flight and control.
Fast forward two centuries.
In 1848, Reverend Adam Peterson of St. Andrews introduced
the Gutta Percha, or “Guttie.” As the Industrial
Revolution continued during this Pre-Victorian era, methods of production changed
across the globe and shifted the resources used in that same production; this
new type of golf ball was formed from the rubber sap of the Gutta tree found in
the tropics of the world. Trade routes
were established and secured to solidify access to similar products. Along with the Industrial Revolution came the
Railroad, which not only changed the method of transportation across the world
much in the same way that travel by horse had done millennia before, but also
directly contributed to the spread of golf and the ease of manufacture of
equipment.
The new Guttie could be made for a fraction of the price of
the long-reigning Featherie; not only was the initial investment cheaper, but
when it came to refurbishing, the ball could simply be re-heated and re-shaped
in a mold. Thanks to the advances in production,
Golf crossed backwards across the economic boundaries of luxury and disposable
income, and became again available to the Everyman.
But, there was a
catch.
The Gutties still did not travel as far as the Featheries,
and did not represent the same level of control. To mitigate these factors,
producers began to deliberately score and shape their molds for the Gutties to
better simulate the scratches and dents found on long-lived Featheries. The Maker’s Mark of Allan Robertson was most
prevalent during this period, and by the 1880-90’s, shape-molding Gutties was a
standard in the industry. By the time
Dunlop came in to become the major mass-production engine right before the turn
of the century, the hand-crafted ball industry had been essentially killed.
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| Examples of molded Gutties, including wear-and-tear. |
The pattern during this transitional period that found most
popularity was the “Bramble,” which today can only be found at special-interest
mini-golf courses or “aqua ranges” as floating balls (although developments in
the 20th century would find the latter floating balls able to be
manufactured with the more traditional modern dimples).
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| Today, you'd likely only find the Bramble at Scottie's Indoor Putt-Putt. |
In 1898, Coburn Haskell accidentally made another change by
introducing a golf ball with a core made from a single piece of rubber; when
waiting at the B.F. Goodwrench factory to be received by Bertram Work for a
lunch date, he began to play with idle and unattended machines on the factory
floor. The core for that ball was wound
with rubber threads (the winding process developed by W. Millison) and encased
in a tight leather wrap, and by 1901, the “Haskell” became universally accepted
as the ball to use for play. Not only was it affordable and reproducible
on a mass scale, it had effectively demolished the competition in the British
and US Opens for three years running.
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| The kid points out the absurd price of $6 per dozen...today, that is equivalent to $163.47!! Well, I guess it's still better than $65 per ball... |
At this point, the production method had been solidly
established, and the new realm of exploration became what patterns would be
imprinted into the surface. In 1905,
William Taylor developed the dimple pattern that is still the standard today,
maximizing lift and minimizing drag.
There were also experimentations with the core of the
Haskell; as it was air-injected rubber, it had the tendency to explode
upon impact after long-time exposure to higher temperatures…imagine teeing off
in the US Open with the leading score going into the third round only to have
your ball explode off of the tee!
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| In Hawaii, "aloha" means hello AND goodbye. |
Other manufacturers would experiment with the core
throughout the 20th century, using cork, various metals, and even
mercury; but the first significant improvement on the design wouldn’t occur
until 1972, when Spalding introduced the two-piece “Executive,” which was
itself an evolution of a ball patent purchased in 1967 from Jim Bartsch (this
patent revised construction of the skin of the ball, switching to an artificial
resin developed by du Pont named
Suralyn). Bartsch’s original design was
sound, but could only be realized by Spalding’s chemical engineering team to
remove the need for previously used layers with their new resin formulae.
Even through today, all innovations on the Executive are
simply variations of the dimples patterns on the surface and the makeup of the
core, to maximize airflow and compression upon the stroke of impact.
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| Examples of the different cores of golf balls throughout the 20th century. |
Even though the technological imperatives didn’t change
until the late 20th century, regulatory bodies had been establishing
standards for balls in professional play since the 1920’s. Both the Royal & Ancient Golf Club os St.
Andrews and the United States Golf Association agreed that any ball approved
for regulation play would weigh no more than 1.62 ounces and have a diameter of
no more than 1.62 inches. In 1931, the
USGA broke away from this agreement to introduce the “Big Ball,” which raised
the diameter to 1.68 inches, but lowered the weight to 1.55 ounces. Less than a full tournament year later, they
raised that weight to the previous limit of 1.62 ounces. In subsequent years, all attempts to arrive
at a compromise diameter of 1.66 inches failed. It took an official stance from
the Professional Golfer’s Association of Britain that insisted the American
dominance of the sport was directly due to the standards of the size; in 1968
they established that they would be experimenting with the larger balls. By 1974, not only had all three organizations
established the Big Ball as the
standard, but made it and only it the
mandatory ball to be used…the smaller sizes of yore were outlawed altogether by
1988.
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| Of COURSE we Americans wanted it bigger... |
Very few changes have been made since then, and most of them
are proprietary secrets among the ball designers and developers. Looking at patents for future balls that
haven’t yet hit the market, we can see that very complex mathematics are
beginning to be incorporated into design.
The amount of geometry, aerodynamics, and general science that are going
into the “ball of the future,” are astounding, and one would have to have a PhD
to understand the complexities involved.
In fact, most of the designers listed on the patents actually have PhD’s
in physics.
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| Yes. I understand all of this. |
There are plans to incorporate GPS tags into balls, gyroscopic stabilizers that float inside the ball even while it spins at hundreds of RPM’s as it traverses through the air. Think of the technology that already exists in televised broadcasts to track a ball in flight and overlay that flight path live as the competition is being sent out to the world. Now think about how that visualization would change if the Golf Channel had access to all of the GPS coordinates for each competitor’s ball on file while filming the event…how would that change the passive act of watching professional golf?
All in all, the history of the golf ball is incredible. It crosses borders, cultures, economic boundaries, and practices of industry and trade. Few sports can trace one of its simple elements back 2,000 years across Legionnaires, shepherds, local lords, and captains of industry…but this deceptively devilish game that so frustrates and rewards us can.
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| Behold...the Ball of Tomorrow. |
Who knows exactly what the future of the golf ball will look
like? It’s a sure bet that the sport
will last another 2,000 years, and future writers will be able to write
articles just like this about the next phase of the evolution of the golf ball.
