When was golf balls invented

The gutty lasted until Coburn Haskell, an American, developed a wound core ball in In , he and Bertram Work, an employee of the Goodrich rubber company in Ohio, patented the Haskell ball, as it came to be known, in — a solid core wrapped tightly with rubber threads covered with a layer of gutta-percha. This means that, for different reasons, none of the golf balls which were the making of golf were patented in the UK.

The hand winding of the rubber threads was soon mechanized. The outside covering was initially a Bramble pattern, and it would be a dozen years before superior dimples patterns that we know today were developed. Bobby Jones described this as the most important development in golf, and it certainly was of his life time. Within a few years, the Haskell was outperforming the gutty and superseded it. In Years of Golf Balls , Chick Evans relates how, when he was a caddy, he witnessed the first use, and loss, and finding of a Haskell golf ball.

Though the first 2-piece ball with solid core and cover, was developed in , it would be decades before the Haskell ball was replaced.

In , Spalding re-devised this construction using Suralyn as cover. Since then, there has been a never ending explosion of 1, 2 and 3 piece developments of cores with variations of covers and dimples.

The result is golf balls than spin slower off the driver, and hence slice less, but still allow control in short game. Golf Ball from Hairy to Haskell Which came first — the golf club or the golf ball? Wooden The use of wooden balls in golf in Scotland is an assumption, but without any definite evidence.

Hairy The Romans had a small, leather stitched handball filled with hair, called the harpastum , though there is no known connection to colf or golf and there is no evidence that they used this ball in any stick-and-ball game. And you can't get it away from me. Look at the rubber grip on this thing. Lastly he pointed out that if you get pulled over and the cops find a bat in your trunk, you get a second look; but a set of golf clubs never prompts questions. Other than that story I have nothing revelatory to say about golf club design.

Golf ball design, on the other hand, is pretty interesting. The first golf balls from the 14th Century were made out of wood, specifically beech, by carpenters using hand tools. They weren't perfectly round and it's safe to assume that they sucked. The 17th Century saw the slight design improvement of the featherie, a leather ball stuffed with bird feathers and stitched shut. But these things took forever to make, behaved differently when vet versus dry, and were also not perfectly round.

In the mids, a guy named Robert Adams Paterson made the first molded ball. He discovered that the sap from a sapodilla tree, native to Malaysia, could be heated up, placed into a round mold and would then dry hard.

Called the guttie, these were the first golf balls with mass-manufacturability, and with the added bonus that they could be reheated and re-molded if they went out-of-round. Then an interesting discovery was made. If you owned a guttie for a while, it got nicked and banged-up from regular use. People subsequently observed that when you hit a nicked-up guttie versus a brand-new one, the roughed-up balls actually had a more consistent flight path. Well before the Wright Brothers or any knowledge of aerodynamics, regular folk observed that those little nicks helped stabilize the ball in flight.

Golf ball manufacturers thus began etching, carving and chiseling different textures into guttie surfaces, trying to find the pattern most conducive to stable flight. Andrews Old Course. Not willing to give up just yet, he made more balls and tried again. But the balls disintegrated very quickly this time as well. When young Paterson completed his studies, he emigrated to America. And he did. In , he sent the improved version in London but there was almost no interest in the novel golf ball.

There are several reasons why the gutta percha ball replaced the featherie which was the standard for more than years. Cheaper production and consequently, lower cost up to 80 per cent! In fact, it could fly even further than its costly counterpart, reaching distances of up to yards. Also, it lasted longer and was less vulnerable to moisture, which was a huge advantage over the featherie, especially in the wet British climate.

Andrews changed his viewpoint when he figured out that he could make as many gutties in an hour as he could make featheries in an entire day. The guttie sparked a revolution in golf. By making the game more affordable, especially after the mechanisation of its manufacture in the early s 40 , the guttie transformed golf from a sport of the elites to the sport of the masses. Golf suddenly became extremely affordable not just for tradesmen and artisans but even for college students.

The increased interest in the game led to the development of new golf courses, creation of new golf clubs and an increased production of golf balls as well as other pieces of equipment in order to meet the growing demand.

The new golf ball also made it easier to learn to play the game In addition to flying further than the featherie, the guttie was also easier to control both in the air and on the green. In low temperatures, it fell apart very easily. On 11th April , the American businessman and inventor Coburn Haskell got a joint patent from the United States Patent Office for the rubber-wound ball 47 which would soon lead to another revolution in golf.

But the thing that ensured it made it to become the next ball of choice was its performance; bringing control and feel to a whole new level. When ballmakers adopted the dimple pattern golf ball pattern featuring indentations or depressions on the surface , which was patented by the Englishman William Taylor in 49 , the rubberwound ball achieved even greater distances.

Just like the invention of the gutta percha ball, the invention of the rubber-wound golf ball is kind of romanticised. He rolled it into a ball and bounced it to the floor. To his surprise, the ball bounced back all the way to the ceiling.

In , Haskell founded the Haskell Golf Ball Company and launched the manufacture of the rubberwound ball. Amateur and become the first golf player to win a Major using the novel golf ball. Open, respectively, which convinced most of their fellow players to follow their example. But there was still plenty of room left for improvement which is exactly what the leading ballmakers were trying to do over the next decades.

The dimple pattern was the first major improvement of the Haskell, and a big step in the history of golf balls and their design. Compared to the previously dominating bramble pattern golf ball pattern featuring pimples or brambles , golf balls with the patented Taylor dimple pattern flew much further.

In the same year when Taylor was granted the patent for the dimple pattern, the Scottish inventor Frank H. Mingay was granted the patent for a liquid core golf ball by the United States Patent Office. There was obviously nothing magical about radium. Thus the quest for the perfect core material continued throughout much of the rest of the history of golf balls. Meanwhile, Haskell sold both his company and patent to the Spalding Company and retired as a very wealthy man.

Like stickball is to baseball, stick and ball games reminiscent of golf have been around for several centuries, with some accounts going all the way back to the Dutch in We will stick to our specialty, and concentrate on the history of the golf ball itself. The question has always been about the materials, not so much the method. From the 13 th century until the 17 th century, hardwood beech and box trees were the first mediums conducive for the production of golf balls.

In a lengthy process, feathers were boiled and compacted while still wet the hide was wet too ; then, as both dried together, the feathers expanded while the hide shrunk, resulting in a hardened ball.

On to the next big medium—the dried sap of the Sapodilla tree. In , Reverend Adam Paterson from St. With malleable sap that felt like rubber, the ball could be reshaped for more consistent flight.