A Brief History Of the Golf Ball:
In the earliest days of golf on the eastern coast of Scotland,
players used primitive equipment to play the game in a rather haphazard
and casual manner. The first clubs and balls specifically made for golf
were fashioned from wood.
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In 1618 the feather golf ball or 'Featherie' was introduced.
This was a handcrafted ball made with goose feathers tightly packed
into a horse or cow hide sphere. The feathers and leather were fashioned
into a ball while wet. As the assembly dried out the leather shrank and the
feathers expanded to create a hardened ball.
The Guttie ball ('Guttie') was introduced in 1848 and made from the rubber like
sap of the Gutta tree found in the tropics. When heated the rubber could
easily be fashioned into a sphere and used as a golf ball. Not only could
the ball be relatively cheaply produced, it could also be easily repaired
by re-heating and then re-shaping.
In 1898, Coburn Haskell introduced the one-piece rubber cored ball
which was universally adopted by 1901 after it proved so effective in the
British and US Opens. These balls looked just like Gutties but gave the
average golfer an extra 20 yards from the tee. These balls were constructed
from a solid rubber core wrapped in rubber thread encased in a gutta percha
sphere. When William Taylor first applied the dimple pattern to a Haskell
ball in 1905, golf balls took on their modern form. In 1972, Spalding
introduced the first two piece ball. In 1921, the R&A and USGA standardised
the size and weight of the ball.
Today there is a rich variety of golf balls to suit the individual
game and circumstance. Some offer control, some offer distance while others
are suitable for practice only.
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