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Wooden Ball (550) 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. One documented reference is that of a John Daly playing with a wooden ball in 1550.
The Featherie (1450)
The year is 1452. In forty years Columbus will sail the great Atlantic ocean. Meanwhile in Scotland, James Melvill, a well known golf ball maker has petitioned King James IV to embargo the import of foreign golf balls called "featheries" from Holland. Melvill claims too much gold is leaving the country. History reveals that the golf ball was an important part of the economy of the town of St. Andrews. The art of ball making was held in high regard. Documents have been found recording a young lad was hanged for theft of a featherie. The average price of a ball was 4 shillings, our equivalent of about $1.75. The featherie was made of leather and feathers. The leather was cut into strips shaped like the petals of a flower. The strips were sewn together and the turned inside out to keep the seems inside the cover. A small hole opening was left and a "gentlemen's top hat full" of goose feathers by measure - that had been boiled and softened were painstakingly stuffed into the wet leather ball. When the ball dried the leather would contract and the feathers would expand. This shrinking and expanding effect gave the ball its hardness or compression. Finally several coats of white paint were applied. The Gutta-Percha (1880's) The first Gutta ball is believed to have been made in 1848 by Rev. Dr. Robert Paterson from gutta-percha packing material. Gutta-Percha is the milkey juice or latex produced from the Malaysian Sapodilla tree. It is hard and yet non-brittle. It becomes soft and malleable at a temperature of 212º Fahrenheit. gutta balls made under the name "Patersons Patent" were handmade by rolling the softened material on a board. The new durability of the "Guttie" along with its resistance to water, improved run had provided rejuvenation to the game of golf. The Hand Hammered Gutta (1880's) The gutta-percha ball greatly enhanced the enjoyment and popularity of the game. It was noted that after the gutta-percha ball had been "nicked" it seemed to fly truer and with more hang time. Thus, the hand hammered guttie was discovered. Like so many inventions the hand hammered guttie was an accident. Soon purposeful patterns were either hammered or molded into the guuta-percha. These marking were the predecessor of what we call dimples. The Bramble After 1880, gutties were produced with patterns on their surface in an attempt to reproduce the distance characteristics of a scored Featherie. With industrialization 1890's gutties were being made in moulds which further increased their affordability, consistency and quality. The most notable pattern of the period was the 'Bramble' - raised spherical bumps across the surface of the ball. Many of the rubber companies including Dunlop began mass-producing balls which killed off the handcrafted ball business. The Rubber Ball (1898) [beginning of the modern ball] 1. 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. Once W. Millison developed a thread winding machine, Haskell balls
were mass-produced and therefore more affordable.
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Only
in 1972, when Spalding introduced the first two piece ball, the Executive, was
the basic Haskell design improved upon.