What is a Golf Ball?

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What is a Golf Ball?

In order to play a round of golf you need a golf ball. It is helpful therefore to know something about Golf Balls and their history.

The first golf balls, back in the fourteen hundreds, were made out of hardwoods such as beach, yew and boxroot. These wooden golf balls were used until the sixteen hundreds when featherie Golf Balls were invented. The featherie was made by stuffing wet feathers into a leather ball, when the feathers dried they expanded and the leather shrank which combined to create a compact hard ball. There were problems with the featherie, the method of production was slow, only two to four could be made per day by one man, and this made the golf balls expensive, so much so that some Golf Clubs cost less money than the golf balls. The balls were not always perfectly round and often lopsided making it more difficult to play. The featherie golf balls would become unplayable in the wet as the balls would go soggy as they absorbed the water. For its many faults the featherie was the only type of golf ball available for two hundred and fifty years until the invention of the Guttie in 1848.

In 1843 William Montgomery introduced Gutta-percha, a natural resign, to the west. He demonstrated that gutta-percha was able to maintain a tough form after having been heated and moulded. In 1848 the Reverend Dr Robert Adams Paterson developed the first golf balls made from Gutta-percha. The golf balls became known as the Guttie or Gutty. The Guttie transformed the game. These golf balls were at first hand made smooth and round. It was discovered that perfectly smooth balls didn’t travel as far as dinted and scratched used balls travelled so people started to hammer imperfections onto new balls. These golf balls were called hand hammered Gutties. Before the end of the nineteenth centaury around 1890 Guttie golf balls were made in iron moulds with built in pimples that resembled brambleberries.

In 1898 Coburn Haskell invented a solid rubber core wrapped in rubber threads with an outer coating of Gutta-percha. The outer cover of Gutta-Percha was replaced by Balata, a similar substance but a lot cheaper.  By 1908 the dimple golf ball was introduced, this gave average golfers an extra 17 yards distance off the tee.

Today golf balls still have a dimple outer skin but today’s golf balls are generally multi-layered. Advancement in technology has meant that the governing bodies of golf have instigated rules and regulations that limit the size and weight of golf balls and the distance golf balls can travel.