History of Golf Balls and Golf Clubs

The featherie ball was invented sometime around the early 1600s. Until this time wooden balls were used. A featherie is of painted cow-hide stitched shut; containing goose feathers.

This ball outperformed the wood variety and was the standard ball until the invention of the guttie in 1848. Dr. Robert Adams is the individual responsible for this inexpensive and aerodynamically superior ball.

Wound balls were the first multi-layered ball on the scene in the early twentieth century. These balls were once of a liquid or solid core wound up in rubber thread and coated with a thin shell. More advanced manufacturing techniques allowed manufacturers greater precision when designing and producing these balls. Today’s multi-layered balls employ a titanium core and a number of hybrid materials. The shell of the ball is softer these days than it was in the past. A golf ball of today will have two to four layers of synthetic material.

History of the Golf Club

Golf clubs have undergone a long evolution. In golf’s earliest days people used whatever was handy to fashion crude instruments to play. The first record of a special set of clubs comes from King James IV of Scotland, who commissioned a set in 1602. One year later the kingdom appointed its first royal club maker, William Mayne. These early golf clubs were wood, relatively fragile, and expensive to make. The first metal heads date to 1750, and in fact club makers were experimenting with a number of materials in an attempt to improve the effectiveness and durability of the clubs in a game. A new club, a ‘bulger’, was invented to cope with the new dynamics of the ‘guttie’ ball in 1848. These clubs closely resemble the woods of today.

It was sometime around 1900 when aluminum became the material of choice, and in 1902 E. Burr presented iron heads with grooved faces which increased the backspin of the ball. In 1929 clubs with metal shafts were allowed officially into the professional game. In 1939 the 14 club rule was introduced as was the convention of numbering clubs instead of giving names.

The putter was only permitted in professional golf in 1951, and the graphite shaft first made its way into the game in 1973. The most recent evolution in golf clubs is the Taylor-Made ‘metal woods’, which now supersede the ‘wooden woods’ in popularity. Today’s most expensive and sophisticated golf clubs utilize titanium heads and graphite shafts.