History of Golf Balls

In 1618 the feather golf ball or "Featherie" was introduced in Scotland, and replaced the wooden balls of former times. The Featherie was a handcrafted ball made with goose feathers tightly packed into a horse- or cow- hide sphere. The feathers and leather were rolled into a ball while wet. As the assembly dried out the leather shrank and the feathers expanded to create a hardened ball. The ball was then finished off by painting it and punched with the ball-maker's mark.

Quality varied according to the skill of the craftsman. Unfortunately, the handcrafted nature of the balls meant that they were priced beyond the pockets of the masses; indeed, a ball was sometimes more expensive than a club.

The introduction of the Gutta Percha ball or "Guttie" in 1848 by Rev. Adam Paterson of St. Andrews, along with the expansion of the railways, directly contributed to the expansion of the popularity of the sport of golf. The Guttie ball was made from the rubber-like sap of the Gutta tree found in the tropics. When heated, the rubber could easily be rolled into a sphere and used as a golf ball. Not only could the ball be more cheaply produced, it could also be easily repaired by re-heating and then re-shaping it.

Initially Gutties had a smooth surface which meant that they did not travel as far as the Featheries. The balls were, once again, usually stamped with the ball maker's stamp. As the Victorian Era progressed, industrialization and mass production advanced, and by 1890 Gutties were being made in moulds which further increased their affordability, consistency, and quality. The most notable pattern of this period was the "Bramble", which comprised patterns of raised spherical bumps across the surface of the ball.

Many of the rubber companies such as the famous Dunlop began mass-producing balls, killing off the handcrafted ball business. 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 U.S. Open tournaments. These balls looked just like the Gutties but they 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.

With the invention of a thread-winding machine, the Haskell balls became mass-produced and became the standard golf balls of the world. The current dimple pattern found on modern golf balls was developed through Haskell's continued experimentation with design and came into being in 1905. Spalding's Executive two-piece golf ball was the first improvement to be made to the Haskell dimpled ball and was produced for the first time in 1972.

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