Hard wooden round balls were the first golf balls used between the 14th through the 17th centuries.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 ball was then finished off by painting it and punched with the ball-makers mark. 
After that 'Guttie' balls were used. 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 fashioned into a sphere and used as a golf ball.
By the late 1890s, a new type of golf ball had been created, by accident, by a visitor to B.F. Goodrich's rubber goods manufactory. A guy named Coburn Haskell had a golf date with Bertram Work, a Goodrich superintendent, and while Haskell was waiting for his buddy in the factory, he idly wound a bunch of rubber bands into a ball shape—and by bouncing it, discovered it contained a high amount of potential energy. Work and Haskell subsequently skinned the invention with the sap from a Balata tree, and the guttie became obsolete.
By the 1960s Balata and rubber was done away with and replaced with urethane skins and synthetic resin cores.
The reason why golf balls have dimples is a story of natural selection. Originally, golf balls were smooth; but golfers noticed that older balls that were beat up with nicks, bumps and slices in the cover seemed to fly farther.
Aerodynamicist looked at this problem and realized that the nicks and cuts were acting as "turbulators", they induce turbulence in the layer of air next to the ball. In some situations, a turbulent boundary layer reduces drag.
A golf ball usually has anywhere from 330 to 500 dimples - depending on which company designs the ball.
No comments:
Post a Comment