Golf Equipment

Golf is an easy game to comprehend and for all players, amateur, professional, hack handicapper or beginner, there is the supreme thrill of that one perfectly struck shot which soars over the intervening bunkers and settles within two feet of the hole. This opinion of golf is not universal. Mark Twain referred to golf as a way of spoiling a good walk; someone else said that it was a futile game: "hitting little balls with little sticks into little holes".

It is worth pausing at this point to look in detail at the equipment used in the game of golf. As it improved and changed so did the game and the rise in popularity of golf at the end of the nineteenth century can largely be attributed to the introduction of new materials and the impact of mass production.

The first really important item of equipment in the first two hundred or more years of the game was the golf ball, or "feathery", which replaced the first primitive balls made from iron, wood and lead. The feathery was made from three pieces of hide stitched together with waxed twine, turned inside out and then stuffed with boiled goose feathers which were inserted with the help of a long iron brogue with a wooden cross handle, which the ball maker used to press against his chest to exert more pressure. When the ball was roughly round, the last stitches were put in and it was knocked into final shape with a heavy hammer and left to dry. After two days the feathers expanded and the leather contracted, and the result was a hard round ball which was rubbed with oil to make it water­proof and chalk to make it more visible. Featheries were expensive to make and were sold for two shillings and sixpence each, with the finest being made by the Gourlays of Musselburgh and priced at four to five shillings. For many years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to play with a Gourlay ball. But the output remained small and the price high, and they disappeared almost overnight when the gutta­percha, or "guttie", ball appeared in 1848.

The guttie was invented by a St Andrews clergyman, Robert Adam Paterson, who received a statue of Vishnu from India which had been packed in gutta-percha for safety. He discovered that gutta could be cut into pieces, softened in boiling water and then rolled into a ball which hardened as it cooled. He promptly took out a patent and sold the manufacturing rights to a London firm. Balls made of gutta-percha cost about a quarter the price of a feathery golf ball and they became the first mass-produced golfing item. The demise of the feathery and rise of the guttie helped to spread the popularity of golf throughout the world. There were problems with the original guttie balls as at the time aerodynamics was but imperfectly understood. It became apparent that they flew much better when they became scratched and scuffed, and it then became the practice to hammer markings on to the ball before they were sold.