The History of Golf Tees

The history of the golf tee dates back to the 1500?s.  The practice of getting sand wet with a towel and mounding up earth to get the ball off the ground a little went on for some 300 years.  The late 1800?s changed all that.  This is the history of the golf tee.

The original rules of golf from 1744 state that your ball must be teed from the ground.  Golfers were allowed to go within one club length of the original hole and use elements from the ground to tee it up.  As time went on the game grew and there was a need to separate putting areas from teeing grounds.  The first course to do this was St. Andrews when Old Tom Morris redesigned the course.  

You could imagine the mess you had with just creating one tee.  The wet towel and dirty hands gave way to the first golf tees.  Golfers where in search of reuseable tees.  Starting with paper then cork and rubber.  The world's first patented golf tee was invented by two Scots:  William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas.  Their patent document is dated 1889 and describes a small rubber plate with a raised ball support in the form of upright prongs or a hollow cylinder.  This tee sat up on top of the ground and became cumbersome in windy conditions.  There had to be a way to fix it to the ground.

The first invention to stop your ball from rolling away was the Perfectum. The Perfectum was patented in 1892 by Percy Ellis of Surrey, England.  It was made of an iron spike base and round rubber pegs to hold the ball in place.  The Perfectum was the first tee to be placed in the ground.  In 1897, Scottish inventor PM Matthews patented a tee called the Vector with a metal spike and rubber cup to hold the ball which further held the ball in place. 

The first really famous patent for a golf tee came from inventor Dr. George Grant.  A dentist from the Boston area and one of the first black graduates from Harvard Dental School, Grant invented the first American wooden golf tee.  The tee consisted of a wooden peg attached to a rubber tube with a cup on the top to hold the ball.  Grant designed the tee to be less rigid at the top and more stable at the bottom.   Grant didn't announce, promote, or sell his work and was unnoticed for a long time.  Although not the world's first golf tee Grant was credited by the USGA in 1991 as the original inventor of the wooden golf tee.

The first patented and marketed tee was invented by another dentist named Dr. William Lowell.  Dr. Lowell's patented Reddy Tee is the first modern golf tee.  The familiar one-piece wooden peg with hollowed out top became the standard even today.  Dr. Lowell even had golf great Walter Hagen advertising his invention.

Although there were many other golf tee inventions, these are the main ones.  Technology has brought golf a long way and the golf tee is no exception.  What's next for the golf tee?  It's all up to the Rules of Golf.

Early balls

It is commonly believed that hard wooden, round balls, made from hardwoods such as beech and box, were used for golf from the 14th through the 17th centuries. Though wooden balls were no doubt used for other similar contemporary stick and ball games, there is no definite evidence that they were actually used in golf in Scotland. It is equally likely, if not more so, that leather balls filled with cows' hair were used, imported from the Netherlands from at least 1486 onward.

Featherie

"Featherie" golf balls

Then or later, the featherie ball was developed and introduced. A featherie, or feathery, is a hand-sewn round leather pouch stuffed with chicken or goose feathers and coated with paint, usually white in color. A standard featherie used a gentleman's top hat full of feathers. The feathers were boiled and softened before they were stuffed into the leather pouch. Making a featherie was a tedious and time-consuming process. An experienced ball maker could only make a few balls in one day, so they were expensive. A single ball would cost 2–5 shillings, which is equivalent to US$10–20 today.

Guttie

Three old golf balls, from the 1919 book Fifty Years of Golf, by Horace Hutchinson

In 1848, the Rev. Dr. Robert Adams Paterson(sometimes spelled Patterson) invented the gutta-percha ball (or guttie, gutty). The guttie was made from dried sap of the Malaysian sapodilla tree. The sap had a rubber-like feel and could be made spherical by heating and shaping it in a mold. Because gutties were cheaper to produce, could be re-formed if they became out-of-round or damaged, and had improved aerodynamic qualities, they soon became the preferred ball for use.

Accidentally, it was discovered that nicks in the guttie from normal use actually provided a ball with a more consistent ball flight than a guttie with a perfectly smooth surface. Thus, makers began intentionally making indentations into the surface of new balls using either a knife or hammer and chisel, giving the guttie a textured surface. Many patterns were tried and used. These new gutties, with protruding nubs left by carving patterned paths across the ball's surface, became known as "brambles" due to their resemblance to bramble fruit (blackberries).

Wound golf ball

The next major breakthrough in golf ball development came in 1898. Coburn Haskell of Cleveland, Ohio, had driven to nearby Akron, Ohio, for a golf date with Bertram Work, the superintendent of the B.F. Goodrich Company. While he waited in the plant for Work, Haskell picked up some rubber thread and wound it into a ball. When he bounced the ball, it flew almost to the ceiling. Work suggested Haskell put a cover on the creation, and that was the birth of the 20th-century wound golf ball that would soon replace the guttie bramble ball. The new design became known as the rubber Haskell golf ball.

For decades, the wound rubber ball consisted of a liquid-filled or solid round core that was wound with a layer of rubber thread into a larger round inner core and then covered with a thin outer shell made of balatá sap. The balatá is a tree native to Central and South America and the Caribbean. The tree is tapped and the soft, viscous fluid released is a rubber-like material similar to gutta-percha, which was found to make an ideal cover for a golf ball. Balatá, however, is relatively soft. If the leading edge of a highly lofted short iron contacts a balatá-covered ball in a location other than the bottom of the ball a cut or "smile" will often be the result, rendering the ball unfit for play.

Addition of dimples

In the early 1900s, it was found that dimpling the ball provided even more control of the ball's trajectory, flight, and spin. David Stanley Froy, James McHardy, and Peter G. Fernie received a patent in 1897 for a ball with indentations; Froy played in the Open in 1900 at the Old Course at St. Andrews with the first prototype.

Players were able to put additional backspin on the new wound, dimpled balls when using more lofted clubs, thus inducing the ball to stop more quickly on the green. Manufacturers soon began selling various types of golf balls with various dimple patterns to improve the length, trajectory, spin, and overall "feel" characteristics of the new wound golf balls. Wound, balatá-covered golf balls were used into the late 20th century.

Modern resin and polyurethane covered balls

In the mid-1960s, a new synthetic resin, an ionomer of ethylene acid named Surlyn was introduced by DuPont as were new urethaneblends for golf ball covers, and these new materials soon displaced balatá as they proved more durable and more resistant to cutting.^[12]

Along with various other materials that came into use to replace the rubber-wound internal sphere, golf balls came to be classified as either two-piece, three-piece, or four-piece balls, according to the number of layered components. These basic materials continue to be used in modern balls, with further advances in technology creating balls that can be customized to a player's strengths and weaknesses, and even allowing for the combination of characteristics that were formerly mutually-exclusive.

Titleist's Pro V1, Taylormade TP5, and Callaway Supersoft exemplify modern advancements in golf ball aerodynamics. The Titleist Pro V1 boasts a tightly wound 388-dimple design, minimizing gaps between dimples for better aerodynamics. On the other hand, the Taylormade TP5 features a combination of circular and hexagonal dimples to reduce drag. Lastly, Callaway balls showcase a sleek, completely hexagonal design for straighter ball flights.

Liquid cores were commonly used in golf balls as early as 1917. The liquid cores in many of the early balls contained a caustic liquid, typically an alkali, causing eye injuries to children who happened to dissect a golf ball out of curiosity. By the 1920s, golf ball manufacturers had stopped using caustic liquids, but into the 1970s and 1980s golf balls were still at times exploding when dissected and were causing injuries due to the presence of crushed crystalline material present in the liquid cores.

In 1967, Spalding purchased a patent for a solid golf ball from Jim Bartsch. His original patent defined a ball devoid of the layers in earlier designs, but Bartsch's patent lacked the chemical properties needed for manufacturing. Spalding's chemical engineering team developed a chemical resin that eliminated the need for the layered components entirely. Since then, the majority of non-professional golfers have transitioned to using solid core (or "2-piece") golf balls.

The specifications for the golf ball continue to be governed by the ruling bodies of the game; namely, The R&A, and the United States Golf Association (USGA).