by Noel Callaghan
Over the the years the tennis ball has passed many stages before we got to the modern shape and material we use today. Historians recorded that the history of the tennis ball dates back to the 1300s when French people started to play.
The game was known as Jeu de Paume meaning “palm game”, with Paume being one of the country’s most favorite pastimes.
At that time the game was much different from our modern tennis. The ball used was made up of wood, but later people used leather and sawdust as filling material. The purpose of using sawdust was to add bounce.
In the early 1870s lawn tennis arose in Britain through the pioneering efforts of Walter Clopton Wingfield and Harry Gem, often using Victorian lawns laid out for croquet. Wingfield marketed tennis sets, which included rubber balls imported from Germany.
After Charles Goodyear invented vulcanised rubber, the Germans had been most successful in developing vulcanised air-filled rubber balls. These were light and coloured grey or red with no covering. John Moyer Heathcote suggested and tried the experiment of covering the rubber ball with flannel, and by 1882 Wingfield was advertising his tennis balls as clad in stout cloth that were made in Melton Mowbray.
In the 1920s, the balls were pressured to get greater bounce and faster speed and at this time this was a huge innovative step. Nowadays the tennis balls are manufactured in factories but are still made by using vulcanised rubber, however the ball is now covered with felt.
Before 1925, tennis balls were sold in bags and cardboard boxes. Tennis balls were first sold in cylindrical moisture-proof cardboard tubes in 1925, when the Wilson-Western Sports Company came up with the idea. In 1926, the Pennsylvania Rubber Company (Penn) released a new airtight sealed pressurised metal tube that held three balls with a church key to open the top. Not to be outdone a 1927 catalogue offers the Wilson balls in a “new patented airtight metal tube”, it's interesting that both Pennsylvania and Wilson produced cans with “Patented July 20, 1926” listed at the bottom of their cans.
Today the standardisation of the tennis ball is controlled by the ITF. The modern ball should have a diameter of between 2.575 inches and 2.7 inches. They should also weigh no less than 56 grams, and no more than 59.4 grams. The only colours approved for competitive play are yellow and white.
The year was 1972 when the standard ball changed from white to ‘flourescent yellow’ only because after a study it showed that this was better for television coverage. Wimbledon, however wanted to stick with tradition, but after 108 years of history, they surrended to the yellow ball in 1986.
Today there are over 200 different brands of tennis balls with over 350 million sold worldwide each year.
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