History of the Golf Ball

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 cowhide 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. 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, sometimes more expensive than a club. Notable ball-makers of the 1600s were Andrew Dickson, Leith and Henry Mills, St Andrews .

The introduction of the Gutta Percha ball or 'Guttie' in 1848 by Rev Adam Paterson of St. Andrews and the spread of the railways directly contributed to the expansion 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 fashioned into a sphere and used as a golf ball. Not only could the ball be relatively cheaply produced, it could also be easily repaired by re-heating and then re-shaping. Initially Gutties had a smooth surface that meant that they didn't travel as far as the Featheries. The balls were usually stamped with the ball makers stamp, most notably Allan Robertson.

After 1880, gutties were produced with patterns on their surface in an attempt to reproduce the distance characteristics of a scored Featherie. With the Victorians came industrialization and mechanization, and by 1890 Gutties were being made in molds that further increased their affordability, consistency and quality. The most notable pattern of the period was the 'Bramble' - raised spherical bumps across the surface of the ball. Many of the rubber companies including Dunlop began mass-producing balls that killed off the handcrafted ball business.

In 1898, Coburn Haskell introduced the one-piece rubber cored ball that was universally adopted by 1901 after it proved so effective in the British and US Opens. These balls looked just like Gutties but 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. Once W. Millison developed a thread-winding machine, Haskell balls were mass-produced and therefore more affordable.