Golf Balls

US based company, Spalding’s first move into the British game of Golf was relatively late. It was 1896 before a golfing item was included in the Spalding catalogue and even then it was only balls, imported from Britain. It coincided with the modern era of golf ball manufacture which started in 1905 when William Taylor of Leicester received a patent for a golf ball with a covering of ‘isolate cavities…substantially circular in plan’. This was applied to the Haskell Ball, a rubber cored ball that had been developed in 1898. Spalding became the first American manufacturer to license this and then introduced the first dimple balls to America in 1909 at $9 a dozen. This ball remained largely unchanged, albeit with minor modifications until 1968, when Spalding introduced the first two piece ball, the “Executive”. Spalding’s engineering team, had developed a chemical resin which eliminated the need for the former rubber wound balls with crystalline or liquid centres. Since this time, the majority of the world’s non-professional golfers still us the solid core (or “two-piece”) golf ball as developed by Spalding.