New balls, please!
They say you can’t reinvent the wheel. Can you reinvent the ball?
29th June 2019
Wimbledon is here again and with two former world number ones — Andy Murray and Serena Williams — forming a dream-team in the mixed doubles, it promises to be a good year.
Players will serve up 54,250 balls during this year’s tournament, and after hearing that iconic phrase: ‘New balls, please!’ every few games we started thinking: is there anything new about tennis balls?
To see what’s new we need to understand what’s old, so a quick history lesson is in order…
Our story begins in a monastery in France over 1,000 years ago. The monks played a game called name je de paume, ‘game of the hand,’ in which they used their hand to hit a ball over a rope stretched across the courtyard, shouting Tenez! meaning ‘take this!’ as they served the ball.
Over several hundred years, the game grew in popularity, particularly among the aristocracy, and eventually made its way across the Channel where it was adapted by the nobility into an esoterically English version which became known as ‘Royal Tennis’ or ‘Real Tennis’.
Considering that the Tudors thought bleached white faces were sexy, bathing was optional and wearing a donkey-skin coat would cure rheumatism, it should come as little surprise that the rules, equipment and playing area of real tennis are absolutely bonkers. There are penthouses, galleries, a door, poops, bobbles, boomerangs and giraffes, with the game only won if the scrumhalf scores a birdie from the penalty spot before the wicketkeeper tickles the quarterback, or if Harry catches the Golden Snitch!
Back then, balls could be made of almost anything. There are examples of leather bags stuffed with sawdust, cork wrapped in cloth, a sheep’s stomach stuffed with wool (no prizes for guessing this one was found in Scotland), and even putty mixed with human hair.
Nothing changed for hundreds of years until Charles Goodyear’s famous mistake, when he accidentally combined rubber and sulfur on a hot stove, realising that not only did the rubber not melt, but that it actually got harder as the temperature increased. After the process was perfected and patented in 1844, vulcanised rubber became the key material in a wide range of industries including clothing, vehicle tyres and shipbuilding, and tennis balls were no exception.
When ‘Lawn tennis’ was codified in 1874 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, and when the first Wimbledon Championships were held in 1877, Indian rubber balls were an essential piece of equipment.
As can be seen in the Victorian advertisement above, tennis balls were not immediately standardised. Not until the 1920s do tennis balls become pressurised and covered with felt to optimise their aerodynamics. They also had to be stored in hermetically sealed cans or tubes so they didn’t lose their bounce.
And bounciness is indeed still tested — the International Tennis Federation has strict regulations that say any ball dropped from a height of 254cm (100 inches) onto concrete must bounce back between 135cm and 147cm, and must be tested under a uniform temperature of 20°C, 60% humidity and atmospheric pressure of 102kPa. Likewise, a tennis ball’s diameter must be between 65.41mm and 68.58mm and weigh between 56g and 59.4g.
In addition to bounciness, size and mass, since 1972 and the advent of colour TV, the colour of all tennis balls has been specified so as to increase their visibility for spectators.
There has been some debate over whether the official colour is Green or Yellow. It may not be as controversial as of the blue/black vs white/gold dress, or Yanny vs Laurel, but it has the Patently team divided (we had a quick vote in the office and had an exact 50%-50% split!)
What do you think? (and no cheating! Yellowy-green, greeny-yellow or chartreuse aren’t allowed)
If you said green, sorry you’re wrong. Officially the colour is ‘Optic yellow’.
Since the standardisation, there has been very little change in the sphere of tennis ball technology, but innovators have rallied fairly recently with a flurry of small improvements to keep the patent offices on their toes. Glow in the dark balls, weighted training balls, and balls with movement tracking tech have all been patented over the last few years. Interestingly, a Dutch company also had a shot at trademarking the smell of fresh cut grass for tennis balls in 1996; although, this application was eventually blocked for the lack of graphic representation.
Can the tennis ball be reinvented?
Is optic yellow really yellow?
Should smells be trademarkable?
Give us your thoughts! And, if you could follow us on social media, it would be ACE.
We have a lot more to say about tennis ball innovation and patents. For information on this and any other patent information study, please visit www.patently.com or email us at ask@patently.com.
