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The fried egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.
Here's the take Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean lion of greenside bunker. You need to be aggressive on any shop weather it's sitting cleanly for its Friday egg.
Well, we've all faced it.
The dreaded Frida egg.
Not to be feared, though, it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit. When Harry Brown was eight years old, he lived in rural Pennsylvania. One day, at the end of a neighbor's driveway, he found a big pile of golf balls abandoned next to the trash. Harry didn't play golf. None of his friends played golf, but as eight year olds do, they found a use for Harry's discovery.
Yeah, we threw them at each other. We we hit them, We hit them with baseball bats. We treated them as any other kind of cool thing that you would find on the bottom of somebody's driveway, and just made do improvised right away.
Harry's eight year old mind was struck by the unique properties of the golf ball.
It was like a super ball. I couldn't figure out how an object that hard could have that lively abounce, have that much life that kind of interested me, and maybe that's what made me wonder unconsciously what was going on inside this thing that almost made it magical, like a piece of rock that behaved like a piece of rubber.
So one rainy afternoon, young Harry became bored enough to investigate. He picked up one of the golf balls and took it to his basement.
In the basement there was a hacksaw, and then there was a vice. Vice plus hacksaw plus golf ball equals. I wouldn't call it scientific, but I was just purely curious about what was going on inside this thing.
First, Harry put the ball in the vice and he began cranking.
As you can imagine, it started to compress and distort. As it became compressed, I kind of saw it had a plasticity that maybe he wasn't apparent when when you see it kind of rolling around in the street or in the fairway that it's it did compress like rubber.
It bulged out, but it didn't break open. So it was time for the hacksaw. And as he started cutting through the ball, just you know.
Layers and layers of wound rubber bands, you know, popping. It was It was kind of cool, obviously. I mean, as you saw and they pop, you know, the tension releases, it almost crackles.
This was a wound golf ball, of the type that skilled golfers preferred for much of the twentieth century. Underneath its firm white cover were rubber bands pulled tight around a core, and inside that core was liquid.
I didn't expect it to shoot water into my face, which it did so.
So all of that tension that the ball contained, that pent up power that made it so lively, was released, and what was left on the floor was just a dead lump of rubber threads and ballata. It was satisfying, and it also just weird, all this complexity inside something so simple. His mind started to race and make analogies.
It did seem to me immediately like a miniature planet, because on the surface, all you see is the surface. But then you cross section into it, like the way a textbook cross sections into a planet, and you see there's all kinds of things going on inside it.
About thirty years later, Harry Brown was an English professor at the Paw University, and he became fascinated once again with the nature of the golf ball, its ability to be both rock like and rubber like. It's plain skin and intricate guts. But now he was thinking about those traits of the ball like an English professor. He was reading them.
And then you can read these things going on inside it as a kind of language that tells the story, a code that tells the story of where the object came from. And then it becomes connected and embedded within a new network. It becomes disconnec from the network of playing the game of golf, and it becomes embedded in this new network of rubber and plastic and the factory that produced it, and the history that kind of leads up to that particular design.
In other words, once you cut a golf ball open, once you render it useless for golf, you begin to understand a lot more about it, what it's made of, where it came from, and what history produced it. This is Friday Stories. I'm Garrett Morrison. This episode is the first of three to take a closer look at the golf ball, to cut it open, so to speak, and
reveal all the weird complexity it contains. My hope is by understanding more about the golf ball, about its design, history, and impact on the game, we can understand more about golf itself. Each installment of the series will focus on a different revolution in golf ball technology. We'll start with the Guta percha ball, which appeared in the eighteen forties. It was one of the great turning points in golf history. As the historian Stephen Procter puts.
It, the single most revolutionary thing that has ever happened in the history of golf is the introduction of the gutty ball.
Not the single most revolutionary ball or piece of equipment, but the gutty, according to Stephen Procter, was the single most revolutionary thing that has happened in the history of golf, and in this episode we're going to try to figure out why. First, though, you have to know something about what came before the gutty, namely the feathery.
Yes, so a feather ball was made from mostly from cow hide, and it would be three little leaves, almost like an open flower. They would be sewn together from the inside so that the seams were on the inside and stuffed inside out, so there would be a little tiny hole left in it. Through that a workman would take a whole hatful of either duck down or goose down, usually wetted down some to make it easier to work with, and then stuff it in through the hole by hand.
Feathers would be flying everywhere. There was quite a bit of respiratory disease in these shops as a result of stuffing these balls all day. So once you got them all stuffed in there, jammed up, jammed up, jammed up so that it would create a tight enough fit to make the ball work, then you would sew the hole up and it would be painted white and left to age and dry for a week or two while it firmed up.
The result was an excellent ball. The feathery flew long and straight, surprisingly so for an object made of farm animals, and for over two centuries, from the early sixteen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds, it was the ball that serious golfers in Scotland used. But there were problems with the feathery. For one, an experienced workman could make only a few a day, which meant it was pricey.
A single feathery costs more than one of your clubs.
To make matters. Worse, featheries had a way of unexpectedly bursting open that meant to play frequently, you needed a lot of them.
They were really confined the game as far as proper golf goes. Golf with an actual ball like was used in the game to people who were super wealthy who could afford to buy multiple featheries.
So you could say the feathery determined the social structure of golf. At the top you had the wealthy gentlemen who played on the links at Saint Andrews and Musselborough. Then you had the professionals who caddied, repaired clubs and made featheries. And among these professionals were the finest players of the age, players like Alan Robertson and Old Tom Morris.
It was a very curious relationship. The gentlemen could not really function at golf without the professionals, but mostly they thought of them as ruffians.
Not Alan.
Alan was a shop owner, he was in a different class. But the men who worked for Alan, the men who caddied, you know, they were definitely considered low lifes by the rich men who they worked for.
So you had two classes, gentlemen golfers the workingmen who served them, And in that way golf was a mirror for Scottish society at large. Yet the game itself had a way of turning things upside down because on the links the professionals almost always had the upper hand on the gentlemen.
They were vastly superior at that age to any amateur player, and they could always humble them on the golf course, and that sort of created a little bit of an equilibrium that was pretty unusual class wise in that era. In other pursuits.
This was essentially the golf world that the feathery created. There were gentlemen and there were workingmen, but during the matches that social order could be upended, with the likes of Tom Morris taking control. It was a break from the status quo, but a safe and temporary one. When the match was over, the gentlemen settled their bets and the workingmen went back to work. That was golf until the gutty came along. Origin story number one. There was
a young man in Saint Andrews named Robert Patterson. He loved golf, but he couldn't afford a regular supply of featheries. Well. One day in the early eighteen forties, he received a box from Southeast Asia. It was from his brother a missionary. Inside was a statue of a Hindu deity, Vishnu, the preserver. All around the idol for protection were dark shavings. These turned out to be guttapercha, the dried sap of a
certain tree in Malaysia. It proved a useful substance. When it was hot, you could mold it into anything, but when it cooled it was firm and durable. Soon young Robert had an inspiration. He heated up some guttapercha, rolled it into a ball and took it out to the old course, and golf was never the same origin story number two. Listen, gutta percha was all over the place in the eighteen forties in Britain there were entire factories
devoted to producing guttapercha goods. Probably a bunch of factory thought of mashing the stuff into a golf ball around the same time Robert Patterson did, if not before, I mean that feels like what actually happened. Right either way, By eighteen fifty, virtually no featheries were being sold anymore. That was because the gutta percha ball, although it didn't go much farther, was a big improvement. In a couple of ways.
One was it was there was a certain instructibility about it which went right to the heart of the principal problem with the feathery. You know, the gutty very rarely burst apart. When it did, you could heat it up and you could mold it back together and roll it around in your palms and let it harden for a week or two, repaint it, and you'd be able to get it back into something like functioning order, which obviously was never possible with the feathery.
The gutty's durability wasn't just convenient, It also changed the way the game was played. Remember, featheries often broke, especially when struck by an iron headed club, so golfers used almost all wood headed clubs. But when the gutty arrived, that changed, and the best player of the time was quick to catch on.
You know, young Tom Morris was one of the very first people who realized, you know, you can just you can just use an iron on this ball, no problem.
And once the gutty allowed golfers to use irons as much as they wanted, they had access to a much greater variety of approach shots. Young Tom Morris took full advantage of these.
So there were two things that he did. One was, if you were in front of a bunker and you had to carry it to get to the green, you know, you couldn't hit a run up shot. Obviously, there was a wooden club they called a baffing spoon that was very highly loft, and you could hit with that, but it was very difficult to control the landing. Tommy learned the art of controlling the landing with the rud iron.
The red iron was small and roundish and had the loft of a modern wedge. Before it had been used mainly to get balls out of cart tracks, but with the more durable gutty, Tommy began to use the rud iron for all kinds of short lofted approaches.
And of course immediately everyone followed, and that was the very beginning of the use of iron clubs. The second thing he did is he carried a lofted driving iron in his bag that he had cut down the shaft on his father probably had in their golf shop. So he would bump the ball over rough ground in front of the green if he didn't have anything in front of him, and then master the art of making it stop a foot from the hole, and he was absolutely
deadly at that shot. And so those kinds of shots were the beginning of a whole revolution that extended them to mid iron. So then you would be developing what they would call a wrist shot, you know, and it would be a way of cutting the ball a little bit as you hit it up to the green so that we had a little side spin on it and stop when it landed. But it was just one thing following upon another, somebody else inventing something else.
All of this creative shot making represented a major departure from the previous generation of golfers, you know.
In the days before Tommy Alan Robertson. In his day, they played the type of golf you'd call palky that's a Scottish word that means cunning in wit or strategy usually, and what they would do is they would be maneuvering the ball right, left, whatever to stay away from the hazards the iron game, and Tommy in particular introduced the idea with to heck with the hazards, Let's go for the flag and if it lands someplace back, we'll get our red iron knocked it out.
The game. In other words became far more dynamic and aggressive.
That's all attributable to the Gutty. The Gutty made that possible.
But there was an even bigger set of changes that they got a perch, a ball set off you see before the Gutty, and we covered this earlier. Golf played on the links was limited mostly to gentlemen and those who caddied for them and sold them clubs and balls. But golf did exist outside of golf courses.
People played in the churchyard, people played on their street. People played golf wherever they were. That was the national pastime of Scotland. So they did play a form.
Of golf, and they played with whatever was at hand.
You know. They made balls out of wood, made them out of champagne corks. They did whatever they had to do to find a ball and a stick and play. But they didn't play the long game of golf, let's say. David Hamilton, wonderful historian in Saint Andrews, has a book called Scotland's Game in which he just points out that there are two types of golf in very early Scotland. The short game that you played wherever you could find a spot, and the long game played properly on the links.
That division, the long formal game versus the short local casual game was created in large part by the feathery, by how expensive it was, how brittle it could be. But the gutty was instantly different.
You know, a gutty cost half the price of a feathery, So that alone revolutionized the game more than almost any single event in its history from that day to this one. It really opened up the game to the masses for the very first time, they could go out and play proper golf, with proper equipment that they could afford to buy and own.
And that old split between the long and short games of golf began to break down.
And what happened is that anyone could now play the long game and the short game, of course, disappeared over time. So it brought many, many thousands of people onto the golf course from all walks of life. And that was probably the most revolutionary part about it, was the fact that anyone could buy it and now anyone could play, maybe.
Not literally anyone, but certainly the middle class. And in the mid eighteen hundreds the middle classes of Britain were expanding, So the gutty allowed a lot of people access for the first time to the official game of golf played on an official course.
And that starts a whole series of changes that are amazing and rippled down through the ages and fundamentally changed golf.
All right, So that's what the Guta percha ball did, but we haven't really talked about what it was. Well, first of all, the ball was made entirely of guttapercha, which is actually one of the most important materials in world history.
So one thing I will say to you is, please don't say that gutta percha is a type of rubber, because it's not. It's like saying hats are a type of dog, because they both happen to be fury animals.
That's ale In Godfrey, she wrote a book about gutta perche obviously knows a thing or two about it.
Well, it's a gum from trees that were basically called palaquiuan, which is a bit technical botanical terms, the Palaquiuan genets of the Sabatasi family.
That's a bit boring, isn't it.
These Pollaquium trees grew in specific parts of Southeast Asia, especially on the island of Borneo. In the eighteen forties, more and more Europeans were showing up in the region, competing for control of trade and natural resources. Natural resources like guttapercha. So it's no surprise that Robert Patterson's brother was in Singapore at the time and that he sent home a box padded with guttapercha. In fact, a great deal of got to purcha was traveling from east to
west back then. Soon factories in Britain were manufacturing all sorts of gutta purcha based products.
Just about everything you could possibly think of, bit to frames, jewelry, soles of shoes. So basically what we would these days make out of plastics, you know, using a term loosely, people would make out of gota percha.
What do you think it was about got to purchase that made it so adaptable and so appealing for so many different uses.
I think partly because you could mold it into any shape you like, which because you can't do with the rubber because it's sort of too flexible, and there wasn't anything else much.
You could mold. And you know, some of the things they made I think.
Were quite attractive because because it sets hard, you know you could get a very sharp finish.
Basically, the same traits of gutta percha that suited it to golf balls malleable when hot yet firm when cold, also suited it to many other things, including what was maybe the biggest infrastructural project of the age.
I wonder if I could insulate some telegraph tables with this.
The telegraph was a recent invention. It promised near instant communication between different parts of the world, which was a new idea and incredibly radical. But for there to be an international telegraph network, there had to be a great number of undersea telegraph cables, and those cables had to be insulated with a material that was pliable yet strong.
And so the extra strength of guttaperchain meant that you could make a stronger telegraph cable and it wouldn't bend and stretch and twist and break and all.
That sort of thing.
The British industrial machine kicked into overdrive.
I'll say the first successful international telegraph cable was probably the one cross the English Channel in eighteen fifty one, so it wasn't very long.
What's that twenty miles or something.
By nineteen oh three, when the longest ones had been laid.
I think the world total was about.
Two hundred and thirty thousand nautical miles. Wow, so that's about enough.
To go from the Earth to the moon and halfway back again. And all of that's coated with gut a purchase.
So one of the calculations made at time was that's twenty seven million trees.
It's worth taking a moment here to describe how guttapercha was extracted. The indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia did the work, and it wasn't easy. They were chopped down a Paloquim tree, cut strips into the bark and let the gums slowly drip into a container. After a day or two, they'd collect what they had and boil out the impurities. Then they'd mash it all together, twist it into a rope and ship it off.
So that was basically how it was really for I would say about seventy years, all of those twenty seven million trees worth a gutta perchure, we're pretty much all done by chopping it down and doing it like that, which is just just even now, after however many years, I still cannot believe that that was done. The labor involves in doing that. I don't know whether you've ever been to Borneo, but it is bloody hot and steep and dangerous.
How much would you get out of one tree?
Not much, is the answer. Maybe as little as half a pound, which is not much.
Oh I think.
If you've got a pound from a tree, he'd be pretty happy, very actually.
Another historian, John Tully, has claimed that this method of producing got to purchase caused a quote unquote Victorian ecological disaster.
It's a good name for a.
General article, but Helen Godfrey isn't so sure about that.
I don't think it ruined the ecology of the region at all. I think it had an impact in the immediate area. But was it significant personally? I don't see how it could be.
What's not in question, though, is the extent of the impact that got a purchare and got appurchare telegraph cables had on history. How did the telegraph reshape the world? What would be the first place that you would go in describing the impact that the telegraph had just on life in the world.
Well, it's one of those how long's a piece of string questions? It's just unimaginable because They used to say at the time that the telegraph annihilated time and space. In those days, the quickest way you could get information from someone was probably by railway. So if you wanted to send a message to someone from say, I don't know, New York to Los Angeles, it would have taken days, wouldn't it if you were lucky, whereas a telegraph could
do that in minutes. It's just unimaginable the difference. And there was a story I read somewhere about what was the war America fought with England in about eighteen twelve twelve. Many people in fact died in that war after the war was over because they didn't know the war had finished, whereas had they had telegraphed.
I guess, guys, you don't have to worry.
About killing yourself now because actually we're finished. But multiply that thousands and thousands of times over. How do you say what the impact was, because we just just I don't know.
People at the time often referred to telegraph cables as the nerves of the modern world. So I guess Gutta purcha was the connective tissue of this new global economy, an economy that somehow brought the rainforests of Borneo into contact with the urban factories of Europe and with the pastoral links of Scotland, and that is what the Gutta Percha ball was made of. So it's fun to make
all these connections, but do they mean anything. One take would be that by embracing Gutta percha, golf became complicit in imperialism, but that might be a stretch. The production of the gutty ball was just a tiny fraction of the overall Gutta purcha trade. Yet golf did become part of the story of an industrializing, globalizing world in the mid eighteen hundreds, and not just like metaphorically. There were telegraph companies that actually made Gutta purchase golf balls as
a side hustle. So here's how I've started to think about it. Golf likes to imagine itself as a kind of isolated realm. We've got our values, we've got our customs, and whatever's happening in the outside world, the game stays constant. In reality, though that outside world is continually seeping into the game, and one of the main cracks that seeps through is the golf ball.
Go to a golf museum and put three balls on the table in front of you.
Right, that's Harry Brown again, the kid with the hacksaw.
Get a feather ball, a gut to perch a ball, and then anything made basically since the sixties of the seventies, a poly you're athane ball. Just ask yourself a simple question, where do the materials to make the ball come from? And who makes them? And how is it made? So put those balls on the table and you can see them as products of three major phases of economic development over the last say three hundred years maybe more.
First, the feathery phase.
Ball made of farm animals essentially represents a pastoral or a pre industrial phase of global economic history where you didn't have to go to the other side of the world to harvest sap from a tree to make the ball. You just went outside into your barnyard and collected the raw material there.
Second, the gutty phase.
The imperial phase, the industrial phase. So you may have a kid in Scotland playing golf in a kind of heroic individual way, but the thing that he's playing with originates in Southeast Asia on the other side of the planet and comes to him in Scotland as the result of a globalized colonial economic system.
Third, the phase we're living in right now.
The post industrial phase where you have a chemical company, so not a rubber factory, but a chemistry laboratory, right, which is these aren't tinkers, right, these are scientists who are like making things to kind of like propel the Cold War. The objects that are being used to explore space. And they also happen to be working with a material that's now being also used to craft golf balls.
So you have the feathery, the gutty, and the modern synthetic ball. Each of those represents a different time in a different world. You start on an eighteenth century farm, you move to a nineteenth century factory that gets its materials from a global imperial network, and eventually, by the mid twentieth century, you end up in space. At each of those moments, the ball has gathered up the stuff of the world, brought it into golf and transformed golf
in the world's image. Think about the gutty. It was made of the very material that joined together a new global industrial society, a society where the middle class was emerging and growing. And what did the Gutty do. It made golf available to the middle class. So the golf ball is a kind of vector. It sucks up history and carries it into the game for better for worse. But there is one ball that's missing from Harry's timeline. About a half century after the Gutty came the Haskell.
And if the Gutty changed who could play golf. The Haskell changed something about the game's very essence. That's next on Frida Egg Stories. This was the fifth episode of Fried Egg Stories. It was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, and it was edited and engineered by Jay Vierick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Big thanks to our guests for this episode. As it turns out, all three
have books. Stephen Proctor wrote Monarch of the Green, a biography of young Tom Morris, Helen Godfrey wrote Submarine Telegraphy and The Hunt for Gutta Percha, and Harry Brown wrote golf Ball, which is part of Bloomsbery's Object Lessons series. Links for all three are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.