I
“The problem of the golf ball’s flight is one of very serious difficulty.” That is what was said to a gathering of savants by Professor Peter Guthrie Tait, one of the most brilliant scientists of the latter part of the last century, and the only man who has probed deeply into the real science of the game of golf. He was a wonderful man in many respects. He applied his marvellous scientific knowledge and powers of investigation to everything that came his way. One day he would be extracting cube roots from the most unsuspected quarters, and another he would be analysing the character and formation of the ripples on the surface of a viscous liquid. A few flourishes of the knife of science, a sharp explosion with one of his specially prepared formulæ—consisting of the most wonderful combinations of the ν’s, the γ’s, the τ’s, and the φ’s—and the common but stubborn thing of everyday life was made to yield up its innermost secrets, so that thenceforward it was regarded in a quite different way from that which it had been in the past.
Nothing was sacred from the application of the Professor’s science, and golf was not; but to the credit of the game be it said that some of its scientific problems baffled this great man of science as nothing else that he had ever tackled before so seriously had done. He spent weeks, months, and even years, in occasional periods, upon it; he employed the most intelligent men of science with marvellous powers of reckoning as his assistants, he bombarded the game with the most terrible formulæ that even he had ever invented; but golf still held the upper hand and retained some of its secrets, while it often smiled derisively at the Professor when it had sent him a long way along a false path. The Professor would not give up. He returned always to the attack, and golf and he came to closer grips. He did, indeed, obtain many wonderful secrets from its possession, and he found out more about it—all of it very wonderful and very interesting—than any man had ever done before, or possibly ever will do again. Now and again he told his learned brethren of the difficult nature of the task that he had entered on. Before he died he had found out most things, but golf still held some secrets from him.
Many of the things that he knew, and the way in which he found them out, were never published to the golfing world. He issued one or two papers of a quite popular character, and very elementary; but they did not contain a tithe of what he had discovered or say how he had discovered it. Here we will try to tell the golfer a little of what the Professor found out about the things that happen when the ball is driven from the tee. They will interest him, and perhaps cause him some surprise. Only those conclusions will be given which he proved beyond question, and the truth of them must generally be taken for granted, as it may be safely, since the professor’s lines of study would take a volume to expound with any lucidity, and even then a considerable scientific knowledge on the part of the reader would first of all be necessary.