The Spirit of the Links

by Henry Leach

II

It should be said that, while the Professor played a little golf himself, and was much in love with St. Andrews as a resort, what led him in the first place to make his investigations was watching the play of his famous golfing son, Fred Tait. A few idle, fanciful conjectures on the flight of the ball that was sent skimming through the air from Freddie’s driver led to a more serious calculation, and then, like a siren, the great mystery of golf drew him on. But early in his investigations he committed himself to the statement that nobody could drive a golf ball that would have a carry of more than 180 or 190 yards without exerting at least three times the strength that is generally exerted by a strong man when driving; that is to say, that a carry of such distance was practically impossible. But this statement was no sooner before the public than young Fred proved the fallacy of it, by celebrating his twenty-third birthday by driving a record ball which had considerably more carry than that.

“Stuff! Humbug!” said the Professor; but the fact was there, and when the golf world came to know about it, they asked the Professor what was the use of all his calculating—and to this day that error is chiefly what is remembered by the general public about his investigations. This incident may have been largely responsible for the fact that thereafter he only once or twice let the golfers into the secrets of what he was doing and had found out, reserving the story of his investigations for learned bodies who were most closely concerned about them.

The mistake that he made, which was exposed to him by his son, set him out on a new line of thought, and showed him vaguely where his error was, though not the nature of it. And the discovery which he made at the outset was a startling one, and it may cause some astonishment to the player of to-day who will reflect upon it for a moment. The steadiest, most constant, and most persistent force with which we are generally acquainted is the force of gravity. It is always there; it acts unceasingly upon everything. To defeat gravity, therefore, is almost for a while to suspend the working of Nature. Suddenly it burst upon the mind of the Professor that the golf ball was made as it were to defeat gravity, and so in a sense it does. He found this out by observing the time of flight of the ball, and discovering that it was nearly twice as long as it ought to be, if gravity had free and unfettered play. This is to say, that if gravity were allowed to act in the usual way on the ball from start to finish, as it acts on other things, it was quite inevitable by all the laws of nature and science that a drive of 200 yards would be completed in three and a half seconds. If a man threw a ball so as to describe as nearly as possible the same trajectory as a golf ball, and to stop at the same spot, it would only take three and a half seconds. But the golf ball takes six and a half seconds! Somehow or other it was clear that gravity was being beaten all the way. If it were not so, it would be impossible for the golf ball to remain in the air so long while it was accomplishing such a short flight. That was the great mystery that the professor had to solve, and he solved it at last. It may be said here, in passing, and will be more fully explained another time, that he found out that it was due to the rotation given to the ball by the club, and the nature of the stroke when it was struck from the tee, a rotation which in many ways was responsible for some most extraordinary happenings; all of which the golfer will be a much wiser man for having knowledge of. But before he could go thoroughly into the mystery of this rotation he had to make many other preliminary investigations, and some of the results of these may be quoted.

One of the Professor’s first efforts was in the direction of finding out the speed with which the ball left the club; and it was a long time—years, in fact—before he came to any definite understanding on the point; so difficult did he find the investigation, despite all the experiments he made, the formulæ that he applied to them, and the scientific instruments that he brought to bear on the problem. He had a very capable observer, Mr. T. Hodge, making examinations of the flight of balls driven in actual play at St. Andrews, by the help of the instrument known as the Bashforth Chronograph, with which the speed of bullets is measured; and, what with the results arrived at in this way and others, he came to the conclusion that the initial speed of the ball was over 500 feet a second, which speed, of course, was lost very quickly as the resistance of the air was encountered.

With this as his starting-point, he made many deductions; but subsequently he found that he was wrong in the original assumption.

A vast number of calculations and experiments followed. In a cellar he constructed a complicated pendulum arrangement, to the bob of which there was attached a large screen with a thick clay surface, and against this he got several well-known golfers to drive their hardest, and made the most minute calculations as to the effect upon the pendulum. The clay was scattered in all directions, damage was done, and the golfers complained that under such circumstances they were not able to drive their best. The pendulum and the strangeness of the whole arrangement “put them off.” Some time afterwards he constructed an improved pendulum, the clay screen being fixed on to lengths of clock spring, and when this was placed in a doorway the golfers were again set to drive at it.

What with one thing and another the Professor at last came to the final and definite conclusion, that the ball started from the club at a speed, in the case of a good drive, of about 240 feet a second, but that in the case of exceptional balls it sometimes was as much as 300 or even 350 feet per second. This, of course, was with the gutta ball; and the resiliency and initial speed of the rubber-cored ball being certainly much greater, it is fair to believe that the average initial speed of a well-driven ball in these days is quite 300 feet a second; or, to put it in another way, over two hundred miles an hour. Great as this speed appears, it might be mentioned incidentally that the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a Maxim gun is generally about 2000 feet a second, or about seven times as fast.