It will be seen here that Sir Ralph continued with the ball sent by me to him, the experiment, which I had started, as it was my intention to proceed from a ball as nearly as could be, smooth, towards the present exaggerated ball, by the least possible steps, so that the moment that I had arrived at a ball so marked that it would not give me any extra carry, I should desist at once.
Sir Ralph's summing up is as follows. He says: "From such practical tests it is evident that the surface of a golf ball is far too rough, and that it would fly with more accuracy and farther, especially with a head or a side wind, had it much less numerous and prominent markings on its cover." This is exactly what I contended for in my original article on the subject, and it is exactly what has to be realised by the makers of the golf ball of the future. Many of the balls which are now being produced with the dimple marking are moving in the right direction, but they still have the grave errors of bad centre of gravity and excessive marking. When these two matters have been adjusted we shall have a very much better ball.
It will be interesting now to refer to the results which Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey obtained when he fitted his catapult with an arm provided with an enlarged head similar in shape to the head of a golf driver. Sir Ralph says:
This striking arm hit the ball away just as it is hit by a golf club. The ball I suspended by gossamer silk from the projecting beam of a little gallows fixed over the engine, and so positioned that the enlarged upper end of the arm struck the ball fair and true and with its full force and at the same angle every time.
I was not present when Sir Ralph made these experiments. He, however, was kind enough to send me a copy of his most interesting work entitled The Projectile Throwing Engines of the Ancients. This book gives many illustrations of the catapults used by the Romans and others.
I find it somewhat difficult to follow Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey when he says: "This striking arm hit the ball away just as it is hit by a golf club," for it seems to me that as the ball was suspended above the striking face of the club which was fixed to the upper end of the arm, that the arc described by the arm of the catapult would be exactly opposite to that described by the head of the golf club, and it is of course conceivable that this would in some way affect the carry of golf balls struck by the machine in this manner.
I need not, however, go into that here, for whatever the results obtained by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey were each ball was hit in exactly the same manner, and therefore we have, in so far as regards distance and the effect of the side wind, fairly accurate comparative tests. Sir Ralph says: "Though I could not obtain the same length of carry by making the engine strike the ball as I could when the ball was thrown by it—not by about fifteen yards—yet the individual results in distance and in deviation with a side wind exactly corresponded with the behaviour of the various balls when they were thrown and when carries of from 180 to 200 yards were obtained from them."
Sir Ralph found that in this experiment the carry of the guttie was invariably about eighteen yards shorter than that of the ordinary rubber-cored balls. He therefore carried out an interesting experiment by fixing a pad of rubber on the face of the head of the arm, and the guttie, when struck by this, travelled as far as any of the balls. He found, as I have previously indicated, that of the rubber-cored balls the small one carried the shortest distance when struck by the engine, and he found also that its length of flight was not increased by using the rubber pad. This, of course, is what we might have expected.
There is one very interesting matter which Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey notes. He says: "Another curious thing, the ball with the most untrue centre of gravity usually made one, and occasionally even two, swerves in the air when hit against the wind, though this eccentricity in its line of flight was less noticeable when it was thrown from the engine." This is a very interesting statement to anyone who devotes attention to the flight of the ball, and it goes very far indeed to confirm my own impression that the double swerve of the golf ball which I have noticed so frequently, is produced by defective centre of gravity.