Balls and Rackets
Balls
Balls today are made by real tennis professionals and look similar to lawn tennis balls. Other than their shape, they would be unrecognisable to early tennis players who used their hands.
When tennis was originally played with hands and off the sides of buildings, a smaller, lighter ball was used. Best practice at the time seems to have involved a tough leather cover surrounding a core made of compacted wool or hair (dog’s hair usually, although there is a hint in Shakespeare that human hair was used: Much Ado About Nothing III.2.43-44, “the old ornament of his [Benedick’s] cheek hath already stuffed tennis balls.”).
Originally France was the primary ball manufacturer, although the quality of French balls had declined by 1480 when Louis XI pronounced that contaminants such as sand, sawdust, moss and earth were not to be used in the core.
In 1598 Sir Robert Dallington observed that French balls had started to be covered in cloth, not leather which was still the preferred method in England at the time.
The introduction of vulcanized rubber in the 19th century was a landmark event for tennis as it allowed balls to bounce much higher, even on grass, and enabled the birth of lawn tennis.
Uncovered Ball
Dunlop Ball
In the 1970s Dunlop produced tennis balls to deal with a shortage in professionals and handmade balls. The use of rubber made these balls temperature dependent and caused some surprising bounces and machine manufactured balls disappeared as more professionals produced more handmade balls.
Rackets
It was not until the 16th century that rackets became standard in tennis. In the sport’s early days a bare hand was used. A glove was added to provide more protection, and then cords or tendons were stretched across the palm as is done with a violin bow.
(There is an early mention of “raket” in Chaucer’s 14th century Troilus and Criseyde, although there is no conclusive evidence that this does not refer to dice.)
Early rackets were primitive tools with short handles. When the King of Castile visited Henry VII at Windsor In 1506 he played tennis against the Marquess of Dorset. The King had a racket and as a result gave a meagre handicap of 15 to the racket-less Marquess.
In 1522, Erasmus records a pun in his Colloquies:
Nicholas: We shall sweat less if we play with a racket [reticulum]
Jerome: Let us leave the net [reticulum] to fishermen. It is finer to use one’s hand
Perhaps the net pun works because rackets had such loose strings, which were probably made out of sheep’s gut at the time.
By the end of the 16th century, rackets were common place, although they would evolve much more than the ball over the coming three centuries.
By 1767 and François de Garsault’s The Art of the Tennis-Racket-Maker and of Tennis, rackets have a handle of the length we would expect today. Garsault’s racket is strung in an archaic way since the horizontal strings wrap around each vertical string. Only in the 19th century did the weave pattern still used begin.
Grays of Cambridge was founded as H.J.Gray and Son in 1855, although it faced much more competition at the turn of the 20th century than at the turn of the 21st through to today.
A selection of 17th century rackets
Grays Racket
The 20th century saw substantial changes in the design of the racket through technological advancement. A single ash hoop was replaced by ash, hickory, vulcanised fibre and willow laminations, while adhesives made the use of a nail in the throat of the racket redundant. (Experiments with graphite frames proved too brittle and have in any case now been outlawed.)
The addition of synthetic strings to sturdier frames has allowed much more tension to be put into the strings and has resulted in much more powerful rackets. Real tennis has thus evolved into a quicker and much more hard hitting game.