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.