WHY DO GOLF BALLS HAVE DIMPLES?
Golf balls haven’t always sported hundreds of tiny dimples. Originally, golf balls were smooth wooden balls, which evolved into feather-filled leather-sewn spheres called ‘featherie’ golf balls. Over time, golfers noticed that well-used balls travelled further than new ones. This was because with every strike of the golf club, balls were acquiring dinks and dents. In any other sport, old and damaged balls are quickly replaced, but it turned out that in golf, using battered balls can give golfers a great advantage. Unknown to early golfers, each dent was interrupting the airflow around a travelling ball and reducing the amount of aerodynamic drag it experienced. Drag is a force that opposes motion and reduces an object’s speed when it’s moving through air or a fluid. When a golf ball is struck and sent flying through the air, it separates the airflow around it, causing a vacuumous zone of drag in the area behind the ball to form. Dimples work to reduce the size of that zone, and therefore the amount of drag that slows the ball down. Less drag means the ball can fly further and faster before gravity takes hold and brings the ball back to the ground. Having discovered the benefits of dimples, in the early 1900s golf ball manufacturers began making them standard. Modern golf balls are designed and manufactured to exploit the aerodynamic effects of dimples, varying their size, shape, distribution and patterns on the ball.
DIFFERENT DIMPLES: The dimpled surface of the golf ball has gone through many iterations. In 1848, the gutta-percha ball sported inverted dimples and was covered in a pattern of protruding squares to minimise drag. In 1899, American inventors Coburn Haskell and Bertram Work patented a gutta-percha golf ball with a rubber core. Their design lasted until the early 1900s, when more robust plastics were being developed. Manufacturers found that balls with concave dimples would fly better than a gutta-percha ball. Although it might be hard to differentiate between modern-day golf balls, the number of dimples and the shape of dimples can differ.
Golf ball dimples are created by filling moulds with plastic around rubber cores
Do you know:
● The average golf ball dimple depth is 0.25 millimetres.
● A golf ball with dimples can travel almost twice as far as a smooth ball.
