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Brief History
This flurry of legal wrangling isn’t new. Patent disputes have been a part of the game practically from when the first craftsmen started carving clubs out of hickory. Jeff Ellis, a noted club collector who wrote The Clubmaker’s Art, the definitive book on the history of golf equipment, says he has documented the first patent on golf equipment back to June 29, 1876, when Thomas Johnston of Edinburgh, Scotland, received a patent for a clubhead made from a very hard rubber substance, which Johnston called “vulcanite.”

Procuring a patent in those days was fairly easy. Most European patent offices handed out licenses without even researching whether a similar invention already had been claimed. In fact, during the late 19th century, when clubmakers in the United Kingdom were starting to meet the demand for the growing game, the patent process was a lot easier than playing the game itself.

“You just turned in your drawings, wrote your check and you were handed a patent,” Ellis notes. Many clubmakers simply filed an application, got a provisional number from the patent office, then engraved the number on each club.

“They would pretend they had patents when they didn’t,” says Ellis. “They figured that none of the other equipment companies would know that they hadn’t paid what it cost to complete the whole process. Even then, they realized the marketing value of having a patent on a club design.”

It wasn’t long before the legal wrangling crossed the Atlantic along with the equipment. In 1899 Coburn Haskell, an avid golfer from Ohio who was the shortest hitter in his foursome, visited playing partner Bertram Work, who managed a B.F. Goodrich Company plant in Akron, and saw a machine that could wind rubber strands into a ball. Haskell convinced Work to help him make a rubberized wound ball that he believed would fly farther than the featheries and gutta perchas that were still the norm.

Golfers loved the 25 extra yards they gained with Haskell’s wound ball, and rivals raced to match his design. Haskell sued all the copycats, but lost when a competitor solicited the testimony of Duncan Stewart of St. Andrews, Scotland, who held the first ball patent in the U.K. and was able to prove his own previous efforts at making wound balls. Still, the Haskell ball helped popularize the game in the U.S. and made its inventor very rich.
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