Penfold Golf and The Roaring ‘30sĪlbert Penfold spent the 1930s commuting between New York and the UK., building his businesses in both countries. 44 th Street (which later moved to 11 Park Place) and hired sales reps to cover the States, Canada and the Caribbean. Despite the Great Depression, Penfold opened a sales headquarters in Midtown Manhattan at 67 W. So, in 1932, armed with an arsenal of dimpled balls, Penfold came to the U.S. That made it perfect for the manicured fairways of America. But holding on to the lattice patent proved prescient, as a British court ruled in Penfold’s favor in 1931.ĭimpled balls had a lower, flatter carry and more roll compared to the lattice ball. Penfold wound up getting sued over the lattice ball by his old employer, Dunlop. Penfold found the lattice balls fared better in the UK with its damper climate and softer fairways because they carried considerably farther.Īnd if you think golf ball lawsuits started with Titleist, Callaway and Bridgestone suing each other in the 2000s, think again. He experimented with a variety of shapes, depths and patterns, settling on making balls with dimples and other balls with a lattice-type marking, which he had patented.
Penfold’s other area of expertise was with dimples. The best golf balls of the day had roughly 2,000 pounds of internal pressure. His method maximized the tension of the rubber thread and prevented too many loops of that thread from crossing at the same point. First, he developed a proprietary technique for winding rubber thread around the cores of his golf balls as well as the machinery with which to do it. Examination followed the demonstration and the Penfold test ball was found to conform to the letter of the restricting specification.” – Golfdom Magazine The Penfold Advantage Other Penfold balls gave identical results.
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When the selected driver hit the first Penfold-designed ball, it carried far beyond the furthermost markers. “The first test of the Penfold production was held on a Sunday prior to the British Open Championship on a course near St Andrews. Penfold quietly told his peers he could make a ball to those very specifications that would still outdrive any other ball. The R&A devised a specification that would restrict ball flight and gave it to all the ball manufacturers in the UK so they could develop prototypes. Apparently, these professionals with their newfangled steel shafts were socking the ball too bloody far and making classic courses obsolete. In the early 1930s, the R&A was on a crusade to curb distance.
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Open field by 15 strokes (how Titleist still beat NIKE to the punch with the Pro V1 is another of golf’s great what-ifs). What would you call a ball that conforms to all the Rules of Golf but blows away the field in distance? In 2000, that would have been the NIKE Tour Accuracy Tiger used to smoke the U.S. It’s here where the story gets more interesting. He set up a factory on Bromford Lane in Birmingham, England. By 1927, Penfold struck out on his own and started Golf Ball Developments Inc. Two years later, Penfold developed and patented a tennis ball manufacturing method to keep balls from going flat.
Within three years, he developed the very first golf ball to carry the name Maxfli. That patent would eventually play a huge role for Penfold.īy 1919 Penfold had taken his talents and patents to the Dunlop Company. He started piling up patents for Silvertown almost immediately, retaining the rights to one, for a lattice-type dimple marking.
It was a smash hit, and Penfold was named director of golf ball development for Silvertown in 1911. Penfold developed a way to make a pure-white gutta-percha ball. The gutta-percha was the ball of choice back then and the common “gutty” was a dull gray and hard to find, even on the fairway. His first breakthrough came while working for the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, commonly known as the Silvertown Company. A natural scientist, Penfold was a rubber savant responsible for some of the biggest innovations in golf.
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