Golf: Dimples made game smooth sailing

The humble golf ball is possibly the most mistreated object in all of sport.

It gets belted mercilessly, shanked into trees, dropped ignominiously into slimy water-hazards, blamed and cursed, and eventually discarded in dusty corners of suburban garages.

But behind its innocuously dimpled surface, the golf ball contains a world of history and science.

According to Golf Europe, the earliest balls were made of wood, with the first known reference to one dating back to 1550. However, some argue there is no evidence to support the assumption that wooden balls were the game's first.

Golf arguably derived from the ancient game of 'colf', which was played on ice in Europe's Low Countries. Colf balls were made of leather and stuffed with animal hair, and were imported into Scotland from the Netherlands in the late 1400s.

The modern golf ball was developed by an American, Corban Haskell, in the late 1800s. It contained an inner of wound rubber strands and had a dotted, uneven surface.

Over time, that uneven surface developed into the modern dimples we all know. Scientists Tom Veilleux and Vince Simonds note that standard golf balls have anywhere between 300 and 500 dimples, and that the depth of the dimples is usually around 0.25 millimetres.

The dimples aren't just an aesthetic quirk - they serve a critical aerodynamic function, and are as much a part of the game as clubs and caddies.

Veilleux and Simonds point out that if a professional golfer were to hit a perfectly smooth golf ball, it would travel only half the distance of a dimpled ball. The reason for this can be explained by physics - or more specifically, turbulence.

As a golf ball sails through the air, the front of it encounters high pressure. The air flows around the curved sides of the ball and eventually becomes separated from it. The air that trails the ball is known as messy air, in that it doesn't flow smoothly in the way the air slipping around the sides of the ball does. This messy air forms a 'turbulent wake', which acts as a drag on the ball.

The role of the dimples is to keep the smooth air on the ball longer, thus reducing the size of the wake and decreasing the amount of drag the ball encounters as it flies. The less drag there is on a ball, the further it travels.

One of the most recent developments in golf-ball technology has been the superseding of wound balls with solid-core balls, which were first developed in the 1960s.

Traditionally, professional golfers have favoured wound balls because they were easier to control and impart spin on. Solid balls travel further, though, and from around 2001 most professional players have converted to them. As a result, the professional game is seeing players hit ever-longer distances.

As interesting as all this is, and as far as the golf ball has come from its ancient origins, one problem remains for most weekend warriors - getting the thing in the hole.