What Was the First Tennis Racquet Made Of?

Most people never really give a second thought to any of the equipment they use in a given sport, but each piece, no matter how minor, has its own story of origin. And much like any apparatus you might employ in your favorite athletic pursuit, the tennis racquet has a somewhat interesting tale to tell.

  1. Theories/Speculation

    • Historians have long said that the game of tennis actually dates as far back as the eleventh century. To see it played at the time, however, you'd never even remotely guess it was the popular pastime of today. Instead of racquets, competitors simply used their bare hands to bat a ball over a very rudimentary net. Obviously, the sport has seen some changes, but, for all intents and purposes, the very first racquet was essentially made of five fingers and a palm -- the hand.

    Features

    • As popularity of the game increased, tennis was quite quickly met with so-called "improvements," as the mode in which the ball was struck evolved from the then-standard bare hand to the gloved method. This soon gave way to even further developments to the sport where basic netting was sewn into the glove itself. Even then, players were looking for an edge to beat their competition. Some things never change, do they? This, of course, would give birth to not the racquet as we know it, but more of a paddle, which would soon morph into the tennis racquet.

    Identification

    • The first "official" tennis racquet was made of wood and the strings of natural gut, dried fibers of either the intestines of a cow or the intestines of a sheep, somewhere around the fourteenth century. The handles were much longer and the heads were much smaller than they are today, but the racquets themselves were used virtually the same way, though you might have still confused the sport of tennis with something else, like badminton or even squash, as the ball wasn't really made to bounce.

    Significance

    • It wouldn't be until the late nineteenth century that the racquet (or the game itself) would go through any real change. And it would be this transformation that ushered in the more modern equipment, so to speak, that is the inspiration or derivation of the racquets we use today. Though never credited with the invention, Walter Wingfield was the first person to patent the racquet, among other gear involved in the sport. Of course, as times changed, so did the materials used in the fabrication of the tennis racquet. In the late 1960s, the first steel tennis racquet was brought onto the market by Wilson (a popular sports manufacturer). Since steel was relatively heavy, in relation to the "original" wood racquet, another material was introduced into production, which was aluminum, in 1975. The 1980s would usher in another alloy for the fabrication of the racquet, and graphite soon became the standard material used in almost all racquets available to the public.

    Misconceptions

    • It has long been said that the natural gut used for the strings in the much older tennis racquets was actually made from cat intestines. No matter which expert you ask, they'll tell you this is a misconception as it was always standard practice to string a racquet with the intestinal fibers of either cow or sheep. While only a myth, "cat gut" strings has stuck, and will most likely never go away.