Golf Reform

A certain type of scientist, watching a baseball game, would writhe in his seat to see a fielder drop a fly. "How inefficient!" this scientist would groan. "Why doesn't the supervisor of this nine-man-reciprocating machine equip his units with some substance which would increase adhesion on the inner surfaces of their so-called gloves? Tentatively, and subject to experiment, I should say that a satisfactory substance for this purpose might be found in common or furniture glue."

Golf devotees who read the Scientific American were dismayed last week to find Daniel McFarlan Moore, a New Jersey electrical engineer and inventor, proposing for golf the equivalent of glued gloves in baseball.

Supported by the simplest laws of mechanics, Mr. Moore had no difficulty in showing that golf clubs as now designed are scientifically reprehensible. The object of golf being to drive a sphere straight and far by the impact of a weighted flat surface swinging in an arc at the end of a shaft, it is clear that the flat surface should strike the ball with its plane at right angles to the ball's proposed line of flight. Golf clubs as now designed introduce a torsion factor, making the right-angle contact of clubface and ball depend on muscular control of the shaft to which the clubface is attached. The clubface is likely to twist because the axis of the shaft is one and one-half inches or so removed from the point of ball-impact on the club face. Nothing is more common in golf than to hear a player complain, "The club turned in my hand."

Scientist Moore's article was illustrated with views of a set of scientific clubs he had designed, with the shaft entering the club-head so that the shaft axis intersected the centre-line of the clubface at the exact point where ball-impact should come. With true scientific economy, the club-faces were diminished in size, the round-faced putter resembling a small croquet mallet. The mashie and midiron looked like chunky little hoes with slanted handles.

Mr. Moore did not substantiate the worth of his invention by any data on the new clubs performance in actual play. But he claimed to have found added distance, surer direction and increased confidence, especially for golf novices. What success his "centre-line" clubs would have was problematical. Their principle is far from new, having been incorporated in the loggerheaded "Schenectady" putter in 1903.* But golf, since Demos took it up in the U. S., accepts its gifts from science with much better grace than in the days when gentlemen wore their hats and coats on the links. Steel tubes for shafts, wooden pegs for tees, celluloid crescents for eye shades, ivory for club faces, are but a few of the accepted innovations. The swiveling club-head (adjustable at any angle) is coming into use among economical people. Arm guides, wrist straps, ball-bearing balls, tripod bags, are among countless alluring aids to the awkward, their sale being stimulated by what Inventor Moore calls "the urge to win."

* Patented in 1903 by Robert E. Knight of the General Electric Co., Schenectady, N. Y. Walter Travis, many times an amateur champion and noted especially for his putting ability, brought the " Schenectady" to fame in 1904 by using one to win the British Amateur Championship. In 1905, the British Golf Association barred centre-shafted clubs from its tournaments. In 1920, the U.S.G.A. followed suit. But, like the forbidden rib-faced mashie, "Schenectadies" are still widely in use.