The golf ball with rubber at its heart
Coburn Haskell and Bertram Work helped change golf by winding stretched rubber thread inside a ball. Their late-nineteenth-century design put an elastic core beneath a tough cover. The outside looked familiar; the response to a strike did not.
Why winding the inside changed the game
Golf, USGA Bulletin (1901), via Wikimedia Commons
The patent filed in 1898 and granted in April 1899 described tightly wound elastic thread under a gutta-percha shell. The important innovation was the construction inside the ball, not a new pattern added to its surface.
A wound core could respond to impact differently from the earlier solid gutta-percha ball. As the design was refined and adopted, extra distance changed what golfers could reach and what established courses had to accommodate. The construction influenced ball-making for decades.
The period illustration makes the hidden idea visible: much of the engineering was packed into a small interior rather than advertised on the outside. Haskell’s story is often compressed into a lucky experiment with rubber. The more useful lesson is the partnership and refinement that turned a promising material into a playable product.