During the recent British Open at Royal Lytham, I met Bob Sommers, one of my favourite American golf writers. As a former editor of Golf Journal for the USGA, he is a fund of fascinating information and among a myriad of topics, we talked on this occasion about a milestone in the history of golf-ball testing.
In short, it was the day in 1974 when the USGA took delivery of a club-swinging robot at their New Jersey headquarters.
"At the time, a guy called Joe Schwendeman worked with me at the Journal and he also handled some of the USGA's public relations work," recalled Sommers. "Anyway, when the machine arrived, Joe decided it should be called "Iron Mike". "I remember being slightly irritated by this, because everyone knew Iron Mike was the pitching machine used in training by baseball teams. And it seemed like an insult to our machine which, we were told, was based on the swings of Byron Nelson and Toney Penna.
"So I said 'If you want to call it anything, call it Iron Byron'."
Golf-ball technology has become a pet subject these days, especially since the introduction of the seriously hot, Titleist Pro V1 last October. But the study of golf-ball characteristics in flight can be traced back more than 100 years to the 1890s and the work of a Scottish father and son named Tait.
Frederick Tait was a strapping Scot and a two-time British Amateur champion, in 1896 and 1898. The first of these victories was notable for the fact it was the first final of the Amateur to be played over 36 holes.
His father, P Guthrie Tait, was a distinguished professor of physical sciences at Edinburgh University and we are told the pair often played golf together at St Andrews, where the power of his son's ball-striking, became a constant source of fascination to the academic. As he watched young Frederick power the ball down that ancient terrain, PG Tait formulated a landmark theory about the dynamics of golf-ball flight.
It culminated in the publication of a magazine article in 1896, neatly coinciding with his son's first Amateur triumph at Royal St George's, where he beat the distinguished Harold Hilton in the final.
In describing the delayed upshoot and lengthy air time of a powerfully-struck golf shot, Prof Tait argued that they defied Newton's principles of gravity.
As a result of a rather crude test, he proved that all normal golf shots featured underspin, the source of the flight-enhancing phenomenon known as aerodynamic lift. In the process, he explained the hitherto mysteries of speed, spin and trajectory in a language that lay-people could understand.
Back as far as the feathery, professionals and leading amateurs had been used in product testing. And for much of the last century, manufacturers relied on top-level golfers for golf-ball testing and the measurement of clubhead speed. For instance, the reigning long-drive champion of the US, Jim Reynolds, pitted his clubhead speed against phototubes, or electric eyes, in an experiment carried out in General Electric's laboratories in 1930.
Meanwhile, as early as 1907, when the rubber Haskall ball was becoming increasingly popular and was comfortably outdistancing its gutta percha predecessor, the USGA expressed concern at what they saw as a dangerous development in the game. In the course of an official bulletin, they warned of the need to "adopt a standard golf ball", so as to stop manufacturers from further development to the point where "the standard drive of a year or two hence will approximate 300 yards instead of 200 or 225 or 250." Though improvements certainly occurred in the Haskell over the next few decades, they were nowhere near as radical as the USGA had feared.
Eventually, findings presented by the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago around the outbreak of World War II, suggested that a limit be imposed on the initial launch speed of the golf-ball. This led to the set up of a ten-and-a-half-foot tube through which the ball was fired for monitoring.
A speed limit of 250 feet per second, with a two-per-cent tolerance, became part of the Rules of the game in 1942, on both sides of the Atlantic. This placed a major restraint on a ball's potential for distance. By 1958, however, an American study predicted the day was not far off when new synthetic materials would produce a ball which would "differ markedly from the present ball and make the present initial velocity rule inadequate." As for testing: in an article written for Golf Journal a few years ago, Dave Gould referred to specific decisions by the game's leading manufacturers. He wrote: "Carl Schleie, who began his golf career as head of development for MacGregor in 1974, struggled at first with the idea that a human tester could reliably repeat his or her swing well enough to produce quantifiable results.
"But after a few days on the rest range, Schleie was over his scepticism. It helped that one of his human testers was Jack Nicklaus." The MacGregor executive later observed: "The top players, when they got loose and in a groove, were almost as good as "Iron Byron". Before I took the job at MacGregor, I had never been exposed to that level of talent. It was un believable to me how the pros could just dump balls in a pile out on that range. "Nicklaus was the ultimate. His sensitivity was mind-boggling. One day we were out there with two batches of balls that were identical, except that in one batch the elastic thread was about two-hundreds of an inch thicker. He could pick out the difference every time." Robert Molitor, a chemical engineer who started with Spalding in 1957, was another to discover that tournament professionals were just as valuable as the testing machines the company was using at that time.
"The players were great to work with and happy to take part," he said.
Molitor, who has since lent his name to a golf ball, added: "We noticed over the years that the player who had spent the week testing with us, hitting every kind of shot with all different clubs, would often go to the next week's tournament and win. We concluded that the testing process forced them to practise more than they usually did."
Yet, rather than aiming their product specifically at professionals, we are assured that the primary objective of manufacturers is to help double-digit handicap golfers achieve consistent, 220-yard drives. Durability also became a key issue, with the development of surlyn as being far less likely to be cut by a high-handicapper's mis-hit, than the softer, balata cover.
So it was that Spalding went after the "average-golfer market", touting their Top-Flite, with two-piece construction and a durable cover, as "The Longest Ball." It was acknowledged that distance was being given precedence over feel and control. Experts now agree this was the development which saw distance become an obsession in the marketplace.
And when mice become more sophisticated, it is necessary to develop more sophisticated mouse traps. Hence the arrival of Iron Byron, which was seen to fulfil its function splendidly until its demise in 1998, when it was replaced by more sophisticated, computerised technology.
"I remember when we launched Iron Byron," recalled Sommers. "The USGA bought the machine from the True Temper (shaft) company. To be honest, the engineering wasn't very consistent in the early years, but we made a big fuss about it anyway.
"We invited Byron Nelson along for the press launch and from our museum, we got the one iron he had used when scoring an eagle on his way to victory in the 1939 US Open. The result, was a memorable photograph of Iron Byron and Byron Nelson swinging together.
"Afterwards, I asked Nelson what he thought of the club he had used 35 years previously. "It feels like a lump of lead," he replied. Which, in its own way, explained the need for his mechanical name-sake.
