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The Maxply Effect: How Automotive Advances Ended 400 Years of Tradition
For more than four centuries, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, tennis racquets were made from solid pieces of wood . It was a tradition that seemed unbreakable — until industrial innovation, much like in the automotive world, paved the way for something new. Earlier attempts had been made to build racquets using layered wood, similar to the bentwood furniture techniques pioneered by Thonet. However, these early efforts failed because the glues available at the time could no

Berlin Tennis Gallery
Apr 272 min read


How an Automotive Pioneer gave Tennis its First Bounce
Charles Goodyear Vulcanized Solid Rubber Ball In the 19th century, two groundbreaking inventions laid the foundation for modern lawn tennis: Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber and Edwin Budding's creation of the mechanical lawn mower. In 1839 , Charles Goodyear discovered that heating natural rubber with sulfur transformed it into a durable, elastic material, a process he patented in 1844 as vulcanization . This innovation revolutionized the production of rubber good

Berlin Tennis Gallery
Apr 261 min read
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