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The game we now know as tennis took nearly a thousand years to evolve into its modern form. While some evidence suggests that early forms of ball games were played in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, most historians trace its direct origins to French monasteries around the year 1000 AD. Here, monks played jeu de paume, the “game of the palm,” striking a wooden ball with the bare hand or with a simple leather glove across a rope stretched through the cloister courtyard. The ga

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

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

Wilson Sporting Goods has origins as unexpected as they are unique. Before it became a powerhouse in the world of tennis, baseball, and golf, Wilson was part of the Sulzberger & Sons Company , a Chicago-based meat producer. In 1914 , the company established the Ashland Manufacturing Company , repurposing animal by-products for a surprising new purpose: sporting goods. In 1915, it was renamed Wilson & Co. , but the sporting goods division became Thomas E. Wilson & Co. in 1916