Who hasn’t seen tennis balls? There’s no way you can miss them in a sports store. They are yellow, pistachio green or orange and their diameter is 6.7 centimeters or 2.7 inches. Like in football, tennis balls are recognized by kids and adults alike and they are often part of children’s games that have nothing to do with tennis as such. The balls and the rackets are the key elements that create the essence or the basis of any tennis game, although other gear items may be necessary too.
Tennis balls have a pretty long history. Back in the old days when tennis came into being, these balls were made of leather and were stuffed with various materials like hair or wool. These old tennis balls were not the kind to bounce and make the game interesting as it is today. The Scots are the ones known to have manufactured these balls initially; they would use animal fur or hair, human hair or wool to stuff the spherical container made of leather they tied or sew with rope made from animal intestines. It sounds pretty repugnant now that we have become accustomed to the present vulcanized rubber balls. The middle stage of development between these two extremes of tennis balls manufacturing (organic material and vulcanized rubber) was the rubber core tennis ball which was introduced once people started playing this sport on lawn towards the end of the 19th century.
Todays tennis balls are not made simply from rubber anymore. Manufacturers have added more chemicals to the ingredients so that they would receive the appropriate consistency for a good behavior in a match. This mixture of rubber and other chemicals makes about 80 percent of the entire ball. One of its special components is the felt which helps a great deal in rendering tennis balls certain properties like wind and the players striking resistance. The felt also has an important role in controlling the tennis balls bounce and speed properties.
Tennis balls can be either pressurized or pressureless. This aspect also has a great deal to do with how much the ball bounces. The more pressurized the ball, the more bounce it will have. The only thing is that these types of tennis balls lose their bounce in time. As for the pressureless balls, they will gain more bounce in time and are considered more reliable. The more advanced the technology becomes, the better the properties of the balls used in this sport and in many others; and, as a result, the better the sport performance.
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