26 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



smiled in a superior way at this new science of the game ; and Tait was 

 scoffed at when he enunciated the truth that underspin was the great secret 

 in long driving. 



It is interesting to see how step by step he advanced to the final 

 elucidation of the whole problem or rather set of problems. Not until he had 

 made definite calculations, did Tait or anyone else for a moment imagine that 

 the flight of a golf ball could not be explained in terms of initial speed of 

 projection, initial elevation or direction of projection, and the known resistance 

 of the air. By means of ingenious experiments on the firing of guns, Bash- 

 forth had completely worked out the law of resistance of the air to the 

 passage of projectiles through it. When however Tait tried to make use of 

 the data supplied by Bashforth's tables he found that it was impossible to reach 

 even an approximate agreement between his theoretically calculated path 

 and the path as observed. Two facts were known with fair accuracy the 

 distance travelled by a well-driven ball, and the time it remained in the air ; 

 and a third fact was also with some measure of certainty known, namely, 

 the angle of projection or the elevation. But no reasonable combination of 

 elevation, speed of projection, and resistance of air could give anything like 

 the combined time and " carry " as observed daily on the links. Tait also 

 showed that, on this obvious theory of projection and resistance, very little 

 extra "carry" could be secured by extra effort on the part of the player in 

 giving a stronger stroke with a correspondingly higher speed of projection. 

 The resistance of the air rapidly cut down the initial high velocities. 

 When therefore Freddie Tait on January u, 1893, exceeded far all his 

 previous efforts by a glorious drive of 250 yards' "carry" on a calm day, 

 he deemed that his father's dynamical theory was at fault. 



How often has the tale been told on Golf links and in the Club-house 

 that Freddie Tait disproved his father's supposed dictum, by driving a ball 

 many yards farther than the maximum distance which mathematical calculation 

 had proved to be possible ! It is no doubt a good story, but very far indeed 

 from the mark, as a glance at Tail's writings on the subject will at once prove. 



On August 31, 1887, Tait communicated to the Scotsman newspaper an 

 article called " The unwritten Chapter on Golf," reproduced a few weeks later 

 in Nature (Vol. xxxvi, p. 502). In that article he shows clearly that the evils 

 of "slicing," "pulling" and "topping" were all due to the same dynamical 

 cause, namely rotation of the travelling golf ball about a particular axis and 

 in a particular way. The explanation was based on the fact, established 



