NATURE 



341 



THURSDAY, JUNE 



1913 



DYNAMICS OF GOLF. 

 The Soul of Golf. By P. A. Vaile. Pp. xiii + 

 356. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1912.) 

 Price 6s. net. 



THIS is a breezy, well-written book, full of 

 valuable hints to the ambitious golfer. Much 

 of the instruction takes the form of attack upon 

 the writings of other exponents, and this makes 

 lively reading. With a great deal of the criticism 

 most golfers who have tried to formulate the 

 principles of the game will agree. But it is not 

 human to be perfect, and Mr. Vaile does not 

 escape falling into pitfalls himself, especially when 

 dealing with the dynamical aspect of things. To 

 the November number of The Fortnightly Review 

 he contributed an article on the dynamics of 

 golf, in which he seems to regard hirnself as 

 a supreme authority. In one respect this article 

 is an improvement on the book, for he accepts 

 in its simplicity Newton's explanation of the 

 swerve of the spinning ball advancing in air, 

 and in one paragraph gives quite a good account 

 of this phenomenon, very much as Tait did years 

 ago. Unfortunately he obscures the explanation 

 in a later paragraph when he says that it is "the 

 continual friction on the lower portion of the ball 

 which gradually forces it up." 



Mr. Vaile is merciless in his exposure of loose- 

 ness of language. Yet in his discussion of the 

 value of furrows cut on the face of iron clubs 

 (a method, by the way, first adopted by Tait), he 

 writes that " marking is frequently done by great 

 deep lines, and, particularly in the mashie, nearly 

 always by lines which run from heel to toe. Now 

 in the great majority of mashie shots, when one 

 is putting on cut one requires lines running in an 

 exactly opposite direction " — that is, if English 

 means anything, from toe to heel ! Mr. Vaile, 

 of course, does not mean that, any more than Sir 

 J. J. Thomson means that the golf-ball is spinning 

 like a sleeping top when he says that slicing and 

 pulling are due to rotation about a vertical axis. 

 Sir J. J. Thomson does not say that this is the 

 only spin that exists ; but it is the component 

 of spin about the vertical axis which has to do 

 with the phenomena of slicing and pulling. When 

 the ball is rotating about an axis not truly hori- 

 zontal, there must be a component about a vertical 

 axis. This component, regarded from above, will 

 be either right-handed or left-handed, according 

 to circumstances, producing respectively slicing 

 or pulling. This, obviously, is the meaning to be 

 attached to Sir J. J. Thomson's words. In his 

 article Mr. Vaile says : " Prof. Thomson must 

 NO. 2275, VOL. Qll 



now realise that if the axis of spin was the same 

 in each ball " — that is, each sliced or pulled ball — 

 " their conduct on landing would be similar." 

 Can Mr. Vaile not imagine that though the axis 

 of spin may be the same, the direction of rotation 

 about the axis may be either the one way or the 

 other? 



Mr. Vaile is to be congratulated upon the clear 

 way in which he describes the conditions under 

 which the so-called "push-shot " with cleek or iron 

 is obtained, But the main feature of this stroke 

 was well understood on the golf-links of St. 

 Andrews and Musselburgh long before the days 

 of Varden or Vaile. The divots of turf which 

 were removed by the club after it hit the ball 

 proved incontestably that this particular stroke 

 of club on ball occurred during the descent of the 

 club. In his article on long driving in The Bad- 

 minton Magazine of March, 1896, the late Prof. 

 Tait shows clearly how underspin is produced. 

 In his figures on p. 370, Tait represents the velocity 

 of the clubhead at impact by the line AB, and 

 remarks that " AB may be made to take any 

 direction we please — i.e. the clubhead may be re- 

 presented as moving in any direction whatever; 

 but it is quite sufficient for our purpose 1 to treat 

 it as moving horizontally." Mr. Vaile regards 

 this sentence as meaning that Tait considered 

 every well-driven ball as being projected by a 

 horizontal blow ; for he deliberately says that a 

 " fundamental error " of the late Prof. Tait con- 

 sisted "in regarding the blow of a golf-club as 

 being a force directed in a line parallel with the 

 horizon." This is really very bad. Yet there is 

 a worse case of unpardonable carelessness in Mr. 

 Vaile's reading of the Badminton article. 



In a footnote on p. 380 of this article Tait, with 

 the honesty of the real investigator, points out the 

 difficulties under which his "laboratory experi- 

 ments " on the velocity of projection of a golf-ball 

 were made, and Mr. Vaile quotes this footnote 

 as if it referred to a totally different experiment 

 described on p. 381. The latter experiment, with 

 one end of a long, untwisted tape "tied to the ball 

 and the other to the ground," was clearly not 

 made in the laboratory at all. The ball was 

 driven into a stiff clay face, not into the 10-inch 

 disc of clay spoken of in the footnote ; and the 

 difficulties of aim did not enter into the experiment 

 with the tape. Tait always found the tape twisted 

 in such a way as to show underspin. Mr. Vaile 

 will not believe it. He should therefore try the 

 experiment himself instead of criticising what he 

 has not taken the trouble to understand aright. 

 By this experiment Tait proved to the simplest 

 intellect that underspin was invariably present in 



1 The italics art our:. 



