The Evolution of Golf Equipment: From Hickory to High-Tech Clubs

Golf has evolved as a sport throughout the years, from creating better and more durable clubs to making more aerodynamic golf balls, and it’s come a long way since its 15th-century creation in Scotland. It’s interesting to see how a game largely reliant on club swings had changed the structure of the club from being made up of wood to its modern introduction of steel.

In this article, we’ll discuss the evolution of golf equipment, including how clubs, balls and other gear changed to keep up with the modern style of the sport.

The beginning of wooden golf clubs

It’s common knowledge to many golfers that the game was invented in Scotland in the 15th century, but for nearly three more centuries, they played using all wooden clubs. At the time, wooden clubs were a marvel with an expensive price tag generally made for wealthier families.

Typically, these clubs were strictly made with some form of hardwood. Not only would golfers be limited by wood-made shafts and club heads compared to the tools used in the modern game, but they’d usually have fewer clubs to work with, including clubs as simple as spoons, fairway woods, and long noses.

Even after the invention of iron clubs in the 18th century, they further improved wooden clubs in the 19th century, including using hickory in the club shafts for better density and durability. These clubs were such an advancement from their early wooden predecessors that golfers used them up to the 20th century.

The transition to iron golf clubs

To virtually no one’s surprise, metal paved the way for the future in multiple industries, especially golf. Iron clubs were far more dense and accurate, allowing golfers much better control over how they hit the ball compared to before. Another upside of iron clubs was that they were undoubtedly more durable than their wooden counterparts, allowing for longer use before wear and tear affected the club.

By the 1920s, steel shafts were a prime factor in revolutionizing the steel club industry, followed by the creation of cavity-back irons in the 1960s, allowing for better weight distribution and making the club easier to use. Along with all these new additions to metal-based clubs, a new growing “Iron Meta” would arise with the creation of many different irons (wedge, sand, 3, 4, 8, 9, etc.), allowing golfers to pick a club that caters best to their shot. By the time perimeter weighting was added to club heads to distribute weight evenly across all faces and edges of the club, golfers would be able to make good shots much more consistently.

In the 21st century, metal clubs can be equipped with different sensor technology, allowing players to record and track data on their swing to improve their game.

Has the golf ball changed throughout the sport?

The golf balls most modern players use, while still in the shape of a ball, have had slight alterations to improve the sport since the 15th century. Along with wooden clubs, they used wooden balls until the 17th century. Richer players would replace wooden balls with feathery balls that were leather-covered and stuffed with feathers, although they were not too durable. Eventually, in the 19th century, the gutta-percha ball would be created using dried-up sap from a Sapodilla tree.

Since the 20th century, it’s common that golf balls are multi-layer with a core designed to optimize energy transfer, surrounded by layers of materials such as Irathane, Surlyn and the like. Rubber balls were also a significant innovation and led to the further progression of better energy transfer and flight pathing to help lead to our commonly used modern balls today. Most notable on a modern golf ball is the small set of dimples covering the entire surface with the intended purpose of reducing drag to increase overall distance.