1452 First record of a "goiff" ball for sale. It costs 10 Scottish shillings—around $5 today—and is made of down-filled leather (a "featherie") or possibly wood.

1452 Making featheries is dangerous. Artisans can turn out only three or four a day; some develop lung problems from moldy feathers or break ribs while stuffing goose feathers into leather casings.

The "featherie."Jeffrey B. Ellis

1503 A year after lifting his grandfather's ban against "the futeball and the golfe," Scotland's King James IV buys "clubbes" and a dozen "balles" from a bowmaker in Perth.

1836 Samuel Messieux whacks a featherie 361 yards at St. Andrews—still the longest recorded drive with such a ball. Reports say the shot was downwind on frozen ground.

1845 Robert Paterson of St. Andrews receives a statue from Malaysia in a crate packed with gutta-percha, the sap of the Southeast Asian gutta tree. Eureka! Paterson melts the stuff into the first gutta-percha ball. His "guttie" flies 25 yards farther than a featherie, lasts longer and costs less.

The Bramble cover ball.Jeffrey B. Ellis

1845 The first Gutta-percha balls are smooth and easily nicked. Golfers find that damaged Gutties fly farther and straighter than new Ones, so ballmakers Try bumpy covers. The most common Is the Bramble cover, whose reverse dimples resemble the berries in bramble bushes.

1895 A.G. Spalding & Brothers becomes the first U.S. ballmaker with the Spalding Wizard, a bramble-cover design that costs $6 a dozen.

1898 Coburn Haskell and his friend Bertram Work design the Haskell, the first wound, rubber-cored golf ball. Haskell had tried to wind the rubber string around the core by hand; Work, a B.F. Goodrich employee, had company engineers build a machine to Do the trick.

The Haskell ball.Jeffrey B. Ellis

1901 Walter Travis wins the U.S. Amateur using a Haskell.

1903 Spalding replaces its gutta-percha cover with balata, a rubbery gum from the tropical balata tree, more durable than gutta percha.

1905 William Taylor patents his Dympl ball. Its craters make it fly higher with less wind resistance than pimpled balls. Three years later, Spalding buys the rights to the dimple pattern on Taylor's Glory ball.

1910 Worthington Ball Company creates the Radio, made of rubber mixed with radioactive radium, which is said to "vitalize" the ball.

1921 The R&A and USGA agree: Balls must be at least 1.62 inches around and no heavier than 1.62 ounces. The reason for the 1.62 twosome, if any, is lost to history.

1930 With a liquid center, rubber-thread windings and balata cover, the Spalding Kro-Flite is the thoroughly modern ball. Spalding boasts that the ball "lasts till it's lost."

1930 As recently as 2000, many top balls had Liquid centers. Their ingredients: corn Syrup and saltwater.

1932 In January, the USGA raises minimum ball diameter to 1.68 inches; the R&A maintains its 1.62 standard, leading to a schism that would last 58 years. In June, the Acushnet Process Company in Acushnet, Massachusetts, starts its golf ball division.

1935 The L.A. Young Golf Company releases its Hagen ball, with .a center of pure honey (right) that the company claims will never evaporate. MacGregor counters with the Pace-Maker, whose Dry-ice center is said to make the ball more resilient.

1968 DuPont invents Surlyn, a plastic that's much harder than balata. Ram Golf's Ramlon is the first ball with a Surlyn cover.

1974 Lee Trevino wins the World Series of Golf playing the Faultless Omega—the first Tour victory for a two-piece, Surlyn-covered ball.

1982 Wayne Levi wins the Hawaiian Open with an orange Wilson Optic ball. .A month later Jerry Pate takes the Players Championship—the first .at the TPC at Sawgrass—with an orange ball.

1990 The R&A adopts the USGA's ball-diameter standard of 1.68 inches.

1996 Spalding introduces its Strata, the first multilayer, nonwound ball. Precept introduces the MC Tour, the first urethane-cover, three-piece nonwound ball.

2000 Tiger Woods switches from a wound, liquid-.center Titleist ball to a multilayer, solid-core Nike and wins four straight majors.

The Nike "One" ball.Jeffrey B. Ellis

2001 Titleist releases its Pro V1 to the public after a wildly successful launch on Tour (see "Why the Pro V1 is King," page 104). The percentage of Tour pros using nonwound balls at the Genuity Championship at Doral zooms from 19 percent in 2000 to 90 percent in 2001.

2004 The wound ball is officially dead. Less than four years after the wound, liquid-center Titleist Tour Distance was the market leader, not one U.S. manufacturer make a wound ball.