The history of tennis rackets starts simple, with wooden rackets being the most widely used for several years, and then moving towards steel rackets, composite rackets, metal rackets, and carbon fiber rackets.
Almost all of the rackets stayed the same size, until later on in the game when many companies started experimenting with larger surface areas.
Tennis rackets were invented in the middle of the 18th century. Monks in France created a game that was very similar to tennis, but they didn’t use rackets. The monks started with using their bare hands to hit the ball back and forth over something similar to a net, but then it shifted into the monks wearing leather gloves.
After the monks started getting injured from playing with their hands, they decided to shift to paddles. Players first used solid wooden paddles, and then that transferred to what we would now call a racket in the 14th century.
This early medieval racket had strings made of gut and was bound in a large wooden frame. They were shaped in more of a teardrop shape, with a long wooden handle. They were used to hit a dead ball over a net-type structure instead of against a wall as played initially with a squash ball.
The modern wooden tennis racket was invented several centuries later, and the game started to shift more into what we know tennis to look like today.
Wooden Rackets
The very first tennis racket was made in 1874 in London by Major Walter C. Wingfield. This racket was large, heavy, and made of solid wood, meaning it could deal some severe damage!
Wooden rackets started to be used in the middle of the nineteenth century when lawn tennis was invented and beginning to gain popularity. The wooden rackets used in this period were created with a wide head so that it was easier to use the ball, but the rackets were also relatively heavy.
They were flexible, however, and this allowed for a fair playing field for everyone who ended up playing the game. The wooden racket stayed mostly the same for about 100 years! Excluding laminated wooden rackets, which started to gain in popularity in 1947 and was a game-changer for many players.
Read more: https://www.tennisreviewer.com/history-of-tennis-rackets
