SPORT

Lighting Up Tennis Courts with Aluminium Rackets

The game of tennis is, as the magazine Wired put it, a game of spin.
27 January, 2016
The world's best tennis players, from the Williams sisters to Djokovic and from Nadal to Federer, are masters at putting the right spin on their serves and returns in order to mix up opponents and bring home championships.
These world-class tennis players spend countless hours perfecting the body mechanics required for generating the right spin on a tennis ball, but they also rely on a key technological innovation that transformed the game of tennis and brought it into the modern era decades ago. In many ways, the sport as we play it today was revolutionized by a single inventor: aircraft engineer Howard Head, who turned to aluminium to transform the sport of skiing and then did the exact same for tennis.
Born in Philadelphia in the United States in 1914, Howard Head graduated with a degree in engineering from Harvard in 1936 and moved to Baltimore, Maryland to help design and build planes as part of the Glenn L. Martin Company during the Second World War. Two years after the war ended, Head tried skiing for the first time and realized the cumbersome skis he was given to use were still made out of wood, and this in an era where futuristic materials were rapidly replacing antiquated wooden models.

Drawing on his experience as an aircraft engineer, Head realized the materials he used to build planes–aluminium in particular–could do a better job and produce lighter skis. In 1948, Head built on this realization by founding the Head Ski Company, developing and patenting aluminium "sandwich" skis which had become widely accepted by the time they were used to win medals at the 1964 Winter Olympics.

Photo by Ski Shop.
In 1971, Head sold his ski company and turned his passion to a new sport: tennis. He discovered that his wooden tennis racquets, like the wooden skis he had been given a quarter century earlier, were limited in how large their head area could be; more than 60 square inches would cause their frames to break. To solve this new problem, Head turned again to his old solution: replace wood with aluminium.

His patented "Prince Classic" aluminium (and later graphite) racquets could be up to 125 square inches and had quadruple the effective hitting surface compared to a traditional racquet. Tennis players using his aluminium equipment could put more spin on the balls they hit, a key step toward the creation of the modern game. These larger racquet heads, combined with the use of modern materials (like polyester) for string, have helped maximize the spin a skilled player can put on a tennis ball.
Photos by Wikimedia Commons
When Head first introduced his new aluminium racket to the tennis world in 1976, he was met with widespread derision. Within a few short years, however, the success of his new design had proved him right. By 1980, up to 85% of tennis racquet sales at some locations were for Prince racquets, flying off the shelves and into the hands of at least 700,000 players (and all at the expensive of traditional models). Within four years, Prince racquets accounted for 13% of sales.

The Prince is the shape the tennis racket should've been in the first place. I have no doubt that in three or four years it will be the conventional frame and the others will be thought of as small, funny-looking and old-fashioned. This is no boomlet. It's an absolute explosion. The word is out: the Prince is for real!

Howard Head
Inventor of the aluminium skis and tennis racquet
Howard Head sold Prince Manufacturing, the company behind his racquets, in 1982 and passed away in 1991. His impact on the sports world, however, can still be felt today. The Head Company is still a major industry figure in both skiing and tennis, and countless tennis players all over the world use aluminium racquets on the court.