History of Table Tennis

Who Invented Table Tennis?

If you are looking for more details, kindly visit our website.

The game of table tennis has its roots in lawn tennis.  When lawn tennis became very popular in the s & s, game makers tried to emulate its&#; success by developing indoor versions of the game.  So there were card games, board & dice games, rackets & balloon games and even tiddledy winks tennis games.  But the first use of the name Table Tennis occurred on a board and dice game by J.H.Singer of New York around and it&#;s also known that a game of Table Tennis was offered in the game catalogue of George S. Parker, founder of the famed Parker Brothers in the USA.

Table Tennis

So the answer to the question &#;who invented table tennis?&#; is &#; Englishman David Foster.  An English Patent (number 11,037) was filed on 15 July when David Foster of England introduced the first action game of tennis on a table in .  Only one example is known to have survived and it&#;s now on display in the ITTF Museum.  Foster&#;s Parlour Table Games was a compendium of table versions of Cricket, Football and Lawn Tennis.  The table tennis game featured elegant strung rackets, a 30mm cloth covered rubber ball, a small wooden perimeter fence and elaborate side nets to catch stray balls.  Early versions of table tennis used rackets (bats / paddles) with velum stretched over an outer casing (similar to a small drum) attached to a handle. This gave rise to the name Ping Pong which was derived from the sound that was made by different sized rackets (bats / paddles) striking a ball.

As the popularity of the game spread, two rival organisations were set up in England with the &#;Table Tennis Association&#; and the &#;Ping Pong Association&#; formed within days of each other in .  Soon after this time in the history of table tennis though, it&#;s thought that the game fell out of favour.  But by the s it was back in fashion, particularly in Europe, and Englishman Ivor Montagu was instrumental in reviving the &#;Ping Pong Association&#; in &#; reformed as the &#;Table Tennis Association&#; in (later adding the prefix &#;English&#;) &#; and forming the &#;International Table Tennis Federation&#; (ITTF) in .

At a meeting on 7 December Ivor Montagu (pictured right) was elected as the first chairman of the ITTF and five days later the first Constitution and Rules of Table Tennis were agreed.

A tournament held in London, England was also designated as the first World Championship.

The history of table tennis shows us that table tennis was popular in Europe at this time. So it was Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, Germany, Hungary, India, Sweden and Wales who were all invited to become the original members of the ITTF.  The rules for International Competitions, which were approved at that meeting on 12 December , were based on the English rules of the game at that time for singles &#; subject to a few minor amendments &#; and the Hungarian rules of the time for doubles play.

Ping Pong v Table Tennis

So what&#;s the difference between ping pong and table tennis?

Well, the term table tennis had to be used by these associations because ping pong had already been registered as a trademark by the sports company John Jaques & Son in England.

Parker Brothers in the USA had also bought the rights from Jaques to use the name ping pong in the USA only.  These companies were promoting ping pong tournaments which only permitted their own equipment to be used and were threatening to take action against anybody who used their proprietary trademarked name of ping pong without specifying the use of their equipment.

The &#;Ping Pong Association&#; in England therefore decided that it was prudent to stop using this trademarked name forthwith and reformed themselves as the &#;Table Tennis Association&#; instead.  So, since that time, and particularly since the establishment of the ITTF in , the modern game has been known as table tennis.

So the obvious question is &#;

Why is the term Ping Pong still used?

The term ping pong started to fade from use as more and more national associations were formed, affiliated to the ITTF, and adopted their rules of table tennis.  However, particularly in the USA, references to ping pong has continued for much longer than elsewhere in the world.  This is probably because ping pong was promoted extensively in the early s by the equipment manufacturers who owned the trademark, and therefore it became ingrained in peoples minds &#; just as any other product which is widely advertised and promoted.

Indeed, Ping Pong is still a federally registered trademark in the USA and is now owned by Escalade Sports. So, the registered trademark of Ping Pong indicates a brand of equipment used to play the sport of table tennis.

Ping pong has also remained in popular use by the media all around the world (and by recreational players) who often use it in a derisory context about the sport of table tennis.

The next significant event was &#;

The rise of the East

As the popularity of table tennis spread around the world, the Asian countries embraced the sport and quickly became world leaders.  Although the European players, particularly Hungary and England, dominated the mens singles titles at the World Championship during the first 25 years, the Japanese and Chinese players have taken the majority of world titles from the s onwards.

Kangna Product Page

A notable exception was Sweden, who with Jan-Ove Waldner and Jorgen Persson in their ranks, claimed the men&#;s singles titles in , and and won the team event in , and .

The Paris Olympic Games will welcome back the fastest sport played on a tabletop: table tennis.

Have you called it ping pong before? Excusez-Moi but that is an Olympic faux pas. The sport is formally recognized internationally and Olympically as table tennis.

Confused? NBC Olympics breaks down the history of table tennis, and why you might have called it ping-pong. 

The advent of table tennis dates back to the late s when the wealthy Victorians in England created an indoor version of lawn tennis using items around the house to assemble a makeshift tennis court. Rubber and cork balls were the common materials used in the first iteration of the table tennis ball.

As table tennis grew in popularity, sports equipment manufacturers and businesses filed patents related to the burgeoning game. In , sports equipment company Slazenger, now known as the official ball sponsor of Wimbledon, filed a patent for a net in which table tennis was mentioned.  

In , the Table Tennis Association was formed in England, and just four days later, the Ping Pong Association was founded. Two years later, the two merged in a joint effort to promote the sport.  

The sport of table tennis was ratified in after a series of meetings held in London and Berlin, which ultimately led to the formation of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF).

While the first World Championships were held the same year as the formation of the ITTF, table tennis did not debut at the Olympics until at the Seoul Games.

Table tennis on board a Red Star Line passenger ship, . The Red Star Line ran between Antwerp in Belgium, Dover in England and New York in the USA. Postcard. Getty Images

Celluloid balls were introduced into the budding table tennis game in . They produced the perfect bounce and became a staple of the table tennis equipment set.

Not only did the celluloid ball produce the perfect pop, but players and spectators alike became fascinated by the significant sound that emanated with each bounce off the paddle. People began to call the sport by that same distinct sound, and variants of the game's name started to sprout up, including whiff-whaff, pom-pom, clip-clap and ping-pong.

As the game became ubiquitous, two names prevailed: table tennis and ping-pong. To capitalize on the game, a company named J. Jaques & Son Ltd. trademarked "ping-pong" in and manufactured table tennis sets under the same name. In the s, the game crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The Parker Brothers, creators of the board game Monopoly, acquired the rights to ping-pong and started distributing ping-pong sets in the states.

Boy holding two Parker Brothers Ping Pong equipment sets, standing in front of oak trees at South Park for Pittsburgh Courier newsboys picnic, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in . Getty Images

With the prevalence of ping-pong game on the shelves of local stores, ping-pong became a widely accepted and understood name for the game of table tennis. The term ping-pong has gone through what is referred to as a "genericide", when a brand name loses it's distinguishing identity and just refers to the product or service of its kind. It's akin to how people refer to tissues as "Kleenex," the brand name of a tissue.

Today, ping-pong refers to the recreational, leisure activity of the sport of table tennis. Table tennis is still the internationally recognized formal name of the sport. 

At the World Table Tennis Championships held in Nagoya, Japan, the Chinese team was under strict government orders not to interact with the Americans, as relations between the two countries had been tense since the start of the Cold War.

During the tournament, 19-year-old American table tennis player Glenn Cowan boarded the Chinese team's shuttle bus. Zhuang Zedong, the best Chinese table tennis team player, outstretched his hand to Cowan to shake, and the two started to communicate through an interpreter. By the end of the conversation, Zedong gave Cowan a picture of the Huangshan mountains in China. The next day, Cowan reciprocated Zedong's gesture and gifted him a t-shirt with the peace sign. Photographers captured the exchange, and the goodwill between the countries became international headlines. Before the tournament concluded, the U.S. table tennis team was met with a surprising offer &#; an all-expense paid trip to China, courtesy of the Chinese government and Chairman Mao.

After getting clearance from the government and President Nixon, nine U.S. table tennis players traveled to China to play exhibition table tennis matches. These "friendship matches," as they were called, marked the first time Americans visited China in decades and historically helped improve country and cultural relations. President Nixon documented the momentous sporting occassion in his memoir, and thus, the term "ping-pong diplomacy" was born. 

I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a ping-pong team.

Players of China and the United States take part in a table tennis friendly match in Beijing, China, April 13, . Getty Images

The visit to China has been recorded in countless publications and reenacted in the film Forrest Gump. The fictional character Forrest Gump found himself on disabled leave from the Vietnam War and picked up what he called ping-pong.

"I was so good that some years later, the Army decided I should be on the All-America ping-pong team," said Forrest Gump in the film.

The name ping-pong inspired the virtual world, when video game manufacturer Atari developed the game Pong. The game was the digital version of table tennis, and the name derives from ping-pong. Pong was the first commercially successful video game and changed gaming forever. 

Beside the silver screen and the digital game front, ping-pong is still regularly referenced to this day, on TV, at your local recreation center, and even in song &#; thanks to musical artist Enrique Iglesias, who sampled the sound of a table tennis ball bounce in a song. The song is aptly titled, "Do You Know? (The Ping Pong Song)".  It's a surprise that Iglesias used the sound of a table tennis ball, not a tennis ball, as Iglesias's partner is former Olympic tennis participant Anna Kournikova. 

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Table Tennis Tables Manufacturer.