History of Ping-Pong

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Judy Hoarfrost from Paddle Palace Table Tennis Company and our topic today is the history of table tennis. Table Tennis got its beginnings in the 1980's in England. It started out as a parlor game with early attempts to bring tennis indoors to play at a table. Early names for the sport were Whiff-Whaff, Gossima; Flim-Flam, Ping-Pong; they say it's because of the sound that the ball made when it hit the racket. The early rackets had a covering often of vellum or parchment that made interesting sound. I brought a little bit of equipment here from the old days. This one's from the early 1900's. Some of the earlier ones have even longer handles than this one. The name Ping-Pong stuck and it got a trademark. Hamley Brothers out of England trademark it, they join with J. Jackson Sons and then it was bought out by Parker Brothers. In modern day it's actually own by Escalade Sports which is a American company. But during early days because of the strict enforced in some of the trademark, you can only use the equipment called Ping-Pong when you play in the tournament. It was a, it was getting restricted for the sports. So they changed the name to Table Tennis and that's why we call it Table Tennis today. We, a major breakthrough for the sport was in 1900 when the celluloid ball was invented. Before that they were using cork balls, rubber balls; but the celluloid ball and here's an early one. It has, the old ones had seams in them; but they, it allowed the sport to become a little faster, a little more exciting and it got quite popular then. The 1920's to the 1050's was the hard bat era in Table Tennis. And in those days they used a hard bat which is a wooden bat with pips out of rubber and no sponge. It wasn't nearly fast, as fast and spinny as what we use today but it was well known for long points and there was the longest point in competition history was during that time period, 1936 at the World Championships in Prague, the first point in one match went longer than two hours. The next era of Table Tennis would; I would call the sponge technology era. 1952, a fellow name Hiroji Satoh out of Japan showed up at the World Championships in Bombay, India with a sponge racket and it was quite a sensation. It was fast; it was spinny and he won the World Championships. He's the first Asian to ever win the World's. Before that it was always a European dominance. And he began the, you know, few decades of the Asian dominance after that. Let's jump up to 1971, that's a year that's quite significant for myself. It was the year of Ping-Pong diplomacy. I was at, a World, first World Championships on the US team in Nagoya, Japan when the Chinese team invited us to go to, to China. And of course before 1971, China was quite close to the rest of the world; so we, we helped with Ping-Pong diplomacy, we helped opened up relations between China and the US and in the following year in 1972, was when President Nixon made his historic trip to China. Another major year for Table Tennis I suppose you would say was 1988 when Table Tennis joined the Olympics in Seoul, Korea. Table Tennis today , it's the fastest racket sport in the world. It's the second largest and most popular participation sport in the world; next to soccer and it has the largest number of member associations in the International Table Tennis Federation. So if you're interested in learning more about Table Tennis, do search for local Table Tennis club. We'd be happy to have you come to paddlepalace.com. We have lots of information there about Table Tennis. But we have a great interesting history and we have a bright future."