2012 London to London

It is widely accepted that table tennis,
or “parlour tennis”, began in England
in about 1880, as an indoor derivative
of lawn tennis or of its predecessor, real
tennis.
In the beginning it was a fairly basic
game with a variety of improvised
equipment. Rackets might be of plain
wood, of wood covered with cork or
sandpaper, or of vellum stretched on a
wooden frame. Nets were in a range of
heights and might not actually be nets
at all but solid, consisting, perhaps, of
rows of books on end; balls could be
made of cork or rubber. Tables, which
were often dining tables, could be of
different sizes and heights.
There was no standard system of scoring;
to win a game might mean scoring
11, 21, 50 or even 100 points. Service
could be by means of a first bounce on
the server’s court, as at present, or by
the ball being struck direct on to the opponent’s
court, as in lawn tennis, except
that in this case the ball had to be struck
underhand from below the level of the
server’s waist. There were also several
variations of doubles play; this lack of
uniformity was not important while
table tennis was merely a light-hearted
parlour game, not to be taken too seriously.
However, towards the end of the
century its character began to change.
In the late 1890s a former English international
cross country runner, James
Gibb, brought home from a business
trip to the U.S.A. some celluloid balls
which he thought might be better for
table tennis than the rubber balls which
he had been using. It was his view that
the sound that they made when struck
with the vellum-covered rackets in common
use, was “ping-pong”.
He suggested this to a friend and neighbour,
John Jaques, a prominent sports
goods manufacturer, as a more suitable
name for the game than “Gossima”,
which Jaques had registered in 1891.
John Jaques agreed and forthwith registered
the title throughout the world,
London, the Home of Table Tennis
Berlin
1926
Photo: Table Tennis 1926
London to London 9