There is some comfort for us all in this latest example of man outlasting machine. While 86-year-old Byron Nelson contemplates yet another appearance as an honorary starter of the US Masters at Augusta National six months from now, the machine to which he lent his name is being consigned to the scrapheap.
Officials of the US Golf Association (USGA) have decided that Iron Byron, their mechanical tester of golf balls since 1974, has served its usefulness. To keep pace with the increase in technological wizardry from ball manufacturers, testing is being taken to a higher level.
We are informed that Iron Byron's replacement is a ball launcher resembling a baseball pitching machine set on its side. It fires balls through a 70-foot long flight-monitoring tunnel, known as the Indoor Test Range (ITR), and readings are assessed by a computer software package capable of plotting a ball's flight pattern and distance.
At the moment, machines old and new are working together, but Iron Byron's activities are gradually being reduced from five days a week down to one day. And it will effectively cease to function at the end of October.
Designed by the True Temper shaft company, the original machine - a clone was built at a later stage - was brought to the USGA's New Jersey headquarters to help their technical staff enforce the Overall Distance Standard (ODS) for golf balls. That was 24 years ago, when it was originally referred to as Iron Mike.
On hearing it so described, Bob Sommers, the then editor of the USGA's magazine Golf Journal, got somewhat agitated. "Stop calling it Iron Mike," he said. "If you want to call it anything, call it Iron Byron, given that the machine's swing was patterned after him."
Using a Spalding, laminated-wood driver with an extra-stiff shaft, it would pound out balls at 30-second intervals under a standard set of conditions. Though each ball has its unique launch and flight characteristics, Iron Byron's tests were not concerned with determining such factors. The new tests will.
"We have reached the culmination of 10 years' work in the field of ball-testing," said USGA technical director Frank Thomas. "The new technology will give us the scope to perform tests we've never done before."
It should be noted, however, that tournament professionals and leading amateurs were used as product testers, long before the introduction of automatons. "The top players, when they got loose and in a groove, were almost as good as Iron Byron," said Carl Scheie, who began as head of development for the MacGregor company in 1974.
His view was helped, no doubt, by the fact that one such tester happened to be Jack Nicklaus. "I had never previously been exposed to that level of talent," Scheie went on. "It was unbelievable to me how the pros could just dump balls in a pile out on that (testing) range.
"Nicklaus was the ultimate. His sensitivity was mind-boggling. One day, we were out there with two batches of balls that were identical, except that in one batch the elastic thread was about two-hundredths of an inch thicker. He could pick out the difference every time."
A landmark theory about the dynamics of a golf ball's flight was formulated 100 years ago by Scottish professor P Guthrie Tait, father of Frederick Tait, who won the British Amateur Championship in 1896 and 1898. As it happened, the 1896 final, in which Tait beat Harold Hilton by 8 and 7, was the first time the title was decided over 36 holes.
Father and son often played together, and the professor concluded that young Freddie's powerful drives defied the law of gravity by the manner of the ball's delayed upshoot before staying a lengthy time in the air. He then proved in a crude test that all normal golf shots featured underspin, which was the source of the flight-enhancing phenomenon known as aerodynamic lift.
IN AN article on the subject published in a leading sports magazine, professor Tait removed the first layers of mystery surrounding the speed, spin and trajectory of a ball in flight. Now, 100 years on, the USGA have devised formulae which will form the basis for the latest, highly-sophisticated approach to ball-flight testing.
Up to now, the USGA were concerned simply with a ball's initial launch speed. That regulation went back to the second World War, when the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago suggested its introduction.
It led to the construction of a 10.5-foot tube through which the ball was fired for monitoring. So it was that a speed-limit of 250 feet per second (fps), with a two-per-cent tolerance, was incorporated in the Rules of Golf in 1942.
Limiting a ball's initial velocity to 250 fps places a major restraint on its potential for overall distance. But the ball's aerodynamic qualities of lift and drag began to improve substantially through the 1960s. "By the early 1970s, distance had become paramount because, as an industry, we started figuring out how to create it," recalled engineer Tom Hardman, who joined the Wilson staff in 1973. "But the industry lacked engineering talent in general and aerodynamic knowledge in particular."
Against that background, Wilson turned to a testing team at the massive, Convair missile manufacturing plant, based in San Diego. There, low-speed wind-tunnel tests highlighted the importance of dimple shape, size and depth.
"Our Convair data was not as reliable as Iron Byron, but it allowed us to isolate aerodynamics for the first time and measure their effect," said Hardman. And while these tests were in progress, other manufacturers were experimenting with golf-ball covers and such revolutionary construction as a two-piece ball with a solid centre and no elastic-thread windings.
The USGA paid $25,000 for the first of its two robot golfers. Then came an official Overall Distance Standard which limited average carry and roll to no more than 280 yards, plus a tolerance of six-per-cent, giving a maximum of 296.8 yards.
From dawn to dusk, during a normal testing season from April to October, Iron Byron, with four human assistants, tested balls against those parameters. For each shot, the ball was teed and the robot would be wound into its backswing position.
After the ball's lot number was keyed into a computer, it would be struck and its landing point determined through triangular sensors embedded in the range. Two observers would then record the landing and ending points.
Twelve balls from each lot would be struck, but it would sometimes be necessary to repeat the procedure, because the club's metal shaft was liable to break about every 9,000 swings.
The first list of conforming balls in 1976 comprised fewer than 50, compared with 1,640 from plants in 14 countries in the list published last spring. It wasn't until about 13 years ago that Iron Byron had a permanent space at the USGA's new test centre.
Interestingly, when the facility was opened, a golf hole (4.25 inches in diameter) was cut on a centre-line, 250 yards from the tee. By the time it was filled in two years later, Iron Byron had made seven holes-in-one.
But the pace of change in recent years has been quite staggering. One manufacturer already markets balls designed to perform in tandem with drivers made by two of its competitors. Others are capable, during the manufacturing process, of dialling in discrete differences that optimise the spin-rate, launch, carry and roll of modern balls.
Looking towards the new testing procedures, Thomas said: "We wrote the ODS rules 22 years ago with a clause saying we would switch from an arbitrary set of launch conditions to case-by-case launch conditions when and if we acquired the means to do so. Now, that time has come."
Ostensibly, the landmark changes are quite complex, but they will continue to determine whether the ball meets five simple standards: minimum size, maximum weight, spherical symmetry, maximum initial velocity and overall distance. It is the last step - formerly Iron Byron hitting a ball for maximum distance - which changes to an indoor test, based on mathematical and scientific principles.
Meanwhile, to account for any temperature effects, the balls are first placed in an incubator for at least three hours at a temperature of 23 degrees Celsius (73.4 F). Manufacturers submit balls during two testing periods - spring, when roughly 600 balls are tested, and autumn, when the total is generally 400.
In what appears to be a daunting challenge, officials of the USGA are confident that whatever the technological advances and general sophistication of missile or projectile, the size of the hole is likely to remain an elusive target for the foreseeable future.
As one industry technician commented acidly: "The only remaining challenge is the delivery system - the player swinging the club."
