Table Tennis

Table tennis began as a Victorian-era parlor game in England, played on dining tables with improvised equipment -- early balls were even made from champagne corks. The turning point came in 1901, when English enthusiast James Gibb brought celluloid balls back from a trip to the United States; their higher, more consistent bounce transformed the game from casual amusement into something with reproducible physics, and celluloid became the standard ball material within a couple of years.

The game's popular nickname, "ping-pong," was trademarked by the British firm J. Jaques & Son in 1901 and later sold to Parker Brothers for the US market. Because "ping-pong" became a protected brand name, the sport's various national associations adopted "table tennis" as the official generic name instead. The International Table Tennis Federation was founded in Berlin on January 16, 1926, formalizing the sport under standardized international rules.

The now-standard 40mm ball wasn't always the rule -- table tennis used a smaller 38mm ball until 2000. The ITTF changed the specification because players' use of increasingly powerful "speed glue" on their paddle rubber had made the game so fast that rallies were becoming too short and too difficult to follow on television. Switching to the larger 40mm ball increased air resistance, which slowed ball speed and spin just enough to lengthen rallies and make the sport more watchable as a televised spectator sport, without altering the table or net dimensions themselves.