A game played with books and corks
Table tennis began in Victorian England as an after-dinner game. Players used a line of books as the NET, a champagne cork or a rounded ball of string as the ball, and sometimes the lids of cigar boxes as bats. It went by names like wiff-waff and gossima. In 1901 a London company, J. Jaques and Son, registered PING PONG as a trade name, after the sound the ball made on the TABLE, and sold the American rights to Parker Brothers, the makers of Monopoly.
The game changed when light, hollow celluloid balls arrived from America around 1900. They bounced properly and made real rallies possible.
The sponge bat and the spin war
Early bats were plain wood or covered with a thin sheet of RUBBER studded with PIPS, little pimples of rubber. At the 1952 world championships in Bombay, a Japanese player called Hiroji Satoh won using a bat covered in thick sponge. It was nearly silent and made the ball fly off at strange speeds, and his opponents could not cope. Rules followed to limit the thickness of the covering.
Modern rubbers grip the ball so well that SPIN is the heart of the game. TOPSPIN makes the ball dip down and kick forward off the table; BACKSPIN makes it float and check. A LOOP is a big topspin stroke, and a CHOP is a defensive stroke that puts on heavy backspin from well back. Asian players often use the PENHOLD grip, holding the BAT the way you hold a pen.
Ping-pong diplomacy
In 1971, at the world championships in Japan, an American player called Glenn Cowan missed his team bus and climbed on to the bus of the Chinese team instead. China and the United States had had no official contact for more than twenty years. The Chinese star Zhuang Zedong shook his hand and gave him a silk picture as a gift, and photographs of the moment went round the world.
Days later, the American team was invited to visit China, the first American group to be welcomed there in decades. The next year President Richard Nixon visited Beijing. Our Cold War page covers the stand-off that the table tennis players helped to thaw.
Rules made for television
After the 2000 Olympics, the ball was made bigger, from 38 to 40 millimetres across, to slow it down so viewers could follow the RALLY. Games were shortened from 21 points to 11 in 2001, with a DEUCE at 10–10 meaning a player must win by two. For a fair SERVE, the ball must rest on an open palm and be tossed at least sixteen centimetres into the air, so the server cannot hide spin in the fingers.
A ball that clips the EDGE of the table counts, but one that hits the side does not. Players switch between FOREHAND and BACKHAND in a split second, and a high ball is an invitation to SMASH or BLOCK, with only the BOUNCE on the table to judge by. Americans often call the bat a PADDLE. Table tennis joined the Olympics in Seoul in 1988, and China has won the great majority of the gold medals since.