Birth of Lawn Tennis
The modern sport is tied to two separate inventions.
Between 1859 and 1865, in Birmingham, England, Major Harry Gem, a solicitor, and his friend Augurio Perera, a Spanish merchant, combined elements of the game of rackets and the Spanish ball game Pelota and played it on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston. In 1872, both men moved to Leamington Spa and in 1874, with two doctors from the Warneford Hospital, founded the world's first tennis club.
In December 1873, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised a similar game for the amusement of his guests at a garden party on his estate of Nantclwyd in Llanelidan, Wales. He based the game on the older real tennis. At the suggestion of Arthur Balfour, Wingfield named it "lawn tennis," and patented the game in 1874 with an eight-page rule book titled "Sphairistike or Lawn Ten-nis", but he failed to succeed in enforcing his patent.
Read more about this topic: History Of Tennis
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