Table tennis game was invented by the English Sports Company John Jaques & Son in 1898. This company was the first who is manufacturing the table tennis set. For your information, before this, people used rackets for bats and paddles with velum stretched over an outer casing that is attached to a handle. It is very unique. The named for this game before is ping pong and now people still used this name and to make it more formal it is changing to table tennis.
As the popularity of the game rises rapidly, two associations were invented to make it well-known. The associations are “Table Tennis Association” and “Ping Pong Association”. Obviously, there are so many opinion about the game. This is because people think that ping pong and table tennis are two different things.
Below is the timeline for table tennis game. I refer to the webpage www.allabouttabletennis.com :
- 1880s - Who invented table tennis?
- 1937 - Introducing a time limit on games
- 1937 - Lowering the height of the net
- 1937 - Banning finger spin serves
- 1952 - Changing from hard bat table tennis to sponge rackets
- 1953 - China first entering the World Championships
- 1971 - China offering Ping Pong Diplomacy
And more recently ...
- 1980s - The introduction of speed glue
- 1980s - The introduction of combination rackets
- 1986 - The introduction of the two color rule
- 1988 - Becoming an Olympic sport
- 1996 - The formation of the ITTF Pro-Tour
- 2000 - Changing the ball size from 38mm to 40mm
- 2000 - Separating the World Championship events
- 2001 - Changing the scoring system from 21up to 11up
