Rubber balls amazed Europeans only after Columbus
A ball is usually a sphere, sometimes an egg shape, and countless games follow wherever it goes. Rubber balls, now everywhere, were unknown outside the Americas until after Columbus's voyages, when the Spanish became the first Europeans to watch them bounce in the Mesoamerican ballgame.
A ball is a round object, usually a sphere but sometimes egg-shaped. In ball games, play follows the ball as it is hit, kicked, or thrown, and balls also serve simpler pastimes such as catch and juggling. Because they are such familiar spheres, the word stretches to anything roundish, as when an armadillo or a person curls up into a ball or a hand closes into one.
Many balls today are made of rubber, a material unknown outside the Americas until after Columbus; the Spanish were the first Europeans to see solid bouncing rubber balls, used most notably in the Mesoamerican ballgame. In English the word first appears in this playful sense in 1205, in Layamon's Brut, which describes people driving balls far across the fields; it came from Middle English bal and, before that, Old Norse.
Ball games are shown on Egyptian monuments, and in Homer's Odyssey Nausicaa is playing ball with her maidens when Odysseus first sees her. Greeks saw ball play as a gentle supplement to harsher athletics, good for suppleness and grace and mostly left to boys and girls. Romans tied it to the baths, where a room called the sphaeristerium was set aside, and used at least three sizes of ball, including the small pila for catching games and the heavy, stuffed paganica.
Many modern balls are pressurized, some at the factory, like tennis and squash balls, others by players, like volleyballs and basketballs, and nearly all slowly leak. Under the ideal gas law their pressure rises and falls with temperature, and a hard-hit squash ball heats up through inelastic collisions. Other balls are solid, uniform in hockey and lacrosse or layered in baseball and cricket, while pickleball and floorball use hollow ones. Rain or sweat alters surface friction and with it a player's ability to put spin on the ball.
Source: Ball
