According to the Tennis History museum, organized "ball games" were common in France in the 11th and 12th centuries. A crude form of tennis became popular among 12th-century French monks. The game resembled handball in that the monks hit balls against the walls of their monastery using their hands. Eventually, the monks began stringing a rope across their monastery courtyard and hitting balls to one another by hand over this rope. By the 13th century, the French nobility became enchanted with hand tennis, and hundreds of courts sprang up in France.
Ball
The tennis ball began as a humble wad of wool or hair covered in leather or cloth and secured with string. By the 1500s, tennis balls were made with cork cores and looked similar to a baseball. As reported on AlthleticScholarships.net, the process for vulcanizing rubber was invented in 1850, which resulted in the emergence of durable and bouncy tennis balls that were the forebears of the modern tennis ball.
Racquet
In the early days of tennis, it was played like handball, with the ball being hit against walls by the players' bare hands. Eventually, tennis players wore simple gloves, which then evolved to gloves with webbed fingers. The use of a solid paddle was then adapted to a paddle with a webbed body and solid handle, resembling the modern tennis racquet. By 1500, players used racquets with sheep-gut webbing and wooden frames. According to the Tennis History Museum's website, the modern interlacing of racquet strings, which consists of main and cross strings, began in the 1860s.
Court
When tennis moved from the courtyards to indoor handball-like courts, the net was purposefully lower in the middle at only 3 feet high, while the ends of the net were 5 feet high. Tennis fell out of favor in the 1700s but had a reemergence in the 1800s when outdoor grass courts became all the rage. Since croquet was already popular, existing smooth, grass croquet courts were the logical choice to modify into tennis courts. Modern tennis courts were established in 1877 when the first Wimbledon Tournament was held by the All England Club.
Attire
In the 1500s, male players wore long, ballooning knickers over stockings. This style of tennis wear later evolved to long trousers and formal shirts. In the early 1900s, male players wore white-only flannel trousers and shirts. In 1932, Henry Austin wore shorts at Wimbledon and forever changed the tennis dress code. In the late 19th century, the first women players wore long dresses and corsets made purposely from heavy, cumbersome materials to ensure that the stiff dresses would not rise and expose the women's ankles. When World War II made stockings hard to find, women began to wear billowy, long white shorts under their dresses, and the bare-legged trend continued after the war, forever banishing stockings from the tennis court.
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