Yes, this really happened: there was a time when some golf balls glowed… literally!
In the 1930s, losing a golf ball wasn’t just a nuisance: for many, like engineer and amateur Dr William Davidson, it was a constant and costly headache. Between treacherous ponds and dense undergrowth, every missed shot became a mini-tragedy. Davidson, tired of searching for balls as if they were lost treasure, tried everything: magnets, floating markers, chemical lights… but no solution worked at all.
Until one day, what seemed like science fiction became his solution: a golf ball with a radioactive core.
Yes, you read that right. Davidson created a ball containing a tiny radium core encased in rubber, whose radiation was perfectly detectable with a Geiger counter. So even if it fell under water or got lost in vegetation, the ball could be located with surgical precision.
The problem? Playing an entire round with a radiation source in your pocket was not exactly what we would consider ‘safe’ today. Although the risk was low, it was still crazy.
What Davidson did achieve was to go down in the annals of golf with one of the most unusual inventions ever recorded. A mixture of genius, desperation and a touch of ‘mad scientist’, it shows just how far the passion for the sport can go.
Moral of the story: if you lose a ball, maybe you don’t need a nuclear laboratory… but at least you can laugh at the thought that someone did try.