How Ping Pong Works

While Asia is well-known for being cuckoo for Ping Pong, the game was actually invented by bored British Victorian aristocrats. Go back and forth about Ping Pong’s place in the world with Chuck and Josh.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Cherry over there.
And this is Stuff you Should Know, the podcast about
ping pong. I'm excited about this one. I'm glad. I

(00:26):
love ping pong. Are you any good? I don't think
we've ever played, have we? I don't think we have. Crazy.
That was that one time we were at that ping
pong bar and we just stared at each other for
an hour, but we never played. I remember that as
being air hockey. I remember the staring. Uh. Yeah, dude,
I love ping pong. I'm pretty good for you know,

(00:50):
just a recreational pong er. Uh. And and I finally
got a table. I'll get an outdoor table. Oh nice,
and an outdoor table, fancy? I love it. Yeah, that's great.
I don't have room inside. Well yeah, if you have
an outdoor table, it doesn't matter. Yeah. I got one
under the deck. Very nice, and it's just the best.
I'd love. I have had many times in my life

(01:11):
where and now it's just kind of when I can
get someone over or family, and I have a window.
But um, at various points in my life, I have
played a lot of ping pong, including when I lived
in l A my buddy John Pindell, chef John, you
know John. Um, he was I think living in a
place that had an outdoor table. And this was outdoor

(01:33):
in Los Angeles, so it's kind of great. It's just
out there in the backyard. Um. And then my brother
and I have had epic, legendary ping pong battles at
his house. Oh yeah, fund basement, like like matches, like
a single game that went on forever kind of thing.
Just I mean, not that, but like two out of three,
Like every time family is over there, at one point

(01:55):
we will disappear and everyone's like word Scott and Chuck o,
and we're down there and at it. That's awesome. It's
just so much fun. I love ping pong. I love
ping pong too. But my eyes are kind of open.
I realized I'm not quite as much the ping pong
officionado as I once thought I was. Yeah, between you
and this article, I realized I'm a total schlub when

(02:16):
it comes to ping pong. Yeah, I'm not bad. O good. Um,
So we're talking ping pong today and chuckle, you can
just phone this one in. I had to do a
lot of extensive shoe leather research on this one. Um.
But the the idea of ping pong when you think
of it, especially in this the twenty one century, most

(02:38):
people think of um, China when they think of ping pong,
especially here in the US, but really worldwide, because China
is nuts for ping pong, and there are plenty of
other countries too that love ping pong. Don't get me wrong.
Sweden is known as one of the major homes of
ping pong. The Japanese love ping pong. It's basically almost

(02:58):
every country except a Erica really has a thing for
ping pong. Here it's just you know, fun recreational stuff.
In other countries it has taken very very seriously, and
there are pockets that take it seriously here too. There's
the US Table Tennis Association, which has been around since
the thirties. But I think what I mean, as far
as the public goes thinking about table tennis players, we

(03:21):
don't exactly like put them hoist them on our shoulders
and carry them around the room after a match like that,
Like might what might happen to them? In other countries.
That's a very good point. But but it's it's sort
of more of a recreational Like you said, there are
some competitive players, to be sure, and organizations, but it's
a it's a sport you can play while you're drinking

(03:42):
a beer. You know. Sure, now you don't want to
do that if you are actually competitive pro table tennis player.
But I say all that chuck, because, um, while we
think of China's like the home of table tennis, it
actually is a British um invention. Did you know that
I did? Well, of course you did your table tennis pro. No,

(04:04):
I mean I knew that just because it was a
variation of tennis, which the Brits also gave us. Um,
it is a racket sport, which, um, you can include
things like bad mitten and uh, smosh ball and smash ball.
What are those things they played down at ben As Beach.
What is that called pickle ball? Is that what it is?

(04:25):
It's basically like a miniature tennis court. I think it's
called smash ball. Okay, I don't know. People are yelling
at in their car right now at me. I mean
I've heard I think you're talking about pickleball. Is it pickleball?
It's just sort of like a shrunken down tennis court. Um,
But obviously they're playing it looks like tennis with oversized
ping pong paddles, right exactly, Okay, yeah, that's pickleball, all right.

(04:47):
It might be called smash ball too, you know, there's
a regional difference in the grinder hero that kind of thing.
I think pickle I think smashball is something else entirely.
Are you thinking of smash mouth? God? That again, um,
reference to our lives show that we just did. Okay,
But what I was saying was it is a known

(05:09):
as a racket sport or a racket game wherein you
have a racket, you hit something over a net to
another human or maybe a robot even uh as we'll
get to. But uh, and there's a there's a court,
there are boundaries of some kind that you need to
hit it in. It's not just a crazy fee for
all right exactly. You can't just like win a point

(05:30):
by crushing it over your opponent's head. That would be fun.
It takes skill and finesse, and it even takes more
skill in finesse than like tennis does. Like lawn tennis
because lawn tennis well so, so there's a difference. There's
royal tennis, which is played like I'm trying to remember
what movie it appeared in. Um, maybe it was even

(05:51):
down to Nabby, I'm not sure, but whether you play
it indoors, it's like tennis indoors and there's like the
ball is hard and wrapped in cloth and squash. No. No,
there's royal tennis, and then um there's lawn tennis or
modern tennis is what it's called. And ping pong is
a variation on modern tennis, but it takes more finesse
because yes, you can smash the ball and that is

(06:12):
a way to go aggressive attacks style um playing. But
there's also a really good way to play too, which
is is strictly defensive and it's all finesse and spin
and we'll we'll see like there's a lot of thought
that goes into it, which is why if you notice,
if you start to look around at who plays table tennis,

(06:32):
you'll find that there are table tennis um tables and
in places where they're very smart people like m I.
T has a table tennis club, and CERN has a
table tennis club and one of their one of their cafeterias.
Like smart people like this because there's a lot of
physics involved into it, UM and there's not a lot
of running around either. Yeah, you don't see him. Uh,

(06:56):
you don't see dumb dumps because they're just like I
don't get it, yeah, like smash ball paddle. But we
do know that the although we don't know like the
the inventor. There's not one person that is credited with
its invention um. But the story goes that British soldiers
in South Africa or India, we're board and you know,

(07:18):
the weather wasn't so great and they were probably drinking,
and so they came up with this little, smaller version
of tennis played on a table um, as the story goes,
using cigar box lids, using sabar o lids and a
whittled down champagne cork to make it round. Which you

(07:38):
know that that wouldn't be a bad little first first
go I saw that exact same story was attributed to
some wealthy UM British aristocrats who were bored one day.
That sounds about right, but there seems to be unanimous
UM agreement that it was on a table with some
cigar box lids and a cork whittled down. Yeah, and

(07:59):
so you know, it grow from there, it grow it growed.
Excuse me, uh, I think he's still got another try left.
It growed from there into wait wait, wait you mean
grow right? You're kidding, right, okay, okay, that's the first
time I knew you were kidding. The second time I
was like, chuck, looking straight man, Um, you really are

(08:23):
It grew from there and the names changed various times.
The first UM manufactured, actually put out and sell ping
pong tables was the Jacques Games Company and they called
it Gossama. Um. There was another trademarked name with whaff,
which was the Slayinger Company's h name, and the world

(08:43):
was like, you got another try there. That was one
called flim Flam. I don't know if that was trademarked
from a company or if that was just a nickname.
And all these with with the exception of Gossama, they
were meant to to um emulate the sound the ball
made going back and forth. Right, really yeah, yeah, whiff
whaff It didn't sound like whiff waff at all. What

(09:04):
about flip flam? Nope, maybe the sound of the paddle.
It sounds like a whiff win, a whaff, but not
the ball. Okay, fine, but gossima meant it was like
after gossamer, which was kind of fine and thin and
um elegant, which was like the ball play. It was
what that was describing. They were all terrible, terrible names.

(09:27):
I can't believe we just said that. So. Uh. They
did use cork at first, but they didn't bounce great.
Rubber wasn't good because it had too much bounce. Um.
The rackets were really kind of crazy looking at first.
Someone had really long handles, kind of look like a
bad mitten racket um with a vellum stretched over a
wooden frame. But they were not Uh, they broke on

(09:49):
the table and stuff. So they were really kind of
refining it in those early years as far as the
equipment goes, right, Um, and I think it was that
was it Jaque, No, you know, it was Jacques the J. J.
Jackuin's son who um were the ones that were selling
those like what you just described, just kind of cheap,

(10:12):
not well made, not really well thought out equipment for
ping pong, which it wasn't called ping pong at the
time until the late eighteen nineties when that same company,
Jay Jacques and Son, who were a sporting goods outfit,
started calling it ping pong in their catalog. It just
converted from gossima over to ping pong through these guys. Yeah,

(10:34):
and it was um before that. In eighty five, there
was an attempt to patent it as table tennis by
guy named James Debonshire. But uh, two years later he
abandoned that pursuit. I don't know if it was just
taking too long or if he saw the writing on
the wall, but he he left that behind and then
it would be um. Like you said. Nineteen o one

(10:55):
was when Jean Jack trademarked at ping pong name yep.
And then Parker Brothers bought the North American or at
least American rights to use ping pong exclusively and they
brought ping pong to the United States with that um.
And this is the reason why if you you know,
look up any professional association or any um competitive like

(11:16):
ping pong group, they always refer to as table tennis
because ping pong is a trademark, table tennis is not. Plus, also,
over the years, ping pong has gotten an association with
people like me. Yeah, just people having fun playing it,
where table tennis has been the route that you know,
most competitive. Um that that that it did notes competitiveness,

(11:38):
competition pro kind of thing. But I think if you're
just hanging around the locker room or whatever with some
table tennis pros, they'll refer to it as ping pong
and no one's like, oh, I can't believe you just
called it that, and you were like, no, that's locker
room talk. So uh. The same year that ping pong
was trademarked, in nineteen o one, there was an Englishman
named James Gibb. He found these celluloid balls when he

(12:02):
went to the US that were just it wasn't for
table tennis. It was just a toy and novelty toy.
He's like, this is pretty great. Actually, it's pretty lively.
It's light, uh, just the right amount of bounce. And
so I think celluloid is kind of like the route
we should take. And everyone seemed to agree and that
sort of became the de facto ping pong ball, right,

(12:24):
did say that way forever. Celluloid is a type of plastic.
It's super flammable, like it's what film stock, like camera
film was made from forever um. But like I said,
it's very flammable and your ball is gonna go up
in flames if you pass it over a candle, like
if you're lighting your game by candles. So that's not
very good. But that was an enormous change that pushed

(12:45):
ping pong way forward, because up to that point, a
corkball didn bounced very well. Rubber ball bounced too much.
You couldn't really play ping pong like we see it today.
It was more like, oh, sir, oh sorry, here's another service.
Oh sorry, here's another service. My point, it was just boring.
When that guy came along with the celluloid balls and
introduced him for ping pong play, that was it made

(13:07):
it fun. Finally, ping pong finally became fun. Yeah. Just
a year after that to the paddle, and this is
all sort of aligning perfectly. The paddle underwent a big
change um over the years proceeding. They had used cork
to cover them and leather sometimes. I saw that you
can still buy leather covered ping pong paddles, and Tiffany's yeah,

(13:27):
I could totally see that pearl handled leather, leather facing. Uh,
but they couldn't land on the right materials, and then
Attwo at a tournament, a man named ec Good found
this dimpled rubber coin mat wrapped it around his paddle
and he's like, this thing is pretty boss. I can
get a little spin on it. We got this ball
from the year before, and everything sort of clicking at

(13:50):
this point, right. That was so you've got the great ball,
You've got the great covering, um, and now Ping Pong
is ready to explode, and it started to and then
it just stopped. Let's take a break, okay, all right,
that's a good cliffhanger and find out what killed Ping
Pong right after this. Well, now we're on the road,
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or

(14:12):
two from Josh camp Chuck. It's stuff you should know,
all right, all right, So Ping Pong's finally coming into

(14:38):
its own limbs, finally getting good. And then right as
it is, it just it just drops off as a
fad that craze, especially in the United States, and I
think in Europe too. It just kind of went away.
Um And there's no real obvious reason why. But our
old pal ed dug up an example that he thinks
might be behind it. There was an ad for the

(15:00):
National Guard in nineteen fourteen, where one of the major
generals in the National Guards said that they don't want
any ping pong warriors, which implies that the sport was
seen as um effeminate or that you were kind of
a whimp or something if you play ping pong. So
it's possible that like that kind of um uh, the
warlike masculinity rose above it and ping pong got pushed

(15:24):
down as a result. Well. And also World War One
in the Spanish flu um probably put a dent in
in fun games like this overall, I would say, I mean,
that's just a guess. But they had more important, more
important fish to fry than playing ping pong. But came
back right after the war, right right after the war.

(15:44):
And I don't think that it is coincidental that this
was also a time when people started smoking pot a
lot in America, the jazz age UM. So you had jazz, marijuana, cigarettes,
and ping pong. Those are the big three of the
jazz age. Quite a mix, yeah, And then so Parker
Brothers still had their their trademark on this whole thing.
They're like, oh, great, hallelujah, it's the jazz age UM

(16:08):
and they started throwing these competitions with cash prizes, and
celebrities showed up. It was a big deal. Yeah. Imagine
during the marijuana craze too, they were like, this is
great for what we're doing, but we gotta keep score.
And that's a problem, right, somebody's gotta stay sober for this,
Like who what was it? Who served? Was it? No way?
Is it? Seven six? Man? You're way too uptight for this.

(16:33):
So I believe in the twenties is when they started
having these big tournaments Parker Brothers with prizes. Celebrities were
coming out. Um, the i T t F. It was
officially founded in the mid twenties. That's the International Table
Tennis Foundation. Yeah, and they start having world championships in
nineteen six, Yeah, like right off the bat. Yeah, and

(16:56):
it was a big deal. Like obviously they stopped during
World War Two for a peer period of time, but
pretty much every couple of years since ninety six, aside
from the war, Um, they started holding these Uh I
guess would it be bi annual or over two years?
Well that could be, yes, bi annuals over two years,

(17:16):
that's not twice here, I think it can be. That
was one of those things I think you would use
semi semi annual, might even be quarterly. I'm not sure.
I think it can be neither one, just like with weekly. Yeah,
but those first years, uh, Hungarians were the dominant country. Um.
They won eight of the first nine. Um. Four of

(17:38):
those went to the same guy, a guy named Victor
Bara one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, and thirty five. Man,
that's good. Yeah, so he was doing pretty good. But
the United States was not. No, they, like I said,
the U s t t A didn't form until nineteen
thirty three. And even then, if you wanted to go
play really like hih level table tennis, you went to

(18:02):
one place in the entire country, Lawrence's Broadway Courts in
Manhattan Town. You gotta go to New York if you
want to play ping pong. See if you can make
it there. You can make it anywhere in the US,
but don't even try it in Hungary. Yeah, it just wasn't. Uh,
it just didn't catch on like it did in Europe. No,
it didn't. And this is like this is the same,

(18:22):
like there's never I think it was kind of big
in the seventies to again POT in the United States,
but um, it's never been like ex like explosively sustainably
popular like it has in other countries and in particular. Um. So,
the Europeans are dominating table tennis from about the mid

(18:43):
twenties to almost went to the early fifties. Yeah, and
then from thirty to fifty the Soviet Union banned it
for twenty years. That left of Soviet vacuum. Okay, so
so the Hungarians, well, the Hungarians would have been an
Soviet control then, huh. I don't know the answer to
that question. Yeah, I guess they would have been, So

(19:06):
that would have I guess. I wonder if that's when
it moved over to Western Europe. Northwestern Europe, like Sweden
in Germany. Yeah, supposedly the best all time players a Swede.
That's what I've heard too, the Mozart table tenants U
Jean Jean ov Waldner. Oh you with the oh the

(19:30):
gen part, I'm like, I don't know if he's Swedish
and then the ove really got me. Probably not John,
it's probably yahn yn Ova Waldner. Yeah, nice, supposedly the
best ever. So is he contemporary? M hmm, I don't know. Okay, So, um,
so you've got this, You've got Europe dominating America's like,
we're not even trying right now. And this is basically

(19:52):
from the twenties to the early fifties. And then in
n Asia steps in and says, don't forget Asia. UM
in the form of a man named hiro Ji Sato
and Uh. He showed up at the World Championship in
ninety two, UH in Bombay or Mumbai, and he said, hey,
you know how there's no rules about what kind of

(20:13):
paddle I can use or what size it is, or
there's not really a lot of a lot of guidance
on the paddle. Check this out. He had put foam
around his paddle, and boy did that make the ball
bounce back. It increased the speed of the ball tremendously
and he just dominated that that tournament and became world
champion in nineteen fifty two. By the way, that guy

(20:35):
is totally contemporary. He's in his fifties, he's retired now.
I don't know why you would retire from table tennis.
So one thing I read, I read an article about
a kid who is one of the best in the world,
who is actually from America's an Indian American. Um. He Uh,

(20:55):
he trains like he has to train to move around
the table fast off. Well, supposedly, if you're an advanced player,
you can burn up to five calories an hour playing
table tennis. Is that right? That's what they say. That's
a that's a Snickers bar and a half. Yeah, I
mean I work up a sweat. That's that's me as well, though,
So take that in consideration. Yeah, I can sweat playing chess.

(21:19):
I can't wait till you reach the age where you
just walk around in public with a hand towel around
your neck. Who does that? What's his name from the office, Robinson?
Is that his name? Oh Craig, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think he's famous for sort of just draping a
sweat towel over his shoulder. Yeah, why not, you know,
good for him. I'm gonna follow that lead. So there's

(21:41):
worse leads you could follow, for sure. Yeah. So, um
Heirogi Sato showed up with his foam paddled um paddle
or foam covered paddle and just dominate and became the
the hero or the champion of that tournament and of
the world. But there's two legends that happened to him afterward.

(22:02):
One he returned home and was hailed a hero and
a champion by Japan, and two he returned home and
was scorned as a dishonorable winner because he used an
unusual paddle and never played table tennis again. And um,
it turns out that he doesn't show up in any
other tournament after that one. So maybe he was like, well,

(22:24):
I achieved it, I'm gonna go do some other stuff.
Or um, maybe he really was like, this was this
everyone's right, this was dishonorable. I'm never going to play again. Interesting.
I hope there wasn't some nefarious action taken. I hope
so too. So Over the years, uh, a lot of
changes have taken place to make it more um playable

(22:45):
and more and this is like the official rules in competition.
To make it more playable and to make it better
for people watching it. Um, they lower the net by
about an inch over the years, um to make it
guess a little zippier and more fun. Uh, they increase Actually,
not too long ago, in two thousand, they increased the
size of the ball by two millimeters to slow it

(23:08):
down a little bit. Um, because it was getting so
fast people couldn't even follow it. It was like Forrest
Gump up in there and people like it doesn't I mean,
it has to be a I mean it's not a
big TV sport here obviously, but it's a big TV
sport in a lot of the world, Like people watch
this stuff. Yeah, I mean the camera has to be
able to see where the ball is going, which isn't hockey.

(23:28):
You know, people want to see what's going on. They
could do the glowing ball like they did in hockey
for a while. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, same
company that did the ten yard line or the first
down line. Oh right, yeah, was it really yeah, yeah
it was. I think Pat did glowy things, right. Um,
I think we talked about I can't remember what episode

(23:49):
we talked about that one before. But okay, so you
have the foam paddled padded paddle, you've got um balls
that work really well, and um you had have uh
what else, chuck, you have a lowered net. Yeah, you
have a bigger ball you have and and then probably
the cream of the crop. That's not what I'm looking for, man,

(24:13):
am I just no, that's the death below, um the
uh well, the pinnacle. They made it an Olympic Summer sport. Ah, yes, yes,
Which now it's like, okay, now you're not just wasting
your life being a pro table tennis player just just

(24:33):
in it for the pot. You know, you can actually
train to go to the Olympics for your country. That's right,
pretty monumental. Um, should we talk about playing styles a bit?
I think we should. I like where you're I like
where you're going or not going with this next? Well,
uh so the point is made in this article that, um,

(24:53):
table tennis is is a game all about the style
of play, sort of like boxing. You can come out
swinging hard, you can come out with the rope a dope.
You can play defense in boxing, and you can kind
of do that in tennis. You can be really aggressive
and try and set up for the big smashes, or
you could be what's known as a chiseler or a
pusher and just be really fundamentally sound and wait for

(25:16):
your opponent to make a mistake. Right, And that was
Chiseling was huge, um back before the phone paddles, because
that's all you really had. You couldn't you couldn't attack
with a huge, super fast return. I mean you could try,
but it wasn't going to really work. Um, But once
the introduction of foam came around, chiseling became like a decision.

(25:37):
You could also be an attacker as well. Yeah, I
mean I think now you've got to have all of
the weapons in your ping pong arsenal right, exactly. You
know you can play the spin game. You can be defensive,
but you also gotta hang fifteen feet back off the
table and hit those big loop shots, right. Yeah, you
want to be able to do both for sure. So

(25:57):
with the chiselers though, the defensive minded uh people in
this legendary match took place the World Championships between two
of the greatest chiselers of all time, um, a Polish
player named Alex Rlick and a Romanian named Penneth Farcas.
This was such a like, I mean, I've read into

(26:19):
this too. It just doesn't seem like it's possible that
the following took place. Okay, well, that's this is how
it was recorded in nine and Sports Illustrated. All right,
there are a lot of little points here. By the way,
Did you say that the most epic part of this
is it was the first point? Um? Supposedly, the very

(26:42):
first point took two hours and twelve minutes to complete,
so they just kept hitting it back and forth. It
was a two hour and twelve minute volley. It was
zero zero at two hours in twelve minutes. That's how
good these guys were at chiseling or just playing defensively.
Like somebody his do you hit it right back? Somebody
has do you hit it right back? You're not trying

(27:03):
to smash it down their throat. You're just patiently waiting
for them to make a mistake. It's a fast game still,
It's not like playing with a six year old, right,
But the thing is is it's a fast game, but you,
as the player and probably as a spectator, are like
start to feel like you're about to go insane because

(27:23):
you're locked into this zero zero like this. For at
the time ping pong was played to twenty one. Whoever
got to twenty one first, and then you had to
still win by two points. So if this was zero
zero for two hours and twelve minutes, the ball cross
the net twelve thousand times, I just don't know if
I buy it. That's a problem time wise. Yeah, So

(27:44):
here's all the things that supposedly happened. Um a referee
in the match his neck locked up and had to
be replaced. Midpoint, his neck had to be replaced. Yeah,
Orlick switched hands because he got tired and played with
his left hand for a little while every now and then.
I believe that um during ring the point, the I
T T F got together to negotiate shortening the match,

(28:07):
the game to five points instead of twenty one. Right,
But they had to have the proper representatives from the
different countries there, and it air Like was the representative
from Poland, so they couldn't have this meeting without him.
So they had the meeting table side during the match,
like during this point as it was going on, Supposedly

(28:28):
Airlic had a chessboard set up table side and during
the match was also playing chess and saying what move
to make? I don't know about that, That's what he said.
That's why I don't believe any of this. This all
sounds like tall tale. Well there are other people there,
all right, Well, then he played chess, I don't I

(28:48):
don't know about that one, but I do think that
there are definite elements to that. I believe that there
was a two hour and twelve minute period where there
were zero to zero I don't know. Um, at least
that's that's true. Well, there's so much stuff attached to
this it makes me doubt the whole thing. Um. Austrian
players suppose he went to a movie, came back still

(29:09):
during the first point um, and then finally the Romanian
paneth Farcas Mr return erlic goes up one oh, and
then they started on point number two. They get twenty
minutes into that one, and supposedly other members of the

(29:31):
Polish team pulled out knives and bread and a two
ft sausage, thinking that they were going to be there forever,
and this made Farcas basically lose his mind. He lost
his marbles. Like Burger King, he went on the attack.
At that point, he went from being a what do

(29:53):
they call the chiseler to going hard on the attack.
Hit it twice, erlick returned both and then he basically
lost it. Supposedly just blasted the ball over his head
and ran out screaming. I love that story. That's one
of the better ping punk stories around. Yeah, I believe

(30:13):
about it all right, But even if the only thing
you believe is that they were zero zero for two
hours and twelve minutes. Now you keep saying I believe that.
I'm saying even if that is the only thing you believe,
then that's good enough. I don't buy any of it.
What do you think, like that there was a match
between these two and then that's it. Everything else is

(30:33):
made up? No, I think I think Laura has taken
over and that it has been enriched over the years
to where people were going to movies and the dude
was playing chess. Sure, sure, yeah, I just I don't
I don't buy it that it went down like that.
But do you believe that they were zero zero for
two hours and twelve minutes. I don't know if I
believe that or not, because I haven't seen a verified

(30:55):
source other than this guy telling the story. Okay, where
did you see it other than this guy telling the story? Nowhere?
But I mean, like that takes a lot of goal
to just make up that story, tell it to Sports Illustrated,
have it printed in Sports Illustrated, knowing that anybody could
go behind you and say, well, let's look at the
records for that night and see and just say, well,

(31:16):
this guy is totally lying. Is people have goal? Yeah, Well,
you and I are going to agree to disagree, just
to keep things moving, because I think at the very
least they were zero zero for two hours and twelve minutes.
I buy that. Here's what I think. I'm definitely not
gonna say. Well it was in Sports Illustrated what so

(31:36):
it had to be true? Alright, alright, So enough for
waging on Sports Illustrated from you. Hey, and I got
that magazine for many many years. You know who's on
my first cover? Giselle Bunching Muhammad Ali. Oh wow, I
started getting it when I was a kid. Jeez, wow,
do you still have that one? I'll bet it's worth
like seven ten dollars now, I do. I think my

(31:57):
mom kept all the like many many years in a box.
It's kind of fun to go through and look every
now and then. Oh yeah, for sure. All right, so
this fake match happens uh in the nineteen thirties, um
Jewish table tennis players, and we should point out that
many of the early world champions were Jewish men. Um.

(32:18):
They fled Germany for England and then uh Erlick, who
we just mentioned the Polish player was threatened. Obviously, he
was in Poland when the Nazis invaded and he was
sent to Auschwitz and he was literally being led to
the gas chamber when a German Nazi guard recognized him

(32:41):
and spared his life. Yeah, like he was about to die.
And he got moved around from concentration camp to concentration
camp until the Allies liberated him and others from the
concentration camp he was in. And then right after the
war he went right back to table tennis. Yeah, it's
pretty crazy, all right. I think we should take a break,

(33:02):
okay and go talk about Sports Illustrated some more, alright,
that the bastion of and journalism, and we'll be back
right after this. Well, now we're on the road, driving
in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two
from Josh M chuck It stuff you should know, all right,

(33:42):
all right, So Chuck Um, we were talking about like
chiselers and attackers and all that. And at first, if
you played ping pong up until the fifties, up until
Sato showed up with his phone paddle, um, you're basically
just chiseling. Everybody was chiseling. This is a patient, back
and forth game. Once the phone paddles came up and
change the game so radically, like you said, they actually

(34:02):
enlarged the size of the ball to increase the air
assistance to it to slow it down, which was a
huge change for everybody to get used to as well.
I think that was in the two thousands that that
change was made, But from the fifties to the two
thousand's people were just crushing the ping pong ball. It
got really fast and really fast paced. It was fun,
but it got too fast. So um, the the I T.

(34:24):
T F stepped in and said, now we got to
make some changes. And that's some of the other things
that they've done too. They've made changes and rules over
the over the lifetime of ping pong to to make
the game hard and interesting, but also to make it
fun to watch too. Yeah, they now you play to
eleven in competition play um used to be twenty one

(34:46):
for most, uh, just sort of backyard fund players. It's
still twenty one, but these people are these people are
so good though that twenty one. It's just way too
long of a game. You can play a point for
two and a half hour, right, two hours and twelve
minutes to be precise. Uh. They change sometimes the serve rotation,
like how many times you serve in a row before

(35:07):
you switch it up. Um, which side do you play on? Um?
You can't hide the ball when you serve, because you know,
trying just trying to make the game as fair as possible. Um.
The dimensions of the table are kind of interesting if
you're looking at it in meters. Uh. And if you're
from the United States, it's a nine ft long table,

(35:29):
five ft wide, two and a half feet high. But
that's two point seven four meters one point five to
five wide, seventy high. Um. The net is six inches high. Uh,
but that's after they lowered it a bit. Have you
seen how they make balls? Uh? Yeah, like the little factory. Yeah,

(35:51):
you saw like video of it being made. I can
watch that stuff all day long. I know. Same here. Um.
If you if you look at ping pong balls before
their armed into balls, to actually start as little flat
plastic circles, and that that was that is one half
of a ping pong ball. And they take it and
they form it. They press like a like a ball

(36:11):
bearing ping pong ball size ball bearing in hot water
to mold it. And they take two of those two
halves and put them together and seal them. And then
they trim off the fat and there's your ping pong ball.
But that's not the end of the life of the
ping pong ball manufacturing process because the the companies that
make ping pong ball specifically, there's one that's like a

(36:33):
globally dominant, dominating ping pong equipment company called Double Happiness,
which we'll talk about later. But they do so much
quality control it's astounding. Before they settle a ping pong ball. Oh,
I'm sure, Like there's there's a to measure bounce. There's
like a specific amount of bounce that the I T.
T A requires for a ping pong ball, and so

(36:57):
a company will will measure it by dropping it a
set height I think like three millimeters and it has
to bounce back up like two forty two sixty and
they measure it with the digital camera. It has to
have a specific hardness, so that use a robot with
a needle to test the pressure it takes to puncture
it with a needle. Um It's like Casper mattresses, but

(37:17):
they drop a human exactly, they drop, they roll it
down and incline to see where it veers. I mean,
like there's a lot going on there just to make
a ping pong ball that's that's usable in a game.
I think that. I mean, I just think it's top
notch that they take it that seriously, you know, I
mean any competition, uh, sporting ball undergoes incredible testing, right,

(37:42):
Like they just don't throw out an NFL football or
a basketball either or a tennis ball. What it's pretty amazing,
Yeah it is. But ping pong, ping pong balls, That's
what I'm talking about here. I think you, I think
you secretly are kind of making fun of ping pong.
I don't mean to be. I'm just my pong. My
idea of ping pong has changed as a result of

(38:04):
UM researching this. How about that? So the paddles themselves,
they are laminated wood. When you look at him, you
can tell it's sort of pressed together of different woods. Um,
some of them are fire fiberglass. There are carbon fiber paddles,
which I would love to give that a whirl. Yeah,
but I saw that of the thickness has to be
would does that mean there's like carbon fiber in the
middle of it, maybe just to make it like slightly lighter,

(38:26):
would be my guests. Um, there are all kinds of materials,
like from just the regular you can still get like
the sand paper paddles very low fi. But those that
padded rubber on one side, uh, and the textured little
rubber dimples on the other side, which have to be

(38:47):
two different colors, by the way, because the other players
supposedly needs to know which side you're hitting it with
so they know what's coming or you know, to a
varying degree what might be coming. Right, But that's sort
of like the classic paddle that most people have settled
on right now. Yeah, and the the smooth, padded side
would be for chiseling, and the um the dimpled side

(39:10):
would be for attacking and for probably the most important
part of ping pong spin to add spin to the ball. Yeah,
I'm a pretty good spinner. Oh you are, huh, Like,
not just one kind of spin? Can you do multiple
kinds of spin? Yeah? I've got a good batcan spinner
shot that's very fast and then sort of a flick

(39:31):
of the wrist that it just shoots off the paddle
and then has a nice little top spin to it.
And I try to angle that to like that farthest
corner than I can. That's really impressive, Chuck, Well, I
didn't say it was great. At it, But that's the aim.
This is what's going on in your head at least, right, Yeah,
but I'm not like a great uh, I mean, what
do you can call it a smash or a slam

(39:55):
an attacker? Well, just the big you know, Oh that's
ash mouth. Yeah, the smash mouth. I'm not a good
smash mouth or I'm not great. I mean and get
lucky every once in a while, but I still try
because it's such a boss move. It really is pretty cool. Um.
But that's sort of the variation of the loop stroke,
which is what you see on TV when someone just

(40:17):
throws a big hay maker. Uh. It's all in the
hips and the legs, tons of top spin, and that's
sort of like that main shot for what would be
a big smash to me is sort of the regular
shot that people volley back and forth on in competition, right.
And when you when you're doing the loop, it's like
from what I saw, it's an upward chopping motion where

(40:38):
you're just basically bringing the paddle up really quick as
it comes in contact with the ball, which, like you said,
because it tons of top spin. And there's this thing
called the Magnus effect with fluid dynamics. Whereas this ping
pong is moving through the air, the bottom or the
side of it that's spinning into the air is generating
more resistant so there's higher air pressure there then there

(41:00):
is on top and I'm sorry, on the bottom, which
makes the ball fall because there's less air pressure there.
So when you put spin on the ball, depending on
which direction it's going, you can make it go left, right, up, down,
and depending on the type of um the type of
what's it call when you hit the ball, not the grip,
the depending on this, I guess it's the stroke. Depending

(41:24):
on the stroke you use, you can apply different spin
to the ball. But that's the big reason why, like
one side of a ping pong paddle is dimpled so
that you can make contact with the ball and really
kind of grip it while you're giving it that spin. Yeah,
so they're all kinds of grips. Um. The shake hand

(41:46):
grip is sort of if you don't play a lot
of ping pong, it's probably just the standard little grip
that you would want to use. The pinhole grip is
what you see. My brother and Asian players use that
Scott's move, the one with the thumb on the back
side of it. Yeah, it's uh, basically, your thumb and

(42:07):
forefinger kind of wrap around the handle and almost touch
each other, and then your other three fingers are resting
on the back of the paddle itself, and it sort
of sort of looks like you're holding the paddle upside down,
well because you kind of are. Yes, but that's my
brother is a total uh pin holder. Got you? What
about the c Miller grip? Do you ever do that?

(42:28):
That's Danny c Miller. That's I didn't really quite get then.
That's like the shake hand. But what I saw was
like the thumb and forefinger are kind of resting on
the face of the paddle. Sometimes the finger forefinger is
wrapped around sort of on the side of the paddle.
What I saw was that, so you've got your three
your pinky finger, your ring finger, and your index finger

(42:51):
that's on the paddle. Your middle finger are all rap Yeah,
that's on the handle. Your forefinger and your thumb are
like control. They're like up against the edges of the paddle,
and it makes it easier to spin the paddle and
control it. That's what I saw as the c Miller grip. Yeah,
Well it's easier to flip the paddle to use both
sides of it right exactly. So you want to chisel

(43:12):
here and then maybe a little attack there, put some
spin on, and then just push it back. You just
flip it back and forth. Thanks to Danny C. Miller. Yeah,
and I love the next part of this article, which is, like, um,
if you want to know all the rules of ping pong,
go look them up, right, because it will be kind
of boring just to read all those out. But there
are um, I mean, if you're playing in someone's house,

(43:33):
you play house rules, just ask what they are. Be
a good guest, to be a good guests and say
what are the house rules? Because people play differently. Um,
some more not obscure rules but sort of sort of
nitpicky rules that casual players might not know. Um And
depending on on where you play the house rules, it
may take effect or not. You're supposed to toss the

(43:55):
ball at least sixteen centimeters into the air before you serve, right, Um,
My house rule is you just have to have some
air between the like you can't just hold it in
your hand and hit it off your hand. Like, we
don't say it has to be sixteen centimeters, but there

(44:15):
has to be a little bit of air between your hand.
The ball has to be suspended before you serve it.
So what happens if someone violates your house rules? Are
they like tired, tired and feathered? Now you say, dude,
what are you doing? Not cool? Here's a smash mouth
for you. Uh. And you have to serve behind the
in line. Um, that's a pretty standard even and for

(44:36):
house rules, like you're leaning over the table. Oh, I
see what you mean you can't lean forward a couple
of feet because I was going to say, I thought
you were saying, like you have to get it inside
a square? Do you get it to the other square?
And I saw that that's that only applies in doubles. Yeah,
you can serve it to either side when you're playing singles. Right,
and then if you if it touches your hand that

(44:58):
you're holding the paddle with. Apparently according to the I
T T F, your hand is part of the paddle
as far as they're concerned. So if it if it
bounces off of your hand, that's there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah.
I always get the thumb hit though, and it it
always sends it off in a bad direction and I
always go, ah, I'm hit. You need to do more
c Miller more see Miller less thumbsies. The pimples, believe

(45:23):
it or not, those are regulated, Um, they cannot be
larger than two millimeters, But astoundingly, the size of the
paddle is not at all regulated. You could show up
with them a pickle ball paddle if you wanted to,
and they'd be like, yep, it works. Um. But the
foam padding on either side. If you're a competitive table

(45:45):
tennis player, you glue your own foam on and you
can cheat it too, right. Yeah, For a lot of
until the Beijing Olympics, you could from I think the
sixties until the Beijing Olympics, they would use a specific
kind of glue that UM would would it would expand
but at the same time soften the foam underneath the

(46:07):
exterior um of the phone padding. So you've got like
the the layer that like the rubbery layer, and then
underneath that is foam like a spongey material. It would
get into the pores of that spongey material and it
would make that ball bounce even faster, and UM would
just give it an enormous amount of speed. But just
for a short amount of time though, right, right, So

(46:29):
if you were in a tournament, you were pulling off
and then regluing your um your phone pads on multiple
times over the course of that weekend, because you get
about three or four hours of good um um, I
don't know, ricochet return off of those things, um, and
then they would dry up and and it wouldn't be

(46:49):
quite as as useful cheaters. I love the article you
sent and where they were basically like everyone was doing it. Everybody.
They called it doping. Table ten is doping. But the
problem is that it had a lot of volatile organic compounds.
So the International Table Tennis Foundation said, no, we don't
want people getting cancer, so we gotta ban it, and
they actually test paddles now in a little machine that

(47:10):
tests for volatile organic compounds. Ye, get those rats out
of the game. Get about uh, you gotta win by two,
like we said, generally played at twenty one at home
eleven in competition, I think we said. And then um,
obviously you just anything as a point. If you get
the point. It's not like volleyball. You don't have to
be serving to get the point, right, which I love

(47:31):
that too. It makes the game go a lot faster. Yeah,
and just my whole problem is keeping up with that score. Yeah,
that's why you want a sober person. They're taking keeping
score for you. Uh. And I guess we should finish
with this well a couple of things. But um, you've
heard the term ping pong diplomacy. Yeah, there's a big
story there. Yeah, that came from a real thing that happened. Um. Obviously,

(47:54):
China live um in isolation for decades and decades from
the rest of the world. And then during the Cold War,
of course we were on the US was on the
opposite side of China. Not a lot of travel going
back and forth or allowed between the countries until the
International Competition of nine where the Chinese table tennis team

(48:16):
went to the championships in Japan. Uh met some Americans,
and in particular one American named Glenn Cowen, and he
was like, hey, man, like, we're all the same, really,
we all love table tennis regardless of our grip. Let's
shake hands. And he rode the bus with him on
the way back to the hotel. So so let me

(48:38):
let me just interject here. He got on the bus accidentally,
he had missed his own bus and these were busses
that were taking the teams to the hotel, and there
was like the first ten minutes of this fifteen minute
bus ride were silent in tents because these two enemy
groups were on the same bus and no one knew
what to do until Juang Zedong stood up and said,

(49:00):
I'm going to go talk to this guy. Yeah. But
they got along great. Like I said, they had more
in common than they thought. And table tennis or ping
pong is literally what brought them together, and it was
seen as a sort of an emblematic thing. Uh. Flash
forward a bit to the press covering this, it becomes
a big deal. The US table tennis UH competition team

(49:23):
said we want to go to China, uh and like
because they're the best of the best over there, and
mal Z Dong said, sure, come on over. They did
so in April one. They spent a week there. It
was big in the news and it literally kind of
thawed relations between the US and China. I mean it

(49:44):
paved the way for a trip by Richard Dixon. Like
the the U S table tennis team went over there
before Nixon did UM and just shared love of table
tennis and this this um, this kind of international exposure
of these two enemy countries, like getting along. Whatever it
takes to build common ground and consensus. If it's table tennis, awesome,

(50:04):
so much the better. So um that it led to
um to normalized relations between the two countries very quickly,
like within a year after after the or the beginnings
of normalized relations within a year after the thing. Where
all because Xiang Zadong came over and said, hey, man,

(50:25):
I just want to say thank you for playing table
tennis and gave him a scarf, and Glen Cowen had
a comb on him, and He's like, this isn't a
good enough reciprocal gift. So he he later gave Ziang
ze Dong a m a T shirt with a peace
symbol on it, which is pretty cool. Man Richard Dixon,
well known lover of session in cuisine and marijuana, Yes,

(50:47):
and peace symbol t shirts. He was a reared one
of those in public. Uh. We should also talk a
little bit about ping pong robots. Um. They built a
table tennis robot. Um. It was okay, Um, you could
program it to to imitate different styles, um, but it

(51:11):
wasn't like when when you played again, when it played
against the human being um. It was what what what?
What would happen there? It was just shooting them all
to the same place at the same exactly where it's
going to go. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of training
from it. But then they started inventing robots. I could
like add spin to it and pick its own moves
And that was in like the early nineties when they

(51:33):
first came out with those and the ones they have today.
One came out in six two thousand and sixteen called
uh four FEUs f O r p h e U.
Yeah it is and it can play some mean ping
pong um, but it's a it like actually plays you.
It's a an ai that plays you in ping pong.
But it's like a giant mechanical spidery kind of looking thing. Yeah,

(51:56):
it's really creepy looking. It looks like a Yeah, it
looks like a big spider sitting high above the table
across from you. And Uh, I saw the video the
guy playing it at ces and he he was I
felt bad for the guy because you cannot beat the thing. Well.
Plus he also goes, we'll pus some kind of nervous
because all these people are watching. Well in the ass
at one point, He's like, is there literally, like nothing

(52:17):
I can do that this thing won't returning. They're like nope. Yeah.
So then he was like, well, why I'm even here? Well, yeah,
it's an ai. It's it's it's um tracking the ball's
velocity and trajectory and like making calculations about how to
best return it. It's you're not gonna win against it, Nope,
but you can train really well to beat other human
socks off with it. That's right. So I don't have

(52:39):
anything else, do you. I'm looking at my fun facts
I got in three of the four. The last one
here is the world record was set between two players who, um,
if you're doing like speed ping pong, they hit it
back and forth one d and seventy three times in

(53:00):
sixty seconds. Oh my god. That is some serious speed play.
That is. That's an amazing fact. But it's got nothing
on the two hour and twelve minute point. Fake news.
All right, Now, you got anything else? I got nothing else?
All right? Well, if you want to know more about
ping pong, go start playing. It's the greatest thing you
can ever try to do with your life. And since

(53:22):
I said that, it's time for listener and mail we
should have a totally have a ping pong table here
at work. I agree. I don't think we have room
for it anymore, but at one point we probably did.
I know now where it's all this like production space,
production space, and we're like, where's ping pong? I'm gonna
call this. Uh, well, we've been getting a lot of

(53:44):
heat lately for two errors, one of which was sort
of a joke by me which I'm gonna read now.
But we should also say about figs and dates and
same things are all the same thing. It's like it's
like pork ham and bacon. Now we we heard from
a lot of people about that and we understand now, yeah,

(54:05):
we I mean, I got it flat out wrong. So
sorry about that everyone. Uh, you can stop telling us
now right. This is about average life expectancy, which I
was kind of just kidding about. I can't It was
I think Spanish Flu episode. I made a joke about
the life expectancy being like fifty or something, and I
was like, so I'd almost be dead. Um, so I'll

(54:28):
just read this, Hey, stuffers, I hope this doesn't come
across being snarky or trolley, but I think you should
try and clear up the difference between average actual life
expectancy and average life expectancy. UM chuck more than once.
So I guess I've said this before. You've made it
sound as if people in the past could only expect
to live into the thirties or forties. But that is

(54:50):
not the case. People live well into their sixties, seventies, eighties,
and nineties, just like today. UM. And he gives some
prominent examples of old people back in the day, and
then he says what drove the average life expectancy down
was the insanely high rate of infant and childhood mortality.
People had huge families back in the past just to
try and ensure this. Some of their children survived into

(55:11):
adulthood because so many died his infants and others never
made it past their second or third year due to
mom's measles, influenza, etcetera. Uh, the absolute horror of whooping cough.
Let's not forget polio and any number of plagues that
modern medicine has managed to render vastly less lethal, thanks
mostly to our friend of vaccines. So more and more
children are surviving the battlefield called childhood, growing into adults,

(55:35):
and the average life expectancy has become much longer. This
is a great email, Thank you Western Medicine. That's from
Joseph Catrell and Joseph, I was kind of just kidding
about that which time, well every time it was a
recurring joke. But um, that was very kind email and
it was fun and funny and you you did it right,
So thank you for sure. Plus also, you gave you

(55:58):
a chance to tell everybody that you know that that's
the case. Yeah, and it gave everybody. It gave me
a chance to let everybody know that I was totally
wrong about dates and figs. Um. Well, if you want
to correct us like Joseph did, that was an a
plus correction email. Joseph, you can get in touch with us.
You go to stuff you shao dot com and check

(56:19):
out our social links, or you can send us an
email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com