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Undid revision 342592530 by 24.192.70.212 (talk) I think you mean the "Super Bowl"
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After watching his children play with a Super Ball, [[Lamar Hunt]], founder of the [[American Football League]], coined the term [[Super Bowl]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/chi-0701300052jan30,1,233400.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true |title=Legends of the Bowl |accessdate=2007-01-31 |author=Rex W. Huppke |date=2007-01-30 |format=html |publisher=Chicago Tribune |quote= Lamar Hunt, who died in December, coined the term Super Bowl in the late 1960s after watching his kids play with a Super Ball, the bouncy creation of iconic toy manufacturer Wham-O. }}</ref><ref name="toys-amaz" />
After watching his children play with a Super Ball, [[Lamar Hunt]], founder of the [[American Football League]], coined the term [[Super Bowl]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/chi-0701300052jan30,1,233400.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true |title=Legends of the Bowl |accessdate=2007-01-31 |author=Rex W. Huppke |date=2007-01-30 |format=html |publisher=Chicago Tribune |quote= Lamar Hunt, who died in December, coined the term Super Bowl in the late 1960s after watching his kids play with a Super Ball, the bouncy creation of iconic toy manufacturer Wham-O. }}</ref><ref name="toys-amaz" />


==Patent==
The Super Ball has been the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the premier association of professional American football, since 1967. It was first played on January 15, 1967 as part of a merger agreement between the NFL and the then rival league, the American Football League (AFL). It was agreed that the two leagues’ champion teams would play in an AFL–NFL World Championship Game, until the merger was consummated. After the merger of the two leagues in 1970, each league became a "conference", and the game was played between conference champions.
* [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=3241834 Stingley, Norman H., &mdash; "Highly Resilient Polybutadiene Ball"]

The Pittsburgh Steelers have won six Super Bowls, while the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers have each won five. Seventeen other NFL franchises have won at least one Super Bowl. Only four active NFL franchises have not appeared in the Super Bowl: the Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars and Houston Texans. The Lions are the only NFC team yet to play in one, the other three are in the AFC. The Browns and Lions have both won NFL championships prior to the Super Bowl era, while the Jaguars (who joined the NFL in 1995) and Texans (2002) joined the league after the Super Bowl era began.

Lamar Hunt, former owner of the Kansas City Chiefs and founding member of the American Football League, coined the name Super Bowl after watching his children playing with a Super Ball. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather than the year in which it is held. Super Bowl I was played in 1967 to determine the championship of the regular season played in 1966, and Super Bowl XLIV, on February 7, 2010, will be played to determine the champion of the 2009 regular season.

In most years, the Super Bowl is the most-watched American television broadcast. Exclusive television broadcast rights for the Super Bowl rotate each year among three of the four major American television networks: CBS, Fox, ABC and NBC. Because of its high viewership, commercial airtime for the Super Bowl broadcast is the most expensive of the year. Due to the high cost of investing in advertising on the Super Bowl, companies regularly develop their most expensive advertisements for this broadcast. As a result, watching and discussing the broadcast’s commercials has become a significant aspect of the event.

Many popular singers and musicians have performed during the event's pre-game and halftime ceremonies. The day on which the Super Bowl is played is now considered a de facto American national holiday,[1][2][3] called Super Bowl Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day for U.S. food consumption, after Thanksgiving Day.[4]


==Further Reading==
==Further Reading==

Revision as of 00:18, 8 February 2010

This article is about the ball manufactured by Wham-O. For the game on The Price Is Right, see Super Ball!! For other highly resilient balls, see Bouncy ball.

SuperBall (originally Super Ball) is a toy, invented by Norman H. Stingley[1][2] in 1965, and manufactured by Wham-O.[3][4] It is an extremely elastic ball made of Zectron,[5] which contains the synthetic rubber polymer polybutadiene, as well as hydrated Silica, zink oxide, stearic acid, and other ingredients[1] vulcanized with sulfur at a temperature of 165 degrees Celsius and at a pressure of 80 atmospheres. The Super Ball has an amazingly high coefficient of restitution.[6][7][8] Dropped from shoulder level, Super Ball snapped nearly all the way back; thrown down, it could leap over a three-story building.

"It took us nearly two years to iron the kinks out of Super Ball before we produced it." according to Richard Knerr, President of Wham-O.[2] It always had that marvelous springiness.... But it had a tendency to fly apart. We've licked that with a very high-pressure technique for forming it. Now we're selling millions." Knerr continued.[2]

Initially the Super Ball sold for ninety-eight cents at retail, by the end if 1966 it sold for as little as ten cents in vending machines.[9]

According to one study "If a pen is stuck in a hard rubber ball and dropped from a certain height, the pen may bounce to several times that height."[10] If a superball is dropped without spin onto a hard surface, with a small ball bearing on top of the superball, the bearing rebounds to an great height.[11] According to Michael E. Browne it "takes off like a bat out of hell".[11] Browne gives the formulae which govern this situation, and shows that the bearing rebounds to nine times the height from which bearing and ball were dropped together.[11][8] The principle is the same as that used in a hydraulic ram.[11]

The "rough" nature of a Super Ball makes its impact characteristics different from otherwise similar smooth balls.[12][13] The resulting behavior is quite complex.[13] The superball has been used as an illustration of the principle of Time Reversal Invariance.[14]

A superball is observed to reverse the direction of spin on each bounce.[15][16][17] This effect depends on the "tangential compliance" and frictional effect in the collision, it can not be explained by rigid body impact theory, and would not occur were the ball perfectly rigid.[17] ("tangential compliance" is the degree to which one body clings to rather than slips over another at the point of impact.[18])

Bernard Brogliato noted that the "surprising motions" of the SuperBall had led physics teachers to "use it as a counter-example to usual models of impacts."[19] He agrees that rigid body theory "does not permit" the observed results, but "resorting to a more sophisticated analysis" allows theory to correctly predict the observed results.[19]

Toys similar to a SuperBall are more generally known as bouncy balls, a term which covers other more or less similar balls by different manufacturers with different formulations.

When the SuperBall was first introduced, it became a fad.[20] Peak production was over 170,000 superballs per day.[21] By December of 1965 over six million had been sold, and US Presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy had five dozen superballs shipped to the White House for the amusement of the staff.[22][5][23][21] Knowing that fads are often short-lived, Wham-O Executive Vice-president Richard P. Kerr said "Each Super Ball bounce is 92% as high as the last. If our sales don't come down any faster than that, we've got it made."[23]

In the late 1960s Wham-O made a "giant" superball, roughly the size of a bowling ball, as a promotional stunt.[3][4] It fell from the 23rd story window of an Australian hotel (or some reports say, from the roof) and destroyed a parked convertible car on the 2nd bounce.[3][4]

The composer Alcides Lanza, in his composition Plectros III (1971), specified that the performer should use a pair of Superballs on sticks as mallets with which to strike and rub the strings and case of a piano.[24] Lanza purchased several SuperBalls in 1965 as toys for his son, but soon he started experimenting with the sounds they made when rubbed along the frame or strings of a piano.[24] Several years later, Plectros III resulted.

After watching his children play with a Super Ball, Lamar Hunt, founder of the American Football League, coined the term Super Bowl.[25][3]

Patent

Further Reading

  • Frauenfelder, Mark; Sinclair, Carla; Branwyn, Gareth; Kreth, Will editors. (1995). "The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates". New York, Riverhead Books (Penguin Group). ISBN 1-57322-502-9, pg..134-136

References

  1. ^ a b Farrally, Martin R; Cochran, Alastair J. (1998). Science and golf III: proceedings of the 1998 World Scientific Congress of Golf. Human Kinetics. pp. 407, 408. ISBN 0736000208.
  2. ^ a b c Griswald, Wesley S. (January 1966). "Can You Invent a Million-Dollar Fad?". Popular Science. 188 (1): 78–81.
  3. ^ a b c d Wulffson, Don L (July 2000). Toys!: Amazing Stories Behind Some Great Inventions. Henry Holt and Co. pp. 92–94. ISBN 0805061967. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ a b c Weiss, Joanna (August 21, 2005). "Toy story". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2 February 2010.
  5. ^ a b Johnson, Richard Alan (December 1985). American Fads. William Morrow & Co. pp. 81–83. ISBN 0688049036. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
  6. ^ Cross, Rod (May 2002). "Measurements of the horizontal coefficient of restitution for a superball and a tennis ball". American Journal of Physics. 70 (5). American Association of Physics Teachers: 482–489. doi:10.1119/1.1450571. Retrieved 1 February 2010.
  7. ^ MacInnes, Iain (May, 2007). "Debouncing a Superball". The Physics Teacher. 45 (5). American Association of Physics Teachers: 304–305. doi:10.1119/1.2731280. For bounces on a wooden bench top, the coefficient of restitution,....is typically about e = 0.8. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ a b Myers, Rusty L. (December 2005). The Basics of Physics. Greenwood. p. 304. ISBN 0313328579. Retrieved 5 February 2010. ...on a hard surface...0.85 for a superball
  9. ^ "California Happy but Wants New Winners". Billboard: 43, 44. December 31, 1966.
  10. ^ Harter, William G. (June 1971). "Velocity Amplification in Collision Experiments Involving Superballs". American Journal of Physics. 39 (6). American Association of Physics Teachers: 656–663. doi:10.1119/1.1986253. Retrieved 1 February 2010.
  11. ^ a b c d Browne, Michael E. (July 1999). "9: Linear Momentum and Collisions". Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of physics for Engineering and Science. McGraw-Hill. pp. 118–119. ISBN 007008498X. Retrieved 5 February 2010.
  12. ^ Garwin, Richard L. "Kinematics of an Ultraelastic Rough Ball" (PDF). American Journal of Physics. 37 (1). American Association of Physics Teachers: 88–92. Retrieved 1 February 2010. A Rough ball which conserves kinetic energy exhibits unexpected behavior after a single bounce and bizarre behavior after three bounces against parallel surfaces. The Wham-O Super-Ball...appears to approximate this behavior...quite different from that of a...smooth ball
  13. ^ a b Coatta, Dan (December 10, 2004). Dynamics of a Super Ball: How Reversible Tangential Impacts Make for an Entertaining Toy (PDF). p. 1. Retrieved 1 February 2010. Super balls are simple toys that exhibit surprisingly complex behavior. Part of the fun of a super ball is a result of the high friction between the rubber of the ball and the surface it bounces against. This friction places moments on the ball that cause it to spin after bouncing. The exchange of energy between rotational and translational forms that occurs at each collision makes the super ball's behavior difficult to predict. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  14. ^ Crawford, Frank S. (September 1982). "Superball and time-reversal invariance". American Journal of Physics. 50 (9). American Association of Physics Teachers: 856.
  15. ^ Bridges, Richard ((December 1991). "The spin of a bouncing `superball'". Physics Education. 26 (6): 350–354. Retrieved 1 February 2010. Strobe photographs of a spinning, bouncing `superball' are analysed to determine whether observed reversals of spin during bouncing fit a model analogous to Newton's experimental law of restitution. Rough, but imperfect agreement is found. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ Aston, Philip J. (October 11, 2007). "The Dynamics of a Bouncing Superball With Spin" (PDF). Dynamical Systems. Retrieved 1 February 2010. When a superball is thrown forwards but with backspin, it is observed to reverse both direction and spin for a few bounces before settling to bouncing motion in one direction. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  17. ^ a b Stronge, W. J. (March 2004). Impact Mechanics. Cambridge University Press. p. 112. ISBN 0521602890. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
  18. ^ Stronge, W. J. (March 2004). Impact Mechanics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 94–95. ISBN 0521602890. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
  19. ^ a b Brogliato, Bernard (April1999). Nonsmooth Mechanics: Models, Dynamics, and Control. Springer. p. 153. ISBN 1852331437. Retrieved 5 February 2010. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  20. ^ Kallen, Stuart A. (February 2004). Arts and Entertainment. Lucent Library of Historical Eras - The 1960s. Lucent. p. 84. ISBN 1590183886.
  21. ^ a b Rielly, Edward J. (May 2003). "Leisure Activities". The 1960s. Greenwood. p. 108. ISBN 0313312613. Retrieved 5 February 2010.
  22. ^ "A Boom with a Bounce: The U.S. is Having a Ball". Life. 59 (23). Time, Inc: 69, 74. December 3, 1965. ISSN 0024-3019. Retrieved 4 February 2010.
  23. ^ a b Hoffmann, Frank W. (August, 1994). Fashion & Merchandising Fads. Routledge. pp. 243–244. ISBN 1560243767. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  24. ^ a b Jones, Pamela (November, 2007). Alcides Lanza: Portrait of a Composer. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 131. ISBN 0773532641. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  25. ^ Rex W. Huppke (2007-01-30). "Legends of the Bowl" (html). Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2007-01-31. Lamar Hunt, who died in December, coined the term Super Bowl in the late 1960s after watching his kids play with a Super Ball, the bouncy creation of iconic toy manufacturer Wham-O.

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