Dart boards
Who invented the first dart board? I guess we’ll never know for certain, but we do know that before the first world war pubs in the UK had dart boards made from solid blocks of wood usually elm. They had to be soaked overnight to heal the holes made from the darts, and it was a messy business for the publican although a popular game.
Dart boards from Amazon
Then along came a company called Nodor who’s primary business was making plasticine and the plasticine had no odour, hence the name Nodor. They used this plasticine to make a dart board that wasn’t a great success and then in the 1930’s some bright spark came up with an idea to make a dart board from rope or sisal fibres to be more precise. They tied together small bundles of sisal fibres all the same length and then put lots of these bundles together and compressed them all together with a metal ring and the first Bristle dart board was born. It was an instant hit as the darts made little or no damage to the board as they just parted the fibres when they entered the board, so it lasted a long time and no more overnight soaking!
Nodor had the market to themselves for the life of the patent (25 years) before other dart board manufacturers entered the market, most noticeably Winmau. And they have been slugging it out ever since with the top tournaments using either Nodor or Winmau dart boards.
By the way did you know the trade mark Winmau is named after the Company Director’s wife, Winifred Maud. Anyway the Bristle board came on leaps and bounds with the new competitive market, introducing staple free boards and diamond shaped spiders (the metal frame that marks out the scoring areas) for the boards to reduce the dreaded bounce outs the old boards were prone to.
Also there are many more manufacturers on the scene now, but those 2 originals are regarded as the best makers of dart boards even today.
Of course things have moved on again, and we now have the electronic dart board that keeps score for you, and can even heckle you when throwing and uses the safer soft tip darts. The soft tip darts are made from plastic and the electronic dart board has lots of holes in them that these soft tip darts go into to trigger the electronics. No one has to be good at arithmetic any more; the dart board works it all out for you.
The latest electronic boards have a bristle style board as well as the electronics, so you get the best of both worlds, using the normal steel tip darts with the electronic scoring. How cool is that!