Why Are Soccer Balls Made of Hexagons?

Erik van Rheenen

Once upon a time, soccer balls (or footballs, depending on where you hail from) were inflated pig
bladders wrapped in leather. One variation was an ancient Chinese game called tsu chu, using a
ball stuffed with feathers. In medieval England, players used leather-covered wine bottles filled with
cork shavings (to make them easily retrievable if they fell in the river). It wasnt until 1844,
when Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber, that soccer balls started taking shape. Literally.

In 1855, Goodyear created the first rubber soccer ball. Then, seven years later, H.J. Lindon
developed an inflatable rubber bladder to make the ball easier to kick and maintain its pseudo-
spherical shape. White soccer balls became the standard in 1951 (companies whitewashed the
leather, and in the 1960s, began to use synthetic materials to achieve uniform thickness and prevent
the balls from becoming misshapen), and if teams played winter matches, official orange soccer balls
were manufactured for better visibility.

But the ball most commonly seen todaythe one with black and white pentagons and hexagons
was first designed in the 1960s by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose forte was designing
buildings using minimal materials. Previously, leather soccer balls consisted of 18 sections stitched
together: six panels of three strips apiece. The soccer ball Fuller designed stitched together 20
hexagons with 12 pentagons for a total of 32 panels. Its official shape is a spherical polyhedron, but
the design was nicknamed the buckyball.
The first buckyball used in official soccer matches was Adidas Telstar in the 1970 World Cup Finals
in Mexico. Adidas developed a pattern of white hexagons with black pentagons to make the ball
easily visible on television. An added bonus for players: The black pentagons helped them learn to
curve the ball better by being able to track its movement more easily.
Adidas kept the buckyballs black-and-white color scheme until 2002, but the 32-panel buckyball
might not stay in vogue much longerAdidas launched its new generation of soccer balls for the
2006 and 2010 World Cups with the Teamgeist (14 panels) and Jabulani (8 panels) designs,
respectively.
Fullers design earned a spot in molecular immortality. In 1996, Rice University scientists Harold
Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a
spherical molecule with the formula C60 that they named Buckminsterfullerene. The molecule is
made of (you guessed it) 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.
August 16, 2013 - 9:30am
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51296/why-are-soccer-balls-made-hexagons