Basketball 1929

This patent is considered to be the original basketball ball patent and was assigned to Spalding. It was the first design to abandon the practice of having each leather section taper to a point, which created construction problems on the polar sides where all the points met resulting in the balls not being perfectly balanced. This new design describes a manner of laying out the leather pieces in which the connecting seams do not have to converge on a single point. The inventor, George Pierce, had a number leather sports patents.