Is it true that an unusual account in a large tennis is associated with the movement of a minute arrow?

Unlike football, hockey or basketball, not everyone understands the rules for calculating glasses in tennis. There is a version that the accrual is 15, then 30 and 40 points in the game are associated with marks of minutes on the dial. We find out how true it is.

The basic unit of the tennis match is a game that begins with a score of 0: 0. If one of the athletes wins the draw, then the score becomes 15: 0, another one - 30: 0, one more - 40: 0, and after the next success, the game ends. Explanations why such a calculation system is used is diverse. One of the most popular is due to the fact that the numbers symbolize the movement of the arrow in the dial, noting a quarter, half and three quarters of the way to victory in the game. Where did this version come from and how reliable is it?

The theory is based on the fact that initially, for the third picked rally, the player was charged not 40, but 45 points. Tennis has its history from the Middle Ages, and such a calculation system is mentioned, for example, Poets The beginning of the 15th century, using tennis as a metaphor for the battle between the two armies. The author of the book Tennis: A Cultural HistoryGerman researcher Heiner Gilmeister Indicates The fact that the use of the number 45 was widespread at least until the 16th century, when for the convenience of pronouncing they began to use the number 40.

However, a folding and in some way even a beautiful story becomes more and more like a legend if you turn to the story of an hour-long business. The very idea of ​​a dial with marks for the first time appeared Only in 1475 in the manuscript of Paulus Almanus, and the creation and widespread distribution of such hours became possible only with invention The pendulum mechanism is almost two centuries later. It cannot be that the “strange” calculation of points that appeared more than 600 years ago was connected with the invention, which is no more than four centuries.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Malcolm D. Whitman. Tennis: Origin and Mysteries
2. Heiner Gillmeister. Tennis: A Cultural History
3. https://time.com/5040182/tennis-scoring-system-history/