"Today golf is an international game played in every corner of the world. It owes that popularity to the pioneering efforts of Scottish golfers in the nineteenth century who built upon the early framework of organisation and spread the gospel of golf with the enthusiasm and dedication of missionaries. As we have already seen thee game had witnessed some early movement out of Scotland to other golfing outposts, taken by royalty to England as far back as the early seventeenth century, by Scottish merchants to far away places like India, where the Royal Calcutta Golf Club dates back to 1829, and by the armed forces to South Carolina in the United States, where golf was played long before the famous Apple Tree Gang founded the first American golf club at Yonkers in New York in 1888. these, however, were isolated pockets; golf was very much vested in the hands of the Scots, and virtually confined within Scotland's borders, until well into the nineteenth century. The reasons were simple: only the Scots knew how to play, they had the skills to manufacture the clubs and balls required to play; they were the only nation then with any experience of laying out a course upon which to play and relatively poor communications and transport had, broadly speaking left the game as yet unexposed to the wider world. Two things changed all that. Firstly the discovery that the rubber from a gutta percha tree could be easily and cheaply moulded into a much more servicable golf ball than the expensive 'featherie', the only option until 1848, thus opening the game up to a much wider audience. Secondly there was the rapid expansion of the Victorian era which brought new prosperity to the middle classes and with it an improved transport system. Many of the now mobile English middle class imitated the royal family by holidaying in Scotland, where they discovered the delights of golf and then took the game back with them south of the border."