Table tennis

In recent years, table tennis has become extremely popular in the Catalan capital Barcelona, and the favorable weather conditions lend themselves to a game on one of the many of the city’s public table tennis tables. The game, which is now also commonly known as ping-pong, dates back to 1880s England where the upper classes would play it at dinner parties. The equipment, however, was quite primitive: books or cigar case lids were used as paddles, and for instance cut up champagne corks served as balls. Back then, the game was known as “wiff waff”, presumably to describe the sound of cork against the homemade paddles. It is not clear when the sound changed into ping-pong, but the term table tennis appears for the first time in New York in 1887, while the designation ping-pong was not recorded until 1901 when John Jaques, a toy retailer, registered it as a trademark in England.