When the world’s first ‘bristle’ dartboard was introduced in England in the 1930s, word soon spread around via the less well informed that the boards were actually made of pig bristle.
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At the end of the decade, one writer was of the view that the dartboards were actually made of horse hair, whilst as late as the 1970s at least one author told her readers that the boards were constructed from ‘boar bristle’!
As a representative of the company responsible for patenting the product once said, “For years many folks thought it was made of pig bristles. We would have needed an awful lot of pigs!” You can see it now: the whole of the British countryside punctuated by herds of bald pigs.
Even though this myth has been perpetuated up to the present day, it is a patent untruth. The ‘bristle’ is in fact a vegetable fibre known as ‘sisal’.
More recently one writer has confirmed that dartboards used to be made of ‘camel hair’!
(c) 2020 Patrick Chaplin
Dr Patrick Chaplin 