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History Paintball
   
The first paintballs were created by the Nelson Paint Company in the 1950s for forestry service use in marking trees from a distance, and were also used by cattlemen to mark cows.[2] Two decades later, paintballs were used in a survival game between two friends in the woods of Henniker, New Hampshire, and paintball as a sport was born.
In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and his friend Charles Gaines, a writer[3], were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.[4]
In the ensuing months, the friends talked about what sorts of qualities and characteristics made for a good hunter and survivalist. They were stumped, however, on how to devise a test of those skills. It wasn't until a year and a half later that George Butler, a friend of theirs, showed them a paintball gun in an agricultural catalog. The gun was a Nelspot 007 marker manufactured by the Nelson Paint Company.[5]
Twelve players competed against each other with Nelspot 007s pistols in the first paintball game on June 27, 1981. They were: Bob Jones, a novelist and staff writer for Sports Illustrated and an experienced hunter, Ronnie Simpkins, a farmer from Alabama and a master turkey hunter, Jerome Gary, a New York film producer, Carl Sandquist, a New Hampshire contracting estimator, Ritchie White, the New Hampshire forester, Ken Barrett, a New York venturer and hunter, Joe Drinon, a stock-broker and former Golden Gloves boxer from New Hampshire, Bob Carlson, a trauma surgeon and hunter from Alabama, and Lionel Atwill, a writer for Sports Afield, a hunter and a Vietnam vet, Charles Gaines, Bob Gurnsey, and Hayes Noel. The game was capture the flag on an 80 acre wooded cross-country ski area.
Thereafter, the friends devised basic rules for the game fashioned along the lines of capture the flag, and invited friends and a writer from Sports Illustrated to play. They called their game "Survival," and an article about the game was published in the June 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated.[6] As national interest in the game steadily built, Bob Gurnsey formed a company, National Survival Game, and entered a contract with Nelson Paint Company to be the sole distributor of their paintball equipment.[7] Thereafter, they licensed to franchisees in other states the right to sell their guns, paint, and goggles. As a result of their monopoly on equipment, they turned a profit in only six months.[8]
The first games of paintball were very different from modern paintball games. Nelspot pistols were the only gun available. They used 12-gram CO2 cartridges, held at most 10 rounds, and had to be tilted to roll the ball into the chamber and then recocked after each shot. Dedicated paintball masks had not yet been created, so players wore shop glasses that left the rest of their faces exposed. The first paintballs were oil-based and thus not water soluble; "turpentine parties" were common after a day of play.[9] Games often lasted for hours as players stalked each other, and since each player had only a limited number of rounds, shooting was rare.[10]
Between 1981 and 1983, rival manufacturers such as PMI began to create competing products, and it was during those years that the sport took off.[11] Paintball technology gradually developed as manufacturers added a front-mounted pump in order to make recocking easier, then replaced the 12-gram cartridges with larger air tanks, commonly referred to as "constant air".[12] These basic innovations were later followed by gravity feed hoppers and 45-degree elbows to facilitate loading from the hopper.
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Paintball Dangers Not an Issue for Excessive ForceCourthouse News ServiceBy ROSE BOUBOUSHIAN (CN) - Experts cannot testify that a paintball gun is "capable of causing severe injury" in a civil trial against two cops who shot a child on Halloween after allegedly mistaking a paintball gun for an actual firearm, ...and more » |
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Paintball owner lays out defenceNiagarathisweek.comBarnfield, who is facing charges of development in a provincially significant wetland due to his attempts to establish a paintball facility on his 10-acre Oxford Road property, began his defence on Thursday after the NPCA spent two days introducing the ...and more » |
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Police race for multiple sclerosis fundsBerkshire EagleBy Ned Oliver, Berkshire Eagle Staff, GREAT BARRINGTON -- At Ski Butternut, police from three states raced downhill with handcuffs, paintball guns and doughnuts. The event, a fundraiser for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, had the officers ...and more » |
ProPaintball.com |
New Paintball Gun: Valken ProtonProPaintball.comPhotos surfaced this morning of Valken's new paintball gun. Officially known as the Proton, the new gun will come with a MAP price tag of $299.95 and be available to dealers starting in March of 2012. According to ProPaintball insiders, ... |
Deccan Chronicle |
Let's paint the town redDeccan ChronicleThe National Paintball League is here –— it's bigger, better and goes international this year. Contestants from all over the world will come together for a volte-face at Sarjapur Road between February 17-19. An ideal mix of agility, dexterity, ... |
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