The game was invented in Medieval Scotland with the idea to use a stone on ice to land in an area to earn points. A great amount of evidence that curling well existed in Scotland in the early 16th century includes a curling stone inscribed with the date 1511 uncovered when an pond was drained at Dunblane, Scotland.
The word curling means …show more content…
His victorious comeback victory qualified his team of Bill Todhunter, Greg Johnson and Kevin Birr to earn a spot at the 2007 Ford World Men's Curling Championship representing team USA. There, Birr's was the only team to defeat Glenn Howard's Canadian team in the round robin when Howard did very terrible on his last rock, eventually Birr bumped out a Canadian stone to score three giving him a victory. In 2009, Birr skipped the U.S. team to 3 game sweep over the Brazilian national team at the first ever Americas Challenge to clinch the second American berth at the 2009 Ford World Men's Curling Championship. Birr who now works as the ice man at The Four Seasons Curling Club in Blaine Minnesota continues to watch the game he always …show more content…
The only part of the stone in contact with the ice is the running surface, a narrow, flat annulus or ring, 0.25 to 0.50 inches wide and about 5 inches in diameter; the sides of the stone bulge convex down to the ring and the inside of the ring is hollowed concave to clear the ice and slide very smoothly on the surface. This concave bottom was first proposed by J. S. Russell of Toronto, Ontario, Canada sometime after 1870, and was subsequently adopted by Scottish stone manufacturer Andrew Kay who now produced more than a million rocks.
The playing surface or curling sheet is defined by the World Curling Federation Rules of Curling. It is a rectangular area of ice, carefully prepared to be as flat and level as possible, 146 to 150 feet in length by 14.5 to 16.5 feet in width so the players have enough space to work with. The shorter borders of the sheet are called the backboards on ice. Because of the elongated shape, several sheets may be laid out side by side in the same arena, allowing multiple games to be played simultaneously so one game won’t take up all the