The First Glass Court

The Spanish patent office keeps a file numbered ES 2 065 227, under the title "Recinto transparente y desarmable para la practica y exhibicion de deportes", a transparent, demountable enclosure for the playing and showing of sport. Its applicant and only named inventor is Jorge Galeotti, with an address in La Plata. The application was lodged in Spain on 24 August 1992 and published on 1 February 1995, and the grant was published in November 1997. It claims priority from an earlier Argentine application, number 320516, dated 29 August 1991. The abstract gives the purpose: a court for "PADDLE-TENIS" with transparent walls, so that matches "puedan ser observados por un numero considerable de espectadores", can be watched by a considerable number of spectators.

Set that beside the sentence the histories carry. It names 1989, the Crystal Palace, Mar del Plata and the first detachable, transportable glass court, and it appears in English, Spanish and Italian, in a national sports paper and across commercial sites, near word for word and almost never with a source. The oldest dated copy this desk could find is on a web page archived in August 2017. That is how far back the trail went, not where the date began.

An interview with Galeotti by Juan Carlos De Marco was published by the site Padel Total on 24 April 2020. The page is gone; the Internet Archive holds copies from May 2022 on. In it Galeotti describes a partnership of three men called Jorge, named Padel Visión, and a court built in the Vetrano family's workshops at Avellaneda. "Presentamos la cancha en piso deportes del casino de Mar del Plata", we presented the court on the sports floor of the Mar del Plata casino. Severino Iezzi was the first to try it. Galeotti calls the occasion a technical success and a financial failure, and remembers the Vetranos and himself unloading the court from a semi-trailer "un 29 de Enero, estacionados al lado del casino", on a 29 January, parked beside the casino. A second outing, at San Bernardo, met a storm, and seven people paid to get in.

What he does not give is the year, though the order of his telling narrows it. He dates to December 1990 the death of Horacio Lasaigues, who had been pursuing the idea of a glass court himself. At that point, he says, "la cancha aún no la había visto nadie", nobody had yet seen the court. Then: "Después de unos meses, arrancamos", after a few months, we got going. Read in that order, the earliest possible 29 January falls in 1991, and "a few months" after December sits awkwardly even with that. The interview implies 1991 at the earliest. It does not state it. It is also one man's memory of events thirty years before, and this desk has found no other record of when Lasaigues died.

The patent cannot settle the year either, and should not be asked to. A priority date records when an application was lodged. It is not a first match or a first crowd, and the document names no venue. What the Spanish record does establish is that the invention was claimed under an Argentine priority of 29 August 1991, that Galeotti is its named inventor, and what exactly he claimed. The document never uses the name Crystal Palace.

Setting out the problem, the patent says: "Se han intentado mejoras para facilitar la visión de las alternativas del juego, realizando uno o ambos de los 'frontones de cabecera' de las canchas convencionales, de material transparente." Improvements had already been tried, that is, making one or both end walls of ordinary courts in transparent material. Its complaint is with the "laterales opacos", the opaque sides, which still blocked the view. What Galeotti claimed was the whole enclosure: transparent wherever the ball rebounds, wire mesh elsewhere, assembled from standard profiles and panels so that it could be put up, taken down and moved. In the interview he says the courts at his own club were designed "con algo de vidrio", with some glass in them.

He also says the court that crossed to Seville in 1992, for the championship this magazine told in its second issue, was a new one, named Palacio de Cristal, and that it stayed in Spain.

One document he describes has not been found. After San Bernardo, he says, Jorge Mocoroa got a piece into Clarín "con la portada de la cancha (la tengo)", with the court on its cover. This desk could not reach Clarín's editions from those years online, and the national library in Buenos Aires lists a single digitised year of the paper, 1976, readable only on its own terminals. Galeotti said he kept that page along with a technical questionnaire in Lasaigues's own hand and his patents in Argentina, Uruguay and Spain.