1A

The 1A carries a plain designation in Ping's own record: the maker's page lists it as the first PING prototype, dated to 1958. Everything that follows in the company's line, the Anser most of all, traces back to this head.

The maker's page describes the 1A's design as built around an edge weight bias and a torsion bar. The torsion bar is described as a heavy, rounded bar at the bottom of the club head that lowered the center of gravity, while the edge weight bias came from elongated holes filled with lead. Together the maker's page credits these features with an effect on ball behavior: the design lifted the back of the ball to get it rolling sooner after contact. That's a fairly specific claim for a 1958 prototype to be carrying, and it's worth reading as the maker's own framing of what the club was trying to do rather than as an independently verified result.

Set against the rest of the line that would follow from Karsten Solheim's work, the 1A reads as the starting point rather than a finished retail product. Where later Ping putters would be refined for manufacture and sale, the 1A is held in the record specifically as a prototype, the first attempt at solving the problems the torsion bar and edge weighting were meant to address.