Felix's Catapulta — The First Mechanical Bowling Machine, 1837 onward

Practice cricket in the 1830s was constrained by the availability of practice bowlers. Schools and small clubs often had only one or two competent bowlers, and a batsman who wanted heavy practice could not get it. Felix's catapulta was a direct response to that constraint.

Felix had been experimenting with mechanical solutions to the practice-bowler problem since the early 1830s. The patent of 1837 was the culmination of several years' work.

Felix patented the catapulta in 1837, motivated by a shortage of competent practice bowlers at the school he ran in Camberwell. The machine consisted of a wooden frame about three feet high, with a hinged arm that was wound back against a sprung Indian-rubber strip and released by a lever. A ball placed in a small cup at the end of the arm was thrown at the batsman with a velocity and length that the operator could adjust. Felix demonstrated the catapulta at Lord's in the late 1830s and again in the 1840s; the demonstration was popular enough that several clubs commissioned their own copies. The 1845 Felix on the Bat described its use and gave engravings of the machine in operation. The catapulta was clumsy by modern standards — unloading and rewinding it took 20 to 30 seconds — but it allowed a single batsman to take batting practice without the need for a bowler, and it established the principle of mechanical bowling that survived through Bola machines, Sidearm slings and the modern Merlyn and pro-Batter machines now standard at every Test ground. Felix also experimented with adjustable launch angles to simulate spin, anticipating modern variable-line machines by 150 years.

The catapulta remained a curiosity rather than a standard piece of cricket equipment; later mechanical bowling devices (Howitt's catapult of the 1860s, the various Edwardian bowling machines) descended from it but were not widely adopted until the twentieth century.