Telstar is a soccer ball made by Adidas. The iconic 32-panel alternating black-and-white design of the ball, based on the work of Eigil Nielsen, has since become a global standard design used to portray a soccer ball in different media.

First used in the 1970 World Cup, this design was chosen specifically so spectators watching black-and-white televisions could clearly see the ball, with the black accents on a white background revealing the ball's direction of spin.

1 Gathering and Processing Materials Soccer balls are made both natural and man-made materials, including: Plastic, from petroleum Rubber, from plants or synthetic Cotton, from plants Animal products, including leather These materials must be processed in factories before they're made into a ball.

Adidas named its new ball the "Telstar" after the Telstar satellite, which itself resembled a white sphere with black patches. The Telstar was used to beam television broadcasts of that year's World Cup - the first ever to be broadcast live and in color.

The soccer ball first got its famous black-and-white markings for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. According to the Adidas website, this ball was called the Telstar and was developed to help people see the ball more clearly while watching on television.

A black-and-white patterned spherical truncated icosahedron design, brought to prominence by the Adidas Telstar, has become a symbol of association football.

The Black and White Ball was a masquerade ball held on November 28, 1966, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Hosted by author Truman Capote, the ball was in honor of The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

White balls would allow some light to pass through. While black balls are completely opaque and as such provide the best shade coverage. Carbon black is also the most durable color and it maximize the life of the balls by decreasing the rate at which the plastic breaks down in UV light.

A ball can be made from many different materials, leather, rubber, and synthetics being most common in modern times. However, balls made from indigenous materials, particularly from animal parts, were once the norm.

A soccer ball is made up of several layers of materials, including synthetic leather, latex or butyl bladder, and graphics. The manufacturing process is complex and involves cutting the panels, sewing them together, adding the bladder, and adding the graphics.

During medieval times, soccer balls were usually made from the bladder of a pig or other animal, and filled with straw or inflated with air. In 1855, Charles Goodyear designed the first soccer ball, made of vulcanized rubber. As a result, the ball was hardened and became spherical.

This standard soccer ball is stitched or glued together from 32 polygons, 12 of them five-sided and 20 six-sided, arranged in such a way that every pentagon is surrounded by hexagons. Postmodern paint jobs notwithstanding, the traditional way to color such a ball is to paint the pentagons black and the hexagons white.