Why is green cloth so strongly associated with billiards? Historian Mike Shamos’s account for the Billiard Congress of America traces the game to a northern European lawn game and explains the cloth as a reminder of grass. That is a useful historical account, rather than proof that one surviving table was the first. Maces pushed the balls on early indoor tables; the equipment and rules then developed along several paths.

Billiards also appears in literature, although a literary setting is not necessarily a record of when a game existed. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 5, gives Cleopatra a reference to billiards, but the dramatic line is not evidence that the ancient Egyptian queen played the later European game. Treat it as a literary anachronism, not a date in the sport’s origin story.

Early illustrations show tables with features unfamiliar to modern pool players, including hoops and upright targets. Major W. Broadfoot’s Billiards (1896) discusses the table illustrated in Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester (1674), with a wooden bed, pockets and maces. Different games assigned different values to hazards and caroms. A winning hazard pockets an object ball, while a losing hazard sends the player’s ball into a pocket after object-ball contact. Their names belong to the history of distinct scoring systems, rather than one rule for every billiards game.

The cue, leather tip, chalk and improved table construction expanded what players could do. Broadfoot’s contemporary manual explains strokes and spin in the mature nineteenth-century game. His descriptions of follow, screw and side show how much controlled ball movement had become part of the game. Equipment, local practice and the particular discipline all shaped its development.

By the early twentieth century, billiards already encompassed distinct families of games. Pocket billiards, English billiards and pocketless carom games should not be collapsed into one invention date. Snooker has a separately documented development: the WPBSA traces Neville Chamberlain’s experiment at Jubbulpore in India to 1875. Later champions, including Ralph Greenleaf, helped give American pool a public following. Their careers belong to a history of professional competition as well as everyday recreation.

Film added another important chapter. The Hustler was released in 1961; Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money followed in 1986, with Paul Newman returning as Eddie Felson opposite Tom Cruise as Vincent Lauria. The BCA credits those films with renewed interest in pool. Nine-ball, straight pool and one-pocket offer different scoring systems and tactical demands. Their histories are better understood as parallel developments than as a single march toward one universally dominant game.