Mid 1960s The Nelson Paint Company was founded in 1940 by Charles and Evan Nelson. Nelson had patented a number of devices that foresters could use to mark timber. One of those was a squirt gun that sprayed paint. But the paintball was invented because the Nelson Paint Company was asked by the US Forestry Service for a reliable way of marking trees from a distance. The problem was the tree was sometimes across a stream or thick brush. The idea behind paintballs was that they could shoot them out over the obstruction, and a ball from a gun would shoot farther than a stream of paint. Or ranchers could also use the balls to mark stray cattle. Charles Nelson played around with the idea and invented a paint pellet that could be shot out of a gun. It was actually created by squirting paint into gelatin capsules normally used then for horse pills. Nelson Paint then approached Crossman to design a pistol to shoot the paintballs, after 1-4 years of production with poor sales. Crossman no longer found it financially sound to produce the marker. Nelson then moved to Daisy, the airgun manufacturer to produce a paintball pistol. Obviously not owning the design of the Crossman 707, Nelson was not able to simply pass the design to another manufacturer, a new design needed to be created instead. Which is exactly what Daisy did by creating the Daisy 'Splotchmarker' which became known as the now famous 'Nel-Spot 007'  The paintballs were also mass produced. Under contract by Nelson, RP Scherer produced the encapsulate oil based paintballs for the makers.
THE VERY FIRST OFFICIAL PAINTBALL GUN
THE NEL-SPOT 007
 March 1982 The Worlds first commercial paintball field was opened by Bob Gurnsey in New Hampshire, Bob Gurnsey invented and marketed paintball as the game we play today under the brand name of National Survival Game (NSG), or "The Survival Game". The National  Survival Game entered into a contract with Nelson Paint Company to be the sole distributor of their paintball equipment. Thereafter, they licensed to franchisees in other states the right to sell their guns, paint, and goggles. As a result of their monopoly on equipment, they turned a profit in only six months.
 April 1982 Caleb Strong opens the first outdoor playing field in Rochester New York (with PMI supplied equipment? can't be the first outdoor, gurnsey's new hapshire field was a month earlier - still checking if this was the first PMI field
WOODSBALL

1985 The first outdoor playing field is opened in England. Fields started to change, getting smaller, the field owners were eager to change from the 100 acre games lasting 2 hours and low paint volumes, to faster games on smaller fields.
 1972 Daisy Manufacturing Company patented and manufactured the SECOND paintball marker the Daisy 'Splotchmarker', which Nelson marketed as the famous 'Nel-Spot 007'. This marker is important because it is THE marker that was used for that first ever game of paintball in June 1981.  The 'invention' of the "paintball gun" is sometimes mistakenly credited to James Hale because of a patent (US 3,788,298) filed for "compressed gas gun with trigger operated hammer release latching structure" in 1972 by James C Hale of the Victor Comptometer Corporation. Daisy Manufacturing Company, the airgun manufacturer, was owned by Victor Comptometer who's primary business was making adding machines, and early calculators. Notice that the patent is not for a compressed gas gun that fires paint pellets. The patent was filed because the Daisy 'Splotchmarker' was designed from the ground up to shoot a paintball, not modified from a previous air gun design. Because of this fresh approach to design it featured a different valve, hammer, trigger design than any existing pellet, bb, and the CROSSMAN 707, so was patented.
   Hale said his bosses handed the job to him. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous project, he recalled, or one that Daisy thought would make much money. After all, how big could the market be for marking fallen trees and roaming cows be? He tried using an existing model of Daisy’s air pistol. It was made for tiny BB’s, so it wasn’t a surprise that the pistol didn’t shoot paintballs hard enough to make them burst on impact. Hale decided to design a gun from scratch. He tried different designs, but nothing worked. His heart wasn’t in it. Daisy was a day job that he worked as he saved money to start his own business. 
   Hale graduated from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville as a mechanical engineer. He went to Colorado and worked for Beech Aircraft Corp. designing hydrogen fuel tanks to be used in the Apollo space missions. In 1970, He and his wife decided to move back to Arkansas in search of the quiet life. There wasn’t a smorgasbord of engineering jobs in the area, he recalled. While Daisy was a fun place to work, he yearned to do something more challenging. The key innovations Hale produced that Christmas Eve 1971 were a simplified mechanism to load the chamber and cock the gun and a set of hollow tubes that delivered compressed carbon dioxide directly to the paintball when fired.  The patent for Hale’s paintball gun was registered June 19, 1972, with Hale’s name listed as the inventor. But the Daisy company owned rights to the device since Hale developed it on company time. (Pretty common, employment contracts give financial rights to the company on all inventions created on company time)
    Hale said Nelson contacted him in the mid-1980s and told him people were using the paintball gun for sport. Hale’s mind instantly returned to the days when he tested the gun by shooting pellets at a wall in the Daisy factory to see if they would explode.
   "I can remember the smack of those things hitting the wall and pitying the poor cows that might be hit with it," Hale said. "We never imagined that people would ever shoot each other with it."   For James Hale, there is just the framed patent of his paintgun in his tool shop. He said he never got involved in the paintball industry after leaving Daisy
MID 1980s Silencers start to appear, home made silencers from PVC tube really worked. Eventually companies started to build and sell silencers as well, but the home made worked just as well. The paintball sniper is truly born! (See Mid 1990s for ATF's word on silencers)

  1986 Dennis Tippmann, Sr. founds Tippmann Pneumatics. Originally a manufacturer of collectible, half-scale replica machine guns, family-owned Tippmann entered the paintball industry in 1986 when gun law changes forced them to re-evaluate their business. Their first paintball product introduced the first full auto paintball maker you could buy  (The SMG-60 came out back in 1986 but was originally full-auto only. Not select fire. The select-fire started at the 2nd generation of SMG with the Internal line. As the external line was the first style.) - The Tippmann SMG-60 a .62 caliber fully automatic featuring a side feed using a 'stripper clip' held in a magazine out the side of the marker and used the newly introduced CA or constant air tanks that had just been introduced this year. Other semis had been made from converted pump guns, and other manufacturers had working models, but this was the first to the market This marker was later converted to standard .68 caliber in the SMG-68.
 1994  Steve Mitchell creates Warpig (www.warpig.com) the first internet paintball site. Also in 1994 Kingman International introduces the spyder series of markers.
 1995  Paintball makes its cable TV debut on E.S.P.N. with the airing of the 1995 World Championship Games held in Orlando, Florida. Later that year, in television newscasts all across America, a videotape of four teenagers using paintball guns in a drive by shooting is aired and paintball players in every corner of the world voice their outrage over the incident. Also paintball fields are opened in Europe, Asia, and South America. Also in 1995 Brass Eagle owned by Aldo Perone Toronto (currently XO industries, Skyball), sold Brass Eagle to Daisy Manufacturing Co.
 
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