Now You See It, Now You Don't!

TellZall's object for November is the Bowling Pin Boy.

Teenagers are always looking for jobs that can supply some spending money and still allow time for recreation - and, of course, for school. For many, especially boys, a job at the local bowling alley was once just the ticket.

Bowling's origins are rather murky, though some claim that it dates to about 3200 B.C in Egypt. Whatever the origins, the game had become so popular in fourteenth-century England that King Edward III found it necessary to ban it to ensure that his troops spent their time improving their archery rather than their bowling skills. The English, Germans, and Dutch all brought variants to the New World, one of the most popular being an outdoor version called lawn bowling. The game figures prominently in Washington Irving's early-nineteenth-century story of Rip Van Winkle.

By the late nineteenth century, bowling had become a popular, indoor recreation. In 1895, the American Bowling Congress was founded, which brought standardization and increased interest to the game. In 1914, the Brunswick company introduced the first hard-rubber ball and established the firm as a leading manufacturer of bowling-related equipment.

While technology improved bowling, one part of the game remained labor intensive: setting the ten pins. After each ball is rolled down the lane, the knocked-over pins must be removed and the remaining pins either kept in their positions - if the "roll" is the first one of the two-roll "frame" - or removed and replaced with a new setting of pins. In addition, the ball must be returned to the bowler.

This work was carried out by the "pinboy," a person stationed behind the pins who, after the ball struck the pins, would perform the necessary tasks. Often teenage boys, who worked for low wages and were available during the evening hours when most bowling took place, filled the job. The job required dexterity and could be dangerous - getting struck by balls and pins was not uncommon.

The many attempts to automate the process were largely unsuccessful until 1936 when Fred Schmidt, an engineer working for the Dexter Folder Company in Pearl River, New York, introduced his version. Schmidt, a bowler himself, worked with several colleagues for four years developing a machine that could perform the tasks accurately and automatically. They showed it to Robert E. Kennedy, a salesman for Brunswick. When Kennedy approached his bosses, they were unimpressed. So, he formed his own company and approached the American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF), a manufacturer of machines used to pack tobacco, to build the automatic pinsetter. AMF President Morehead Patterson was so impressed that he hired Kennedy and Schmidt, bought their patents, and set them to work making the machine ready to market.

World War II intervened and halted work on the project. Then, in 1946, AMF introduced their automatic pinsetter at the American Bowling Congress tournament in Buffalo. The AMF Automatic Pinsetter was nine feet tall, weighed two tons, and had about six thousand parts. But it worked!

The rapid adoption of the machine changed bowling. Instead of one pinboy for every two lanes, one person could handle the "behind the pins" work for an entire bowling center. Pinsetting was quicker, less expensive, more accurate, and certainly safer. And the nation's pinboys had to find another line of after-school employment.