Fall
Spare Me the Details!
Modern bowling alleys typically house ultraviolet and neon lights, disco balls, arcade game
machines, shiny metallic bowling balls, glossy bowling pins, computerized score display
screens, bowling ball feeders, lane bumpers alongside gutters, and automated pin setters.
However, the sport of bowling did not always involve such advanced equipment and
environment—the earliest bowling games were so primitive that they only utilized sticks
and stones. Very rapidly, though, technological advancements have transformed bowling
into the popular recreational activity that it is today.
Celia Kung
Celia Kung is a senior majoring in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. From a
young age, she has enjoyed bowling for fun with friends, and her curiosity in the mechanics
behind the pinsetting and ball-returning processes have inspired the topic of this article.
WRIT 340 Aubertin, Section 66806 | Illumin Assignment
11
Kung 1
Introduction
Imagine playing a game of bowling, where instead of glossy bowling balls patterned with
swirly streaks of color, you were rolling down the lane a wooden ball, which is not perfectly
spherical. Assuming you were able to knock any of the wooden pins on the other end of the lane,
rather than having the ball automatically dispensed directly back to a place where you could pick
it up when you are ready for your next bowl attempt, imagine that you had to remain alert
because an employee would roll the ball back in your direction at any time. While this is going
on, imagine that the pins you had perhaps just knocked over were being manually repositioned
by employees just so that you could bowl another frame. In addition, instead of looking up at the
monitor to check your updated score, imagine that you had to calculate and keep track of your
score mentally. This procedure is
typical of bowling games in the early
1800s, when bowling was first
introduced to America. Because of the
labor involved, at the time, bowling
was not very widespread. Since its
origination, however, it has developed
into a popular recreational activity for
Figure 1: Pin boys manually organizing pins in the standard
tenpin triangular formation.
all ages, and this expansion can
primarily be attributed to the
engineering practices applied over the years. Today, bowling is one of the most popular
pastimes.
Kung 2
Brief History: How the Ball Got Rolling
In the 1930s, Sir Flinders Petrie, a British anthropologist, discovered a collection of
what turned out to be different types of bowling balls and pins inside a the grave of a child from
3200 BC, which indicates that bowling has been around for over 5,200 years. Bowling became
particularly popular in the United States during the 1800s, when Europeans started to bring their
own variations of bowling to America [7]. As popularity of ninepin bowling increased, people
began to gamble on the sport, and this led to an 1841 Connecticut law prohibiting people to own
ninepins bowling lanes. Thus, tenpin bowling emerged as a way for people to bypass the law by
simply adding an extra bowling pin to the game [10]. At this time, the bowling balls were made
of lignum vitae, a hard type of wood, and the pins were made of hard rock maple and were not
well standardized [2]. Also, early forms of bowling involved manual pin resetting, where hired
pin boys would line each of the pins by hand after each throw. Bowling ball and pin designs, as
well as pin resetting mechanisms, have developed greatly over the years from the early means.
The current bowling ball is made from a combination of plastic, urethane, reactive resin, hybrid
reactive, and particle materials [8]. Bowling pins are now made of maple wood pieces, are
dipped in latex to prevent cracking, and then glossed with a protective coat [2]. Pin boys have
also since been replaced by automatic pinsetter and ball feeder machines. All of these
advancements have transformed the way people engage in bowling today and were only made
possible by engineering.
Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’
The first official bowling balls that were ever rolled were made from lignum vitae, a type
of dense wood; however, bowlers found that these balls would chip easily. Thus, in 1905, the
Brunswick Corporation introduced a new rubberized ball, which was the mainstream type of
Kung 3
bowling ball until it was replaced in the 1970s by the polyester bowling ball. Manufacturers then
discovered that balls made from urethane required less maintenance, were more powerful, and
offered the greatest hook, or curve, in rolling it down the lane. As manufacturers continued to
improve bowling ball design, they began to experiment with the inner cores and surface layers of
balls. They recognized that balls coated with reactive resin performed best on the lanes, and
these bowling balls are the most widely used type today [6].
Figure 2: Bowling balls made from lignum vitae, rubber, polyester, and urethane (from left to right). Early
bowling balls were made from lignum vitae, a wooden material that chipped easily. The rubberized bowling
ball was introduced by Brunswick and was the most prominent type of bowling ball used for decades. The
cheaper polyester bowling ball replaced the rubberized model and was popular for a short time, until it was
superseded by the urethane ball. Bowling balls made from urethane were a stronger and a more powerful
alternative to the polyester type and required less maintenance.
The current bowling ball design is effective because the reactive resin covering the ball is
porous, and this property allows the ball to absorb the oil it collects as it rolls down the lane. This
is important because the absorption of oil into the pores keeps the ball’s surface dry so that the
ball can maintain its hooking potential since the friction between ball and lane is not affected
over time [4]. Reactive resin is made from a mixture of urethane and other undisclosed
ingredients to generate the porous surface, as shown in Figure 3, but ball manufacturers do not
reveal much detail on the remaining composition of bowling balls [11]. The type of material
composing the bowling ball’s exterior surface, also known as coverstock, is most influential in
determining the way the ball makes contact with the oil lanes and ultimately affects the ball’s
Kung 4
hooking potential. However, an equally important property of bowling ball motion is the force
and spin with which the ball moves, and this is influenced mainly by the ball’s interior design.
Figure 3: Today, most bowling balls are coated with reactive resin,
which provides for even greater hook and power due to the material’s
absorption ability.
Kung 5
While the approximate sixty-five million bowlers who throw balls down the lanes today
might not realize it, each bowling ball has a complex core that influences the way it rolls. The
core ensures that on each revolution, a different surface of the ball makes contact with the lane,
thus giving the ball a unique spin [9]. The various types of core are each made of different
densities and materials and can be selected
depending on the amount of curve or spin and
power a bowler prefers his ball to have. Core type
affects the spin or curve because each type has a
unique distribution of weight inside the ball,
which determines how easy it is for the ball to
rotate. For example, the heavier or more dense the
Figure 4: Various types of bowling ball cores
with different weight distributions affect the
ball's motion.
core is, the quicker the ball can revolve, whereas
the lighter or less dense the core is, the longer it will take for the ball to rotate and gain speed as
it travels down the lane [11]. The availability of many different core types by manufacturers
allows a bowling enthusiast to purchase the type that best suits his bowling style.
Today, personalized bowling balls are so mainstream that professional bowlers are not
the only ones who own them—any bowling enthusiast can purchase one from bowling shops, or
even at a local bowling alley. Most casual bowlers are not too particular in choosing a specific
type of core, but rather, they seek bowling balls with custom-sized and custom-placed finger
holes for optimized grip comfort. While the size and location of these drilled finger holes can
slightly affect the ball’s dynamics, a bowler’s grip on the ball can influence the amount of force
and hook he exerts in his throw.
Kung 6
Bowling balls have changed drastically over the years, as manufacturers continued to
research and produce new chemicals and materials to optimize the bowling ball’s energy
efficiency and manipulate the motion of the ball by taking advantage of its physical properties.
The fine-tuned engineering process of producing bowling balls enables manufacturers to deliver
standardized and perfectly spherical balls. In addition, the ability to personalize bowling balls
can also be attributed to specialized machines that drill through the bowling ball’s shell to create
finger holes suited to a bowler’s grip. In the earliest forms of bowling, players simply threw
stones or wooden balls at sticks without being able to grip the ball from the inside, and thus
bowlers had less control over the swing. Such advancements in the fields of chemistry, physics,
and engineering contributed greatly to the evolution of bowling, making it a more organized
sporting activity.
Let the Pins Fall Where They May
As the bowling ball design developed over time, with it transformed the bowling pin
design as well. Most of the earlier bowling pins were made from hard rock maple, which was
difficult to standardize, due to the varying wood densities. Additionally, when the American
Machine and Foundry (AMF) began to distribute automatic pinsetter machines in 1946, these
machines would often damage the pins, causing them to crack or splinter. In effect, the cracked
and splintered pins would then cause damage to the automatic pinsetter machines, which were
extremely costly. Therefore, in 1954, Vulcan Manufacturing introduced the Vulcanate, a brand
of bowling pins. These pins were similar to the standard solid pins, but the difference is that they
were sawed in half and glued back together with a piece of maple lying in between the halves.
This idea inspired other manufacturers to build pins out of multiple pieces of wood rather than
single solid blocks, and this design, which is used today, proves to be most durable and less
Kung 7
prone to splitting [2]. After the pieces of wood are laminated together, the bowling pins are
finally coated with plastic material that protects the wood from denting on impact with bowling
balls.
Figure 5: Modern bowling pins are built from multiple pieces of wood laminated together and then coated
with plastic and gloss.
Technology has allowed for refinement of the entire process of producing bowling pins
so that they are standardized, making bowling more consistent. Also, though the shape and
structure of bowling pins have not changed much over time, the improvements in pin material
quality have resulted in smoother overall operation of bowling. The rigid but polished coat
around the densely packed wooden pieces make the bowling pin strong enough to withstand
continual impact by bowling balls, as well as by the automatic pin setter machines.
Pickup Artist: The Automatic Pinsetter
Of the technological advances that bowling has seen over the centuries, the automatic
pinsetter is one the greatest feats. This invention in 1936 by Gottfried Schmidt diminished the
need for pin boys to manually line the pins before each frame; furthermore, the automatic
pinsetter creates a consistent alignment of pins every time, thus making bowling a fairer and
quicker game [3].
Kung 8
Figure 6: Side view of a pinsetter showing the pin distributor, pin elevator, pin table, and sweep.
The automatic pinsetter consists of four main
parts: sweep, pin elevator, pin distributor, and pin table.
It starts when a bowling ball is rolled down the lane;
when the ball reaches the pins the end of the lane, a
scanner camera detects which pins have been hit. At the
same time, a sweep lowers its arm in front of the pins to
protect the pinsetter from any balls that might be
thrown down the lane during the pin resetting process.
Figure 7: The pin elevator carries pins
from the conveyor belt up to the pin
distributor.
The camera then interfaces with a system that
calculates the bowler’s score and sends the information
to a computerized screen, which allows bowlers to see this updated score. A pin table, or a metal
rack with ten holes (one for each pin), lowers on top of the pins to pick up the standing pins and
lifts them upward so that the knocked pins can be swept out of the way. The sweep, still in the
lowered position, then pulls the fallen pins back toward a conveyor belt, which carries the pins
into a pin elevator that is responsible for carrying pins up to the pin distributor. Next, the sweep
moves back into its forward guarding position, in preparation for the remaining pins to be re-
Kung 9
lowered. The pin table drops these pins into their positions on the lane and rises back to its
original location, in which the pin distributor begins to fill the pin table with a full set of ten pins
in anticipation for the next frame. While the pins are being reset, the bowling ball is also in the
back pit of the lane and is being transported on a conveyor system underneath the lane, being
sent back to the bowler so that the entire process can be repeated on his next bowl [1].
The technological breakthrough of automatic pinsetters has allowed for more efficient
and accurate bowling. Because the cameras count the remaining standing pins and relay this
information to a system that calculates the running scores and displays them on electronic
screens, scoring is much more accurate as well. Therefore, not only does the machine save labor
for bowling alley employees, it also saves bowlers
a lot of time, as they do not have to wait as long
for the pins to be reset and do not have to spend
time calculating and noting their own scores. With
computerized equipment doing most of the work,
the process becomes less of a laborious task and
more of a leisurely and recreational activity for
Figure 8: Scores are automatically computed after
each frame and displayed on computerized
screens.
bowlers.
Technology Strikes
The advancements made to bowling balls, pins, automatic pinsetters, and the sport itself
can be greatly attributed to technology. Changes in bowling ball composition can be greatly
attributed to chemistry, as manufacturers experimented with various mixtures over the years to
find the optimal compounds; physics brought about improvements in bowling pin structure;
mechanics gave rise to automatic pinsetters; electronic scoring has only been made possible
Kung 10
through computer science. Without these developments in chemistry, physics, mechanics, and
computer science, bowlers would not be able to hook and curve their balls as accurately as they
can, pins would not be standardized, pin alignment and formation would not be consistent, and
consequently the different bowling techniques would not work as effectively. These
improvements have made bowling much more precise, even allowing for it to become a
recognized sport. However, aside from the accuracy and precision that are mostly of importance
to professional bowlers, other benefits from these technological enhancements have facilitated
the transformation of bowling into a recreational activity for all ages. Personalized bowling ball
patterns and customized finger holes and ball weight enable young children to start bowling at
almost any age. Additionally, bowlers do not even have to know how to calculate bowling
scores, since a system automatically computes and maintains scores, which are then displayed to
the bowler. The greatest contribution that these technological developments have offered is that
they have allowed bowling to be so easily accessible that it has become one of the most popular
pastimes today.
References
[1] Brannan, Shel. "How Bowling Pinsetters Work." HowStuffWorks
"Entertainment" HowStuffWorks. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/pinsetter.htm>.
[2] Cavette, Michael. "How Bowling Pin Is Made - Material, Manufacture, Making, Used, Parts,
Structure, Product, Industry, Machine, Raw Materials, Design, the Manufacturing
Kung 11
Process of Bowling Pin." How Products Are Made. Made How. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.madehow.com/Volume-4/Bowling-Pin.html>.
[3] Karl, Alexander. "The History of Bowling Lanes." EHow | How to Videos, Articles & More Discover the Expert in You. | EHow.com. EHow.com. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.ehow.com/facts_6851424_history-bowling-lanes.html>.
[4] Siefers, Nick. "Core Properties." Bowlingdigital.com | The Whole World of International
Bowling. Bowlingdigital.com, 22 Apr. 2007. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.bowlingdigital.com/bowl/node/2097>.
[5] Siefers, Nick. "Understanding the Relationship between Core and Cover
Stock." Bowlingdigital.com | The Whole World of International Bowling.
Bowlingdigital.com, 22 Apr. 2007. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.bowlingdigital.com/bowl/node/2324>.
[6] Unknown. "History of Bowling Balls." Kingpin Bowling Balls. Kingpin Bowling Balls. Web.
5 Nov. 2011. <http://www.kingpinbowlingballs.com/history-bowling-balls>.
[7] Unknown. "History of Bowling." History of Bowling. International Bowling Museum and
Hall of Fame. Web. 04 Nov. 2011.
<http://www.bowlingmuseum.com/Visit/HistoryofBowling.aspx>.
[8] Unknown. "How Bowling Balls Are Made." Bowlingball.com: It's Where Bowlers Go.
Bowlingball.com. Web. 05 Nov. 2011. <http://www.bowlingball.com/BowlVersity/howbowling-balls-are-made>.
[9] Unknown. "Pick the Best Bowling Ball | Core and Grip Affect Bowling Ball." Bowling Tips |
Secrets and Guide for Better Bowling. Help With Bowling. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.
<http://helpwithbowling.com/help-pick-bowling-ball.php>.
Kung 12
[10] Unknown. "The Game History." All About Bowling. TenpinBowling.org. Web. 04 Nov.
2011. <http://www.tenpinbowling.org/view.php?page=the_game.history>.
[11] Wolf, Lauren. "Bowling Balls." Chemical & Engineering News 86.27 (2008): 31. Print.