America used to have four kinds of bowling. Three are nearly extinct — and they didn’t lose because people stopped playing. They lost because only one game’s pin-setting machine was ever mass-produced.
The Professional Bowlers Association runs a tour for exactly one kind of bowling: tenpin. But duckpin, candlepin, and nine-pin were all real American sports with their own leagues, records, and devoted regions. The reason tenpin won was not taste — it was tooling. In 1952 the American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF) put its Automatic Pinspotter on the market, and in 1956 the Brunswick Corporation installed its own. Two industrial giants, two mass-produced machines, both built only for tenpin.
Each of the other games ran on a single boutique pinsetter with no corporate parent. Duckpin’s machine was built by one man, Ken Sherman, who refused Brunswick’s offer to buy his patent — and after 1973 no new Sherman parts were ever made, forcing surviving duckpin houses to cannibalize the machines of alleys that closed. Candlepin ran on the Bowl-Mor, built by two lawyers in 1947 and no longer manufactured at all. Nine-pin, the old German team game, was outlawed in the 1840s gambling panic and then converted away the moment automatic tenpin machines arrived. In 1963, metropolitan Baltimore had 1,105 duckpin lanes against just 538 tenpin lanes — duckpin was the more popular game in its own city, and it still collapsed by more than ninety percent.