The Machine That Set Bowling’s Pins
In 1952, an American conglomerate that built cigarette machines and would later own Harley-Davidson put a 2,000-pound machine on the market that did one thing: it set bowling pins. It was called the AMF Automatic Pinspotter. Within eight years, it was running 90 percent of the lanes in this country. The Professional Bowlers Association would spend the following decade building its tour on top of those machines. The official history of bowling will tell you, correctly, that all of this made the sport modern. What that history will not tell you — what it has never once counted, named, or so much as memorialized — is who was standing behind those pins before the machine arrived. They were children. Not a figure of speech. Eleven-year-old boys, named in the federal record, working bowling pits until one o’clock in the morning.
What a Pinboy Actually Did
Before 1952, every lane in America needed a person at the end of it. Not to help you — to survive your ball. When you threw, ten pins exploded into a pit at the back of the lane, and a human being was crouched in that pit. His job was to drop out of the way of the flying pins and the 16-pound ball, then climb down, clear the deadwood, pick the pins up by hand, set them back into a spotting rack one at a time, and roll your ball back to you down the return. Then do it again. And again. For as long as the house was open.
They were called pinboys, and the name was literal. The work was reserved for boys because it was cheap, it was nighttime, and it was dangerous enough that the people doing it were the people with the least power to refuse it. The record of how dangerous, and how young, is not a matter of legend. It was documented — deliberately, by the federal government’s own contractor — half a century before AMF’s machine arrived.
Lewis Hine Named the Children
His name was Lewis Hine. From 1908 onward, Hine worked as investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, and his assignment was to walk into the places America put its children to work and photograph them. The mills. The mines. The canneries. And the bowling alleys. In 1910, in Burlington, Vermont, he photographed a place called the Bowling Academy and wrote on the caption that two of the pin boys there, with three other small boys, worked “until ten or eleven in the evening, some nights.”
In 1911, in Lowell, Massachusetts, at an alley called Les Miserables — the proprietor had named it after the Victor Hugo novel — Hine photographed three boys and wrote down their names, their ages, and their pay. Frank Jarose, age 11, made $3.72 in a week. Joseph Philip, age 11, made $2.25 one week and $1.75 the week before, and worked weeknights until midnight. Willie Payton, age 11, made a little over two dollars a week and worked every single night until midnight. Hine’s most-reproduced bowling photograph carries a caption that is just a time and a place: “1 A.M., pin boys working in Subway Bowling Alleys, 65 South Street, Brooklyn, New York.” He was not taking those pictures because the work was charming. He was taking them as evidence, for a committee that was trying to make it illegal.
Six Cents a Game: The Cleveland Union
The comfortable version of this history omits the next part entirely. The pinboys were not passive. They were not waiting to be rescued by a machine. They organized. In 1938, in Cleveland, the people who worked the city’s billiard halls and bowling alleys formed Local 48A of the Building Service Employees union. They sat down with 46 of the city’s 50 major establishments and they won a contract. The agreement covered more than 500 workers — pinsetters, pinboy supervisors, the rack boys in the pool halls, the janitors. It demanded a closed shop. And it raised the pinboys’ pay to six cents for every league game they set, up from the four cents that local proprietors had standardized in the early 1930s.
Six cents a game. That was the victory. That was what organizing 500 people and bargaining with an entire city’s worth of owners bought them. And it tells you exactly how thin the margin was that these families were living on, and exactly how little it would take, later, to make the whole arrangement disappear.
Gottfried Schmidt’s Turkey-Shed Machine
While 500 Cleveland pinboys were negotiating their way up to six cents a game, an engineer in New York was building the thing that would make their bargaining unit worthless. His name was Gottfried Schmidt — Fred, to the people who knew him. He had been working on the problem since the mid-1930s: how to set a bowling pin without a person. The first prototype he assembled was in a turkey shed on a machinist’s property, cobbled together from whatever was lying around — a suction cup, a couple of lampshades, some old flower pots. It was ungainly and it worked well enough to patent. The United States Patent Office issued him the core pin-setting patent in 1940. By the time he was done he held around a dozen patents on the idea. In 1941 he sold the whole bundle to Bowling Patents Management Corporation, and AMF then purchased that corporation outright, acquiring the full patent stack and bringing the technology under the roof of the American Machine and Foundry Company — a conglomerate with no romance about bowling at all. AMF made machines. Cigarette machines, bakery machines, defense equipment. A pin-setting machine was just another product line.
It did not work right away. AMF wheeled a prototype out at the American Bowling Congress tournament in Buffalo in 1946 — and was careful to demonstrate it in a separate building, not on the actual tournament lanes, because the thing was a two-ton temperamental mess. It went back to the engineers for five more years. Then, in 1951, AMF put a refined machine into a 12-lane house in Mount Clemens, Michigan — the Bowl-O-Drome, at 179 South Gratiot Avenue. Bowling historians cite that installation as the first time a center ran a full operating day with no pinboys in the pit at all. The next year, 1952, the machine went on the market.
The Machine Cost More Than the Child
AMF did not sell the Pinspotter to bowling alley owners. AMF leased it — for 12 cents a game. And the pinboys that machine replaced had been earning five to ten cents a game. The machine was not cheaper than the child. It cost the proprietor more per game than a pinboy ever did. The boys were not replaced because they were expensive. They were replaced because they were human. A child gets tired. A child gets hurt. A child organizes a union in Cleveland and wins a closed shop. A child does not show up. The machine showed up every night, set the pins at seven to ten games an hour, never aged out of the job, never dodged a ball too slow, and never, ever, asked for six cents.
AMF was not selling labor savings. It was selling the elimination of labor as a variable. By 1958, the industry had taken 40,000 of them. By 1960, 90 percent of the lanes in America had one. In eight years, a profession that had existed for as long as the sport itself was simply gone. The Cleveland union that had fought for a closed shop and six cents a game had no one left to represent. The Hine photographs went into the Library of Congress archive. The bowling alley owned the machine now, and the machine had no age, no hunger, and no rights.
The erasure did not stop at the job. It reached the memory. When the bowling industry tells its own origin story — and it tells it often, because the 1950s boom is the heroic chapter — the machine is the hero. The Pinspotter “modernized” bowling, “cleaned up” the alleys, made the sport safe for families and women, turned a seedy pastime into suburban respectability. All of that is true. But notice the grammar of it. The official telling is a story about a machine that improved a place. The people who were standing in that place — the children, the night-shift teenagers, the 500 Cleveland union members — they do not appear as people who lost a job. They appear, when they appear at all, as part of the seediness the machine cleaned up.
That is the institutional silence this channel keeps finding. It is not always a buried lawsuit or a settled scandal. Sometimes it is simpler and quieter than that. Sometimes an industry just declines to count the people it stopped needing. There is no plaque. There is no number. Bowling can tell you it had 40,000 machines by 1958 — AMF kept that figure because it was revenue. It cannot tell you how many children it had in the pits in 1948, because nobody whose job it was to know ever thought the answer was worth writing down. The things the sport measured were the things the sport sold. AMF sold the elimination of a problem. The problem had names: Frank Jarose, Joseph Philip, Willie Payton — eleven years old, in Lowell, Massachusetts, working until midnight in 1911, four decades before the machine that would make boys like them disappear, and more than a century before anyone bothered to say so out loud.
Chapters
- 0:00 The Machine That Set Bowling’s Pins
- 1:40 What a Pinboy Actually Did
- 3:30 Lewis Hine Named the Children
- 6:00 Six Cents a Game: The Cleveland Union
- 8:20 Gottfried Schmidt’s Turkey-Shed Machine
- 10:00 The Machine Cost More Than the Child
Sources
- Library of Congress — Lewis Hine / National Child Labor Committee photographs
- Smithsonian — “Set ’em up, Knock ’em down: Bowling’s Automated Pin Technology”
- Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Case Western Reserve University) — “Bowling” / Local 48A
- FundingUniverse — AMF Bowling, Inc. company history