Bowling. We all have a definite image in our minds of a typical bowling alley…the shoe counter, the shiny wooden alleys, the ugly shirts worn by league members, etc., etc., etc.
But in reading a biography of Wyatt Earp I learned that there was a bowling alley in Tombstone at the time of the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral (!). I had no idea that public bowling fora existed at that time.
So my question is, how similar would such a bowling alley have been to what we see today? Obviously they wouldn’t have had scoresheets projected overhead, or automatic pinsetters, but what would they have had? Were the balls and other equipment the same as today? During what period did we begin to see the typical iconography of modern bowling?
The earliest evidence of the game was from an Egyptian tomb, circa 3200 BC. If the thought of them bowling in Tombstone is odd, consider that. Many variants of bowling were very popular in Europe from the 15th century onwards. It was a commonplace enough image for Washington Irving to use it in “Rip Van Winkle”.
Automated pinsetters arrived in the 1950’s. Before then, they used to hire boys as pinsetters, which was truly a pain-in-the-ass job by all accounts. Logically, the automated ball-return had to accompany the automated pinsetter to get rid of having somebody in back of the alley.
The first mineralite ball was introduced in 1914 - earlier balls were sometimes made of limestone or compressed sawdust.
The American Bowling Congress standardized the rules in 1895, and established national competitions. I would imagine that the uniform evolved with league play after that. A brief history:
One correction to that site: they say it’s still popular in WESTERN New England, and while that may well be, I’m currently only aware of ONE big-ball bowling alley on Boston’s North Shore, while there are at least 15 candlepin alleys. Indeed, I have only gone big-balling thrice in my life, while I grew up on candlepin.
Addendum - of course, the variant Irving was familiar with was “ninepin”. As mentioned in that page, tenpin as we know it started appearing in the 1800’s.
I lived in Canada for a brief time as a youngster. They had a five-pin variant up there. Rather than counting the number of pins you knocked down, you totaled the numbers on the pins, so you could get up to 15 on a frame, with strikes and spares scored as in tenpin, so the best possible score was 450. The ball was smaller, about softball sized, with no finger holes. The nasty part on the scoring was that you were required to take out the 1 pin (upper left corner) to score a frame at all. IIRC, there may have been three balls per frame as well.
Historically, bowling alleys used to have an unsavory reputation, sort of like pool halls. Bowling alleys became respectable some decades before pool halls which have become generally respectable only in recent decades.
I may be wrong but I think the reason for ten pins is that a law was once passed in the US banning nine-pin bowling .So,to get round thelaw,another pin was added.Here in the UK there are still some pubs with nine-pin bowling alleys.The game is played with a wooden ball about the size of a large grapefruit and the wooden pins are about a foot high.The pins are set up by hand ,of course and the alley is about 30 foot or less long.