automatic pinsetter

The automatic pinsetter began as a practical answer to a small, recurring frustration: after work, Gottfried Schmidt wanted to bowl, but there was no one available to reset the pins. Built in a turkey coop from scrap and ingenuity, the machine promised to replace manual labor with speed and reliability. More than a decade later, once American Machine and Foundry could manufacture and sell it at scale, it helped remake bowling alleys and expand the sport. Its history also exposes the gap between a useful invention and the extravagant expectations investors built around the industry it helped create.

The Invention in the Turkey Coop

In 1936, Schmidt, an engineer and pattern maker as well as an avid bowler, grew tired of the fact that bowling pins had to be set by hand. If he wanted to bowl a few frames after work, he needed someone else to do that work; when no one was around to set the pins, bowling itself was out of reach. He imagined a machine that could do the job quickly and efficiently, turning an ordinary obstacle to a game into an engineering problem.

The first machine took shape behind Schmidt’s house, in a rundown turkey coop in Pearl River, New York. Working in the middle of the Great Depression, Schmidt and a small team—including a couple of car mechanics and another engineer—made do with scrap metal, bicycle chains, and used auto parts. Within a year, Schmidt had built a fairly good working model and obtained a patent. The improbable workshop and improvised materials were not incidental details: they mark the distance between a workable invention and the resources needed to manufacture it for an industry.

From Working Model to Commercial Machine

Schmidt had solved the problem of making a machine work, but not the different problem of producing it in quantity. He had no way to mass-produce the invention, leaving the pinsetter’s practical promise stranded at the prototype stage.

Morehead Patterson offered the bridge from one stage to the other. An amateur inventor himself and a vice president at American Machine and Foundry, Patterson was working for a company that made machines for the bakery and tobacco industries and was interested in diversifying. He saw that, with effective marketing, Schmidt’s invention could transform bowling. Because alleys depended on pin boys to reset pins, they were limited in how many lanes they could operate. The arrangement could also be contentious between workers and customers, while social reformers attacked bowling alleys as dens of vice. Patterson saw the pinsetter as a means to make the alleys more mechanically efficient and to support their expansion and upgrading.

Patterson went to Pearl River, found Schmidt working in his turkey coop, and offered him a job. Schmidt became an employee of American Machine and Foundry, which gained control of the patent. This transfer gave the invention an industrial sponsor, but did not bring it immediately to the lanes. World War II intervened: American Machine and Foundry’s factories spent the first half of the decade producing war matériel. The pinsetter made its first official appearance in 1946, yet still had kinks to work out. It was not until 1951, more than a decade after Schmidt’s first working model, that a bowling alley in Mount Clemens, Michigan, introduced the first automatic pinsetter.

Changing the Bowling Alley

The machine’s effect on the alley was dramatic. Pinsetters were quicker and more reliable than pin boys, making bowling faster and more pleasurable. Alleys that had been dingy holes became what the book describes as glorious palaces; the transformation was not only a matter of appearance, but also of the speed and scale at which an alley could serve bowlers. By loosening the old limit imposed by hand-setting pins, the machine helped make expansion possible.

A booming middle class embraced the newly accessible sport, and bowling alleys advertised it as an activity for the whole family. The alley acquired the name “the people’s country club,” an expression of its broader appeal as well as its changed surroundings. By the late 1950s, more than 10 million people bowled at least once a week. The pinsetter did not create that audience by itself, but it supplied a crucial part of the infrastructure that let bowling become faster, more inviting, and available on a much wider scale.

The Invention and the Bowling Bubble

The pinsetter’s commercial success also fed a financial boom that grew well beyond the fortunes of any single machine. Between 1957 and 1958, the stock prices of American Machine and Foundry and Brunswick, another bowling-equipment manufacturer, doubled. Smaller bowling companies went public, and investors readily backed new ideas associated with the sport. Alleys spread across the country; by 1960, the United States had 12,000 alleys with a total of 110,000 lanes. Investors put $2 billion in capital into the bowling business during the bubble.

Wall Street helped intensify the enthusiasm by projecting the decade’s rising popularity forward as if it would continue at the same pace. Analysts argued that soon every American would bowl two hours a week. Charles Schwab, then beginning his Wall Street career, made the projection concrete by multiplying the imagined participation of 180 million people by two hours a week and 52 weeks a year. The pinsetter had helped make more bowling possible; optimistic forecasts turned that genuine industrial change into a much broader bet on perpetual growth.

By 1963, bowling stocks had fallen 80 percent from their all-time highs, and nearly a decade passed before they recovered that lost ground. Bowling itself became less popular and never again reached the level it had during the Eisenhower years. Today, there are about half as many bowling alleys nationally as there were forty years ago, despite roughly 100 million more Americans. The automatic pinsetter therefore has a double place in the story: it was a practical piece of machinery that helped open the alleys to mass participation, and part of the real transformation that investors mistook for a promise of endlessly expanding demand.