Gottfried Schmidt

Gottfried Schmidt was an engineer, pattern maker, and avid bowler whose effort to solve a practical annoyance helped transform the bowling industry. In a turkey coop behind his home in Pearl River, New York, he and a small team built an early automatic pinsetter from scrap and used parts; the invention worked, but turning it into a mass-produced machine required resources he did not have.

Identity and the first machine

In 1936, Schmidt was frustrated that he could not bowl a few frames after work without someone available to set the pins. Bowling pins were then reset by hand, and he imagined a machine that could do the job quickly and efficiently. The problem was modest in scale, but it pointed toward a mechanical substitute for the pin boys on whom bowling alleys depended.

Schmidt assembled a small team that included a couple of car mechanics and another engineer. They worked in the rundown turkey coop behind his house in Pearl River, relying in the depths of the Great Depression on scrap metal, bicycle chains, and used auto parts. Within a year, the group had produced a fairly good working model, and Schmidt had obtained a patent.

From invention to manufacture

A working prototype and patent did not give Schmidt a way to produce the machine in quantity. That gap brought the inventor into contact with Morehead Patterson, an amateur inventor and vice president of American Machine and Foundry (AMF). The company made machinery for the bakery and tobacco industries and was looking to diversify. Patterson saw that, with effective marketing, Schmidt’s invention could change bowling.

The pinsetter promised more than the removal of manual labor. Because pin boys set pins by hand, alleys were limited in how many lanes they could operate at once. Their relationship with customers could also be contentious, while bowling alleys faced attacks from social reformers as dens of vice. A machine that reset pins could make alley operations more efficient and support their expansion and upgrading.

Patterson went to Pearl River, found Schmidt in the turkey coop, and offered him a job. Schmidt became an AMF employee, while AMF obtained control of the patent. The transition from improvised invention to industrial development therefore depended on a change in scale and ownership: Schmidt had made the machine possible, but lacked the capacity to mass-produce it.

Delayed debut and wider effect

The machine’s arrival was delayed by World War II, when AMF’s factories spent the first half of the 1940s producing war matériel. Although the pinsetter made its first official appearance in 1946, unresolved problems remained. The first automatic pinsetter was not introduced in a bowling alley until 1951, more than a decade after Schmidt’s initial working model.

Its effects were visible in the character of bowling alleys and in the sport’s audience. Alleys shifted from dingy holes to polished, palace-like venues; automatic machines reset pins faster and more reliably than pin boys, making bowling quicker and more pleasurable. As the middle class took up the sport, alleys promoted it as suitable for the whole family, and the bowling alley acquired the name “the people’s country club.” By the late 1950s, more than 10 million people bowled at least once a week.

Significance

Schmidt’s story turns on the difference between invention and implementation. A small team, working with discarded materials in a backyard outbuilding, could produce a model and secure a patent; the invention’s larger social effect required a company able to manufacture and market it, as well as time for wartime production and technical problems to run their course. The pinsetter’s eventual influence was far larger than the frustration that first prompted it: mechanizing a single task helped bowling alleys expand and helped make bowling a mass, family-oriented pastime.