Morehead Patterson

Morehead Patterson was an amateur inventor and a vice president at American Machine and Foundry (AMF) who saw how Gottfried Schmidt’s automatic pinsetter could remake the bowling business. By finding Schmidt in his turkey coop and offering him a job, Patterson helped move the invention from a homemade working model toward industrial production. The machine later made bowling faster and more accessible, contributing to the sport’s mid-century boom and the speculative excitement around bowling stocks.

Background and Opportunity

AMF made machinery for the bakery and tobacco industries and was looking to diversify. Patterson recognized that Schmidt’s invention could answer a practical bottleneck: bowling alleys relied on pin boys to reset pins, limiting how many lanes they could operate. The work was also a source of friction between pin boys and customers, while reformers criticized bowling alleys as dens of vice. Patterson saw that mechanizing pinsetting could make the alleys more efficient and support their expansion and modernization.

Schmidt had built his first automatic pinsetter in a rundown turkey coop behind his home in Pearl River, New York. With a small team that included car mechanics and another engineer, he had fashioned a working model from scrap metal, bicycle chains, and used auto parts during the Great Depression. He had also secured a patent, but lacked any means to mass-produce the machine. Patterson’s importance lay in connecting that improvised invention to a company with factories and a commercial interest in a new market.

Bringing Schmidt to AMF

Patterson traveled to Pearl River, located Schmidt in the coop, and offered him a job at AMF. Schmidt became an AMF employee, and the company gained control of the patent. The encounter joined Schmidt’s practical invention to Patterson’s industrial and marketing perspective: an ingenious machine alone could not transform bowling without the organization capable of manufacturing and selling it at scale.

The project did not proceed at once. World War II redirected AMF’s factories toward war matériel during the first half of the 1940s. The pinsetter made its first official appearance in 1946, but unresolved problems remained. Its first introduction in a bowling alley came in 1951, at Mount Clemens, Michigan, more than a decade after Schmidt’s first working model. The long delay shows that Patterson’s commercial vision depended on production capacity, wartime circumstances, and the further work needed to make the machine ready for use.

From Machine to Boom

Once introduced, the automatic pinsetter delivered the efficiency Patterson had anticipated. The machines worked faster and more reliably than pin boys, speeding play and making bowling more enjoyable. Alleys that had been dingy holes became polished destinations promoted as suitable for the whole family; 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.

That growth had consequences beyond the alleys. Between 1957 and 1958, the stocks of AMF and Brunswick, another bowling-equipment manufacturer, doubled. Smaller bowling companies went public, investors financed new ideas, and alleys spread across the country. By 1960, the United States had 12,000 bowling alleys containing 110,000 lanes, while investors had put $2 billion into the bowling business. Patterson’s intervention in Schmidt’s invention thus sits at the beginning of a chain linking a machine built from salvaged parts to a nationwide leisure boom—and to the speculative bubble that followed investors’ confidence in bowling’s continued growth.