Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. All of us are wearing bowling shoes, are feet hurt, they look kind of weird, and we're ready to go. I want to shout out. This was a genuine listener suggestion. Oh nice, what listener Mark bowls? No, not b O w L. It's b O L e s. But still kind of funny since we're talking about I watched a video on automatic pin setters by a kid name While a guy named Matt Boland. He's a pin setter technician. So there's some some weirdness going on here. I had a dentist named Dr Tuggle. Mmm, that sounds painful, like you just made my scrotum shrink up into myself. And I had a h My proctologist is Dr Fingering. But what his first name finger in, his middle initials in, and then his last name is but no, his whole last name. I think his name is Robert Fingering Butt, And I think, oh, yeah, doctor Fingering, but yeah, maybe Finland or something. I don't know. I just call him Robert Bobby Bobby Fingers. Yes, but Chuck, the hilarious thing is, we're not talking about proctologists right now, not at all. As a matter of fact, I'll be very surprised if they come up again in this episode because instead about talking about bowling. That's right, and big thanks to Mark Bowls for this. He just simply wrote in and said, hey, I bet you bowling has a pretty interesting backstory, and it kind of does. I think, yeah, it does. Mark Bowles was lazy, uh and wanted us to do it for him, and here we are. And we want to also give an even bigger thanks to Ed Grabinowski for helping us out with this one. Yeah, and before we get to that interesting history, though, bowling seems like the kind of thing we could just say, hey, we're doing one on bowling. Everyone knows what that is, right, but at the risk of not covering our bases, we can very quickly just sort of describe the game, right. Oh yeah, I think that's a good idea because ten pin bowling, which is what we're talking about. There's tons and tons of different variations on bowling, but ten pin bowling is specifically what we're talking about, and it's an American invention. So it's entirely possible that there's people out there who listen who have never played ten pin bowling. Who knows I'm making it up, but it's a good guess, I think. All right, So what you do here, and it is keen to point out and we'll also get to this in the history that bowling is is a variation of just a game, which is it seems like kind of one of the earlier kinds of games, which is throw something at those things, whether it be corn hole or horse shoes or any kind of rolled object at a club or a pin or something. And tin pin bowling is a variation of that where there are tin pins arranged in a triangle starting at the headpin. So you got your one, and then you've got two pins, and then you got three pins, and then you've got four pins, all in rows. So it forms a nice little triangle. And you throw a bowling ball down a lane that is forty two inches wide and sixty ft long from the foul line to the headpin. Yeah, and the entire lane itself is sixty two ft and ten and three sixes long. To be precise, something that one ever needs to know right, well, I mean, somebody put it out there. I wanted to know, so I hats off too. I can't remember what site helped me, but so. Um, at the end where you're rolling the ball, where you the player the bowler is standing, there's a line. It's a foul line, and if you cross it, you just gave up any points you might have accrued for that shot up. Yeah, and then just to make it even harder, to make it that would be amazing, kind of like a running Man version of bowling or a squid game thing. Yeah, the new running Man, frankly bring it into the modern era. Yeah, yeah, um. And then to make it even harder in addition to the threat of exploding if you cross the foul line, there um these troughs on either side of the lane that your ball can easily move into. They're called gutters, and balls are usually about eight to eight and a half inches in diameter. Gutters are a nice snug fit. They're usually about nine and nine and a quarter inches in diameter, so there's a little bit of room for the ball to move along, but it's snug enough that it's not coming out of the gutter once it goes in there almost always. I've seen some aggressive bowlers have one pop out of the gutter if it gets a nice rock going. But you know, I think like that's sort of like kitting a sevententh split. But you would have been in that, Yeah, exactly. Bow nice foreshadowing. And even if you had never bowled, you've probably had at least heard the term gutter ball. It's just kind of a catch all term for things that stink that happened to you, whether you like it or not. Yeah, And these days they have if you go bowling with your younger kids or just someone who really wants to make the game a lot easier, they have these little uh gutter guards, little gates that lift up automatically if you so choose, are not automatically, you trigger it to and then that way, your six year old can throw a bowling ball down and it'll just go side to side. Hitting those things all the way today. Yeah, and they might get lucky and ricochet it right into the pocket, which is the sweet spot between those pins, between the first pin and either one of the two behind it, depending on whether you're a left hand or right hand bowler. Yeah, I mean it's good that you brought that up that if anyone ever didn't bowl much and thought, well, why did those pro bowlers and uh and certain jerks at regular bowling alleys really try to spin that ball hard, so it's like kisses that gutter and then flies at an angle. That's you know, they discovered that is the best way to knock down all ten pins for a strike is to come in at that sort of diagonal between the headpin and the pins behind it. Right. They're not doing it just because it looks cool. No, No, that's basically how you bowl. If you're actually trying to do you try to spend. I haven't bowled in a while, but yeah, I definitely tried to try to spin, because you don't want the ball to just skid along without rolling on the on the the lane you wanted to spin. You know. I never tried to spin. I was I was never strong enough or good enough, but I was an okay bowler in my bowling heyday. Same here. I definitely peaked at bowling in about six to seventh grade, when I was actually in an after school bowling program that was much later. Okay, well, I also peaked at basketball in second grade when I played on the Maroon team in the Royal Blue team at the y m c A. Were you taller earlier? No, it was just I was less afraid of getting an elbow in the face, so I was way more aggressive taking it to the to the basket. My whole secret when my bowling game was on, and you know, I wasn't going out there and bowling like a two twenty or anything like that. But you know, if I walked out of there with like a one eight on a any game, I've considered that a really good score for me. Yeah. My whole trick was to just bullet really really straight. I was pretty good at that, and to not launch it three or four ft down the lane. It was a very smooth action, making contact with the floor kind of right at the foul line, and it all resulted in just a pretty true throw. Nice, non professionally good. Okay, but yes, one eight is definitely I mean, I wouldn't go around boasting at it in some random bar you just walked into, but it's still you could probably impress your closest friends with that, you know. I mean, that's probably like my best score, just to be clear, got you okay? Um And speaking of scores chuck uh. Today, if you go bowling, a computer keep score for you. You don't have to score. And that's actually a huge relief for a lot of people because scoring in bowling is really complicated and there's actually, um I've seen a theory or hypothesis. I guess that one of the reasons why bowling has become less of a thing in America over the years is because it is computerized scoring and people don't understand the game like they used to when you had to keep score yourself. Well. Yeah, but the goal for every single time you throw the ball is to knock the pins down, right, But if you don't, then you've got a problem on your hand. And even if you do knock all the pins down, you don't so that's a strike. By the way, for those of you who have never played ten pin bowling, if you knock all all ten pins down in your first throw, you get two throws per frame. There's ten frames per game, right in any given frame, you have two possible throws. If you knock all ten pins down with your first throw in a frame, that's a strike and you're done. Okay, No, you're you're Are you done? Well? You're done, if it's until your next if it's if it's one through nine, you're done. And the in the ten frame you get those bonus balls, which we'll get to. Got you, So it's scoring. Since you knock called ten pins down, you think, okay, you get ten points per frame. If you bowl the strike in every frame, you'd have a hundred points, like that's the maximum number of points. It's actually not correct. There's bonus points in bowling, so that if you bowl a strike in any given frame, then the number of pins you knocked down in the next two frames affect your score in that first frame that you you bowl the strike in. Okay, I told you it's really complicated, and ian scoring strikes is easier than scoring spares, which I'm hesitant to even get into. But the upshot is there are there are bonus points and scoring a spare and a spare, by the way, is when you knock down all ten pins. But it takes you both of your throws in a single frame, right right, which can happen. You can knock down one pin and then nine pins, or you can knock down nine and then one, or any combination therein. Yeah, as long as all of the pins are knocked down by your second throw, right, that's a spare, and then your next throw in the next frame, those points get added to that frame previously where you threw a spare the frame before. It's way more nuanced than that actually, But that's Frankly, I'm very relieved because that's a pretty good overview of scoring and bowling. Yeah. And in the old days, when we were growing up, pre computerized scoring, I felt like there was always somebody in the group that knew how to do it. They were kind of the de factove scorekeeper, and you would indicate a strike and it's still indicated via computer with an X and a spare with a slash mark through the square. Uh. And of course now with a computer thing, you can you know, when you bowl a strike, they flash your name up there, so people inevitably list their names, you know, Chewbacca or fart Face or something, yeah, something really fun. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's kind of incumbent upon you to come up with a silly name unless your name is ductr Finger. But and then you definitely just use your real name. Right, So you've got like the scoring with the spare scoring with the strike. Those are exceptional. Those have bonus points. If you take two throws in a frame and you knock down two pins and then in your second throw you knocked down five, there's nothing special about that. That's seven points for that frame. Boo. But the thing is um, if you if you notice when when you throw a strike, the next two frames scores are added to your that's that phrase where you scored a strike. If you score a strike in every frame, it just keeps going down the line to where you end up eventually with thirty in each frame. And then by the time you get to the tenth frame, since if you roll the strike in that tenth frame, you actually get two more throws because you're basically adding two more frames or one more frame. And um, if you bowl a strike in every single one of those, including your two extra throws, you will have just bowled twelve strikes in a row, and you will have accrued a score of three hundred, which in bowling is considered a perfect game. That's right, uh, And bowling is all about those strikes and spares and those bonus points. If you want to score high because if you think about it, if you if you knock down nine out of those tin pins, you might think that's pretty good, But if you do that ten times, you've only scored a ninety. So you really need to hit those strikes and spares or ideally a turkey, which is three strikes in a row at least at one point during the game, and you really really want to that money ball is that last frame, Like that's where you can really, um add a lot to your final total, right exactly. So, I mean this isn't meant to be like an exhaustive primer on bowling scoring. I think if this episode like gets you into bowling, like you'll probably need to look up some more you know, explanation of the rules or have it taught to you or something like that. Um, But that's that's generally like how it works, and it is really really kind of difficult to understand. But it also like kind of to me it's a throwback of when the general public was a little smarter because we didn't necessarily rely on computers for stuff like this. We had to do it ourselves. Like now, if you can type in Chewbacca, then you can bowl. It's misspelled. There's like a capital letter randomly in the middle of it. All right, I think that's a good break, right. I think so too, Chuck. We're in sync right now. Yeah, let's do it. So we'll come back and we'll talk about oh, all kinds of fun stuff, bowling gear and and more. Right after this, all right? Uh, ed Is uh wisely points out that, um, there's quite a bit of bowling gear for a game that you can play in short pants while drinking beer. Uh. We'll talk about the ball in a second. But well, let's go ahead and talk about the ball. Yeah, what are you waiting for? I don't know. Uh. The original bowling balls were would It was a hardwood, uh, native to the Caribbean in South America, called lignum. I even looked it up. Vit Yeah, or the um gia con gia coon tree. Oh? Is that is that the tree? That's the tree? That's the Yeah, you said the taxonic name. I think one of the common names is kei khn okay. But it's very hard, you know, dense wood. And that worked out for a little while, but then the twentie century rolls around and they said, hey, we got new things like rubber, so let's make them out of rubber. Uh. And they had a core which was either one or two piece that would be connected by pegs and then like a one inch outer shell and then bruns. What came along the rubber men was the crew that worked on this project and developed something called a mineralite bowling ball in the nineteen tens, which ED couldn't figure out what that was. And from what I saw, I don't know if you didn't digging, I found that it wasn't a substance, but it was more of a process, right, Yeah, And I think that the process resulted in a hard rubber ball, right, but it was a ball that floated in liquid mercury that they would continually kind of uh used to tweak the ball. Is that right? I didn't see that. That must have been amazing and dangerous. Well that's what I saw, because you know, mercury would be the mineral. So I think it's it's a process of making the bowling ball using this uh liquid mercury. And we should say bowling balls didn't used to be made out of like bouncy rubber. That would be an entirely different game from what we're talking about. This is like hard rubber, like a hockey puck. Yeah, not or flubber you know what that? Oh no, no, chuck. And by the way, if I'm wrong about the mineral ie, it is pretty hard to find out a lot about that for some reason. Yeah, I don't know either. Uh if someone had, If I was wrong in that and someone knows what it is, please let me know, right, um. And then also chuck, they're the balls eventually were made from plastic polyurethane UM and then resin took over in the nineties, and the nineties were a decade Like each decade basically brought along a pretty big sea change with bowling balls, but the nineties are arguably the decade of the most change because with that reson they started um messing around with different codings on the outside of the ball, the resident. They called it um reactive Resident, I think, and it would actually kind of grip. It would give the ball some grips and all of a sudden you could control that ball way better. And because of that um that change in balls, Chuck, the number of perfect games exploded starting in the nineties. Look at this. Yeah, in the nine nineteen sixty nine season, the US Bowling Congress, which is this umbrella or umbrella organization that covers all bowling from people who just show up at a lane to you know, the highest paid pro bowler the The USBC recorded nine d and five perfect games in the sixty nine season. Okay, thirty years later in season, there were thirty four thousand, four hundred and seventy perfect games. Yes, and not only that, so that's at increase. But not only that, there were two thirds fewer bowlers bowling in that season than there had been in the nine season bowling tech thank you, right, Yeah, I mean that. But that's what the change in the balls did. It just completely revolutionized the game. It made it way more easy. You could also say a lot more fun, um for the average casual bowler. Yeah, I would say so. Uh. It's interesting if you look inside a bowling ball on the internet, like a cross section. They do have a core, but uh, it's it's not round, and it's really kind of strange. There's some interesting and kind of odd shapes uh that are inside bowling balls. In different shapes of the core will give it different characteristics as it rolls or is uh spun or not spun? What do they call it? Uh? Um uh hooked hooked. Thank you hooked down the lane. Uh. And then you've got your cover stock, and that is the final outer layer that is now that reactive resin that apparently changed the game. Yeah, totally. Um. And if you want to make sure your bowling ball is regulation, you want to get yourself one of those things they used to measure. Um, what's it called a caliper. You want to get a caliper and you want to measure and make sure it's between eight point five o o and eight point five nine five inches in diameter. That's a regulation size bowling ball. There's no minimum weight, but the maximum it can weigh sixteen pounds, which hurts my elbow just thinking about that. Yeah, we're a heavy ball guy, or not medium for sure? Medium to light yeah I was. I was light to medium okay, Yeah, well I think it's the same thing. We were just going in opposite way. I mean, I definitely preferred lighter. I was in still am a weakling so a big, heavy bowling ball just it was no good for me. No, it's it's not that fun. Um. And then the last requirement for regulation bowling ball is that it has to be gaudy. Yeah, I mean some of them are kind of crazy looking. I mean, you can get all kinds of Like if you're a real bowler and you want to buy some weird specialty bowling ball that has a crystal skull in it, you can, um but you know, they have the plain black ones. But they also have all sorts of fun marbleie colored bowling balls, and those are always kind of fun. I found the one that um Bill Mark Bill Murray bowled with um on in Kingpin, the clear one with the rose in it. Okay, was it a rose? I couldn't remember. Yeah, and you can get it for like two fifty bucks online. I mean, not the one he was bowling with, but you know, a remake of it, but it's it's out there for sure. Okay. I just might add that to the old Christmas list for special podcaster nice. I hope you're talking about me and pin bowling. Been bowling, right, Yeah, and my mind just went there. That's funny. Should we talk pins? Yeah, there's not a lot of interesting thing about pins as far as I'm concerned, except for the fact that they have to replace them about once a year because they get so beat up. Yeah, and they're not a single piece of wood. They used to be a single piece of solid maple carved out, but since the fifties they've been glued together in sections right um and then uh. Also the lane itself is um its own kind of piece of master work because it looks like you know, individual pine boards. And the reason that it looks like that is apparently they it's an homage to how lanes actually used to be built, which was individual pine and then maple boards. Depending on what part of the lane you were talking about, you put maple at either end because that's where most of the heavy action was going on, and then in the middle you would make it pine. But they were a little any links of boards that were nailed down and screwed down to um like plywood. Basically that was on top of heavy beams and that was your your lane, and you had to varnish it and then sand it and varnish it and varnish it again, maybe once or twice a year, just to keep the thing, you know, intact from all the wear and tear. Yeah, and we should say that they use pine in the middle because pine is really soft. If we have heart pine floors from the nineteen thirties and our house, and they're just if you look at it wrong, it can dent and scratch. So it's a it's not a very hardy wood. So that's why they had the hard super hard maple where you're throwing that ball down at the beginning and at the end where the pins are exploding after you throw your sixteen pound ball down there, steve you right. But nowadays bowling lanes are synthetic in that right, Yeah, And again like that's it's funny that they make it look like they're individual boards because it's it is. It's all just synthetic. Apparently the manufacturers of lanes um keep their their exact recipes as trade secret secrets, but ED turned up one that described its um substance that it made the synthetic substance that makes the lanes out of his phenolic, which is a kind of synthetic resin made from formalde hyde. So it's not it ain't pine or maple anymore, is basically what I'm saying. Yeah, I like the fact that they do make it look like the olden days, but I I think they could get a little more creative in some bowling alleys and just you know, they're trying to get people bowling again, and another they're doing all kinds of fun stuff with you know, cosmic bowling and all these kind of crazy ideas. But I think they could make the lanes look really interesting. Remember those uh you remember that whatever that substance was made out of that you'd find around like a brass bowl in the nineties, but it was all sort of different, weird colors mixed together, sort of okay, something like that, or tied I want to not do tied eye bowling lanes like it's synthetic. You could make it look any way you want it, or maybe like the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Oh you know, it would be fun. You know people do that sidewalk art that makes it look like the sidewalks crumbled away the three dr awesome. That would be so cool. It would so chuck. I think, um, we should talk a little bit about um lane oil because it's kind of interesting actually, and it kind of changes things. Are you cool with talking about it at this point? Yeah? Yeah, the the whole, the whole deal from the end. Yeah, totally so um the despite it already being made of pretty slick material. A bowling alley lane is actually coated in mineral oil, and it's coated in different places, and not just across bowling alleys, Like a different bowling alley will have oil in different they apply it in different patterns in different ways. Yeah, and this is um this is the reason why. And Ed sort of pose the question if a shmo like me can go out there and bowl a one eighty and the average professional bowler bowls between two tin and two twenty, like I might think, hey, I'm pretty close to that score, Like I could do this a couple of times a week and I could be a pro bowler. And apparently that is not the case because of the fact, this one fact that a standard bowling alleys where schmos like us bowl, uh, we get the mineral oil application and pattern that is the most forgiving and I guess the easiest and most geared towards amateur bowlers. Right, So, like if you get a gutter ball or you just somehow miss all of your pins, you have really failed at a just normal bowling alley because they're actually setting you up as best they can to get a strike every time. So you're actually really working against the workers at the bowling alley. At that point. But the upshot of it is is that, like it's geared toward making the casual bowler a better bowler. If the casual bowler stepped out and started bowling on the lane that had a p B a Professional Bowlers Association approved oil pattern, you would be totally lost. You would probably get a gutter ball every single time. And that's that's, like you said, that's the difference between the casual bowler and the pro bowler. It's so much harder to bowl in the pros because of that oil that they put in different kinds of patterns, depending on the the tournament, depending on the alley, depending on sometimes probably bowlers preferences. Yeah, and the sort of the simplest way to describe it without getting too dense into the patterns themselves. If there's less oil, then it's not going to be a slick and it's gonna have a little more grab. So, and if you get the house oil treatment, which is what they call the standard treatment for amateur bowlers, there's gonna be less oil along the edges and along the sides near the gutters. So hopefully if it veers that way, it'll grab and try and veer itself back toward the center, and it's not you know, I think it's fairly subtle. It's not so much that you can just obviously throw one up there and it'll just sort of ping pong down there towards the middle because of the oil application. Um. But apparently the pro patterns which uh have animal names or they're named after famous bowlers from the past, like, uh, there's a scorpion pattern stuff like that. Um, apparently that stuff is there's a lot of nuance to how you bowl on those and those PBA bowlers are are great at it. Yeah, And so like at a p B A approved tournament or championship, Um, everybody's bowling on the same oil pattern. The oil pattern is established at the official practice and then it's they they reapply it throughout the tournament. So, but it's the same type of patterns. So they've got these patterns down so well that you know, after a day the oils worn off, but put on the same exact pattern that night into the bowler who comes the second day, it's like bowling exactly like it was the day before. That's how that's how exact these patterns are. I saw that some like the oil is applied. Uh, the um the measurement that they use are like micro leaders, Like that's how exact these oil patterns are. And there's actually when I saw Chuck that's named after Chris Paul, the NBA player, he's that much of a bowling enthusiastic has own oil pattern named after I didn't know he was into it. I love that. I like Chris Paul. Yeah, oh yeah, he's huge into bowling for sure, but he's still an amateur. Uh. And also the pro bowlers will maybe dial in a certain ball, like they might have several balls in their arsenal, and depending on what kind of pattern they get, they may use a different ball, and they may you know, they may throw it and hook it a little bit differently, or they invariably will depending on what kind of pattern. But they know the patterns and they know what to do right. And then lastly, Chuck, UM, the coutrement uh that you want to make sure you're outfitted with if you're going to bowl are bowling shoes. And if you're a pro bowler, your your bowling shoes are rather different from the kind that you or I would get from a guy who just sprayed it with some weird disinfectant and handed them to us because they're not normal bowling shoes. Yeah, that's such a classic part of bowling. It's just seeing them grab those and spray it in, right. Yeah, who was it that did that for a living in some movie? Uh? I don't know, I don't know. I want to say there is a heist movie where one of the characters was like a bowling shoe hand er outer. Okay, I bet you somebody, all right, And I would like to know that too, because that sounds to But the bowling shoes, uh, that you will be probably renting unless you do bowl a lot, if you're in a league, you probably have your own shoes. But they have the right amount of amount of slip and grip to send you gliding down the floor but not slipping all over the place. And they are in fact made ugly and the ncomfortable, so you don't take them home. That's a true thing. That's awesome, But people still do take him home. I mean once in the I think I did that once in my twenties when it was kind of cool to wear bowling shoes around. Shame, shame, shame, whatever became of them. Did you take him back? Who knows? You know, that stuff in the twenties just it's it's ephemeral, you know. Did you wear them out? Yeah? Yeah, I would wear them mountain Athens and be like a he's chucking his bowling shoes. You're such a hipster. Uh. And the the last bit of equipment we can mention is if you're pro bowl or maybe if you have like even risk problems, or if you're just a league bowler who's highly enthusiastic, you might have a risk brace and maybe a rosin bag to dry your hand off. Even though they do have those great little air blowers at the ball return station, Yeah, they really do. It's pretty great. We're gonna talk about that in a minute, Chuck, because I propose we take a break and come back and talk about one of the most profound developments in the history of bowling, the automatic pin setter. So, Chuck, for this first part, I want to direct everybody to our two thousand eighteen episode Jobs of Bygone Eras, because we talked about something that really ties into bowling, which was pin monkeys or pin boys. They were human people who would stand at the back of a bowling lane. Sometimes they were responsible for one lane, sometimes for two. And then as people bowled, they were responsible for removing the knocked over pins called deadwood, leaving the other pins up. And then when was when a frame was done, resetting the pins by hand, they would just set the pins out in a triangle. They would also take somebody's ball and roll it down a little incline back to them. That was a human based job for a really long time. Actually, that's right. Uh. Then they advanced it a little bit, uh to where there was a machine that would position and set the pins, but there was still a pin boy because it wasn't fully automated. They would like use the lever to lower lower it down, but it was still like a mechanical machine that was helping getting them in the exact correct position, eliminating human error I reckon, Yeah sure, but also making it a lot faster too. Oh yeah, way faster. Uh. And then they finally I guess this was the early nineteen hundreds. Um, they tried to automate it a little bit more and never really caught on that well. And then a gentleman name Fred Gottfried Fred Schmidt from New York State uh figured out a machine that would actually clear the pins, lift them up, set the pins, and it was bought in nineteen forty one by the American Machine and Foundry Company, which, if you don't think that sounds familiar, if you look at if you go to any bowling alley, you'll see a lot of equipment with a MF branded on it. UM, and that's where it comes from. American Machine and Foundry Company. Yeah, and that was a really really good purchase of those patents by a MF. UM. They opened a factory in an old I think bicycle factory in Shelby, Ohio. They started out with two hundred employees, and those two hundred employees could make two hundred of these automatic pin setters a year at first, but they caught on so quickly and the pin setter changed the game so much that they they just started hiring and building more and more and more, so much so that from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty eight, forty thousand a m F pin setters, and a pin setter is a huge machine at the back of every lane in a bowling alley. Forty thousand of them have been sold or leased out to bowling alleys just in the United States alone. So it was like a a revolutionary shock way that went through bowling because bowling was no longer a slow and unpredictably paced game anymore. It was fast and it had a rhythm that you could get into it. As a matter of fact, a m F tuted that, um, this was a new type of bowling. They called it rhythm bowling because it was automated, so you could kind of determine when the ball was going to come back, when the pins are gonna be ready, and it was just much more fast paced than having some kid hands setting up pins in the back, which is what it had been like, you know, just a decade before. It's interesting you mentioned the rhythm, like you don't really think about it, but even an amateur schmo like me, when the thing messes up or when you're bald and come back right, it does you do feel a little put out, Like, oh man, I was like I was feeling things. I was in my groove and now I got to push that button to make you know, the person from the front desk come over and talk to it. Yeah, that's funny, because I don't feel disappointed. I feel like I did something wrong, and I'm about to get in trouble for doing something to their ball. That's how I always felt. Really yeah, I'm coming to realize that that's like a hallmark of my entire life that I really need to get past. It's not your fault. You don't need to hide in the bathroom. Thanks. I wouldn't quite hide in the bathroom, but I wouldn't make eye contact with the person came over and you know fixed it well, you know you were probably had a scarring thing at a young age where someone came back and went, would you do? Would you do with that bull? I'm crumbling right now. That was like such a perfect impression. You didn't do anything, Todd Gack, you didn't do anything, Thank you? Walking back and forth. So we're gonna get into, um, not the weeds, but we're gonna get a little bit into the nitty gritty of the modern automatic pin center, which is just a truly amazing machine. If you like watching uh how It's made, or any of those shows about like factory mechanical processes, then look no further than the automatic pin setter. And I can recommend, I think we both can. A YouTube video from a gentleman named Jared Owen Animations, So just look up Jared Owin Animations pin setter and he does he's great, Uh, animations of mechanical processes. And this one was so cool and fascinating. It's not how amazing it is this how great this this animation was. And then also I want to just re recommend pin setter operation video. Kind of a sterile title, and it's live action, it's not it's not um it's not animation by Matt Boland again, who's a pin setter mechanic, and he took apart all sorts of different components of the pin setter to show how they worked in operation and explains it. So both of those videos are really good at explaining how pin setters work, right. And one last thing before we get into it, uh, I did think of a lot of ideas along the way, like the you know, the plaid bowling lanes and things to get bowling more interesting. Again, I say, get rid of the facade in front of these machines and let people look at them. It's amazing looking and it would be super cool. It would be super cool. But one of the things that's really critical on those facades is another a MF invention that helped change bowling. What's called the magic triangle, which shows which pins are still standing in their location on that facade, so that you know how to throw your balls. Can get rid of that, They could put that somewhere else. And apparently a MFUM really tried to call this thing the pindicator and it never caught on. Everybody called it the magic triangle like in indicator. I'm surprised I didn't. I didn't catch it did not catch. All right, should we get into this? Yeah? Also, real quick shout out. I think it was Richmond County history dot com, which was all the info I got that um, Shelby, Ohio a MF info from all right, shoutouts. Over Here we go with automatic Concenter, one of the human kinds greatest inventions. The first thing that's gonna happen. You're gonna throw your ball down there and hit pins. And as soon as your ball crosses that little threshold where the pins are, there are sensors on both sides that tell the pin setting machine, Hey, the ball has passed through. It's time to go to work. Right, So a bunch of things happen initially, Like obviously, when you throw a ball really fast that weighs up to sixteen pounds down sixty ft of lane and it knocks into a bunch of wooden pins that suddenly go flying, you need some sort of backstop or barrier, and they have that. They have like some sort of tarp or sheet that's um that covers rubber stoppers that are mounted to like a wood panel, and that's like the backstop. And then directly below the backstop, between it and the end of the lane is a little conveyor belt that pushes everything that got knocked over towards the backstop back away from the lane. That's that's going on simultaneously while the sweep and the pin setter come down right right. And the other thing we should mention that is happening ideally, if it's working correctly, is your ball is going to be sort of shuttled over to what's called an accelerator and it's just a really fast moving conveyor belt on a pulley and it's gonna shoot that ball, uh pretty fast actually, But it's all happening underground. Again, make these things clear, like people want to see this stuff, and it goes through that tunnel between the lanes. It's uh, you know, the lanes share one of those ball return machines. And then at the very end, when it reaches the big uh covered up thing that shouldn't be covered, you have an S shaped uh sort of system with two spinning tires and it just sort of grabs the ball and shoots it through this s S track for lack of a better term, out to where you are, and you can kind of think of those spinning tires. It's like a like a baseball all pitching machine. When you stiff the baseball in between the two uh, the two tires, and it shoots it out right, but not only shoots it out, it moves it upward vertically, which is pretty cool because again, this is a sixteen pound ball. And then I looked, and I didn't see anybody say anything about it, but it looks like that top wheel spins in a direction that will put spin on the ball, so it loses momentum as it's coming up because it's spinning the opposite direction of the direction it's traveling. I'm not a high percent sure that's based exclusively on my own information or observation, and I haven't conducted any sort of scientific study of it because you gotta watch those fingies when you got to pick the ball up for sure, because I mean, that's that's a lot coming out. But I think that they put spin on it to make it slow down, that's right, alright. So meanwhile, you've got a rack, uh that's gonna drop over the pins, and you have um a you know, obviously if you if you don't knock everything down, there's something called a sweep wagon or a sweeper. It's gonna sweep away those pins, but you want to keep those pins that are there. And this machine drops down, uh, it's there's something called the pin detecting plate that's gonna detect whether or not there's a pin there, and then it will engage these grasping claws called spotting tongs. Is that right? Yeah? I think so, okay, and they grab that pin and pick it up, yeah, because it's really important that the whatever pins are left standing after the first throw in the frame. You want to move them up and out of the way before you sweep the dead wood that's left on the lane back towards that conveyor belt, right, and then it brings it back down, sets them back in place, and then the pins that are lists back up and it's ready for that second throw. But in the meantime, that conveyor belt that's moving all the dead wood in the ball that was swept back beyond the lane that's moving, so the ball has been shunted off into the ball return and what's left or pins that are just kind of spinning around, bobbling around. It almost looks like a lot of sheen with the balls pop bump, but like jumping around inside of it and behind right behind that conveyor belt. UM is an elevator, and an elevator is designed UM with a bunch of I think fourteen different little buckets. In each bucket very snugly holds a bowling pin, and the bowling pinches kind of fall into the elevator one by one, yeah, sideways on their side right, and then one by one they're lifted up and UM taken to the top of the pin setter and some more magic happens to Yeah, some more magic happens. They have the centering wedges that get them all ready to go. And we should point out they can be laying either you know, skinny side left or skinny side right. Uh. And they are horizontal and then they when they're dropped off, they're just sort of you know, one end of it is sort of smacked around and it goes down a little shoot. So they are sitting upright again. Yeah, they're all facing the same way with the base at the board. Yeah, at the bottom toward the towards the person. So yeah, there's all sorts of little like thins and shoots and just little things that that manipulate how the bowling pin um moves around and where it's laying and how it's oriented that are really simple in design, but they're also extremely ingenious. Um. And it's like it's not like the kind of thing that you wouldn't intuitively figure out if you sat down and thought about how to do it. But somebody sat down and thought about how to do this, and they came up with a really elegant, really complex electro mechanical solution, which is the pin setter. Yeah, and they I'm sure there are other places around the country, but I know there's one in l a and Highland Park called Highland Park Bowl, which was a bowling alley from the nineteen thirties that they restored to its original beauty, um, not too too long ago. And they do leave the pin setting machines exposed there and it's super cool looking. Yeah. So, so you've got eventually ten pins that are lined up in the pin setter and they are um, they're knocked into a vertical position, standing upright. And then eventually that same pin setter that lifts up the remaining pins after the first um after the first throw, that same pin setter drops down ten pins after the second throw, resets everything and the whole thing starts all over. That's right, it's beautiful again. Go watch one of those videos. It's really really interesting to see how how it works because we haven't quite done it justice if you ask me. Yeah, and I imagine they're expensive and there are a lot of them in a full size bowling alley like it's it's a it's a lot of money going on there, for sure. So should we talk about some of the history. Yeah, we'll finish that with some history. Uh So, like we said, this started out as a lot of human games, which is throw something at something else to knock it down. Uh. They have found things in Egyptian tombs that show that they might have done something like bowling. Uh, they definitely know that. In the Middle Ages, they were bowling on lawns like a bowling green. That's where that comes from. And at various times bowling became super popular and various kings got angry that bowling was popular, and so they said, you you cannot bowl anymore. But also Germany is tagged as possibly the beginning of uh, not what we modern tinpin bowling, but early bowling in the three a d s as a religious religious right in ritual where you would roll a stone at a bunch of standing clubs to absolve your sins. Yeah, it was religious bowling. I love it. Yeah. Germany still has claimed to the invention of bowling based on those monks that used to do that. Again, that's ninepin and eventually, Um, we don't really know where ten pin or win or who I should say, who created tenpin and exactly where and when it was created, but we do know it was an American invention in the very late nineteenth century. And there's a long standing rumor an old saw you will, about um where ten pin came from, and that was that there were there are all sorts of prohibitions on nine pin bowling because it had become a means of gambling or something to be gambled on, and so to prevent gambling, there were prohibitions on nine pin bowling, so they added a tenth pin to get around those bands. And that's supposedly where ten pin came from. Apparently it's never no one's ever really turned up any original source material saying that, but it's a pretty good story. I like it. Uh. In a gentleman named Joe Thumb, the grandfather of modern bowling, brought together a bunch of people and it formed the American Bowling Congress, the ABC, which is now what you mentioned earlier, the USBC, the United States Bowling Conference. And over the years, you know, bowling is kind of ebdon flowed in its popularity. Uh. There were beer leagues in the thirties and forties where um beers would sponsor tournaments and sponsor bowlers. The Mafia got involved for a while with um action bowling, which is like, hey, let me get some action on this, and it there were some pretty high stakes games going on in uh in New York back then, right. Yeah, Supposedly action bowling would take place after the leagues were done, and it would start around midnight or one am, and sometimes these games would go to seven in the morning. And their stories of people who were into action bowling in New York who would walk out of there with ten thousand plus dollars that they won from these basically gambling on bowling late at night. And it was a huge thing in New York, and it got to be so big that some of these action bowlers ended up getting so good that they became pros. They ended up in the Pro Bowlers Association because they couldn't find anybody who would take their money anymore, because people just knew how good they were, so the only people they could compete against where other pros. So Ed has uh the nineteen eighties he lists the peak of bowling's popularity. I'm gonna take issue with that. Maybe in the eighties it was the peak of televised professional bowling. UM, but everything I saw clearly indicated like the nineteen fifties and sixties was when bowling was at its peak of popularity as as far as the American public goes bowling is concerned. Yeah, let me give you an example of that. And I got this from a price inomics article by Zachary Crockett. I think it's called The Rise and follow Bowling. Zachary Crockett is one of my favorite writers on the web. He's just awesome. He's popped up in a bunch of our episodes because he just writes about the most interesting stuff in a really great way. But in it he cites that the first athlete of any sport, chuck, any sport to land a one million dollar contract was Don Carter in nineteen sixty four. And that's one million dollars in nineteen sixty four dollars, so it's about more than seven and a half billion dollars today. And that's pretty astounding that a bowler was the first one to land a million dollar endorsement contract. But it's even more astounding when you juxtapose it against what some of the other stars, some of the other sports stars were getting at the same time. Right, yes, ye, the top bowler was a man named Harry Smith, and he made more money than baseball m v P Sandy kofax and NFL m v P uh y eights it will combined. Yeah, also, yeah, exactly, And then also, um, there were other sports figures who had endorsement contracts, but they were nothing like a million dollar endorsement contract. Arnold Palmer had one with Wilson for five thousand dollars that's less than forty thousand dollars in today's money. Joe Nameth had one with I think Shick Razors. He had a contract for ten thousand dollars, which is worth about seventy five grand today. A bowler in nineteen sixty four got a million dollar contract. That's how popular bowling was at the time. Yeah, it was huge. The those a legend named Dick Webber. Uh and he has a son named Pete Webber, who's probably one of the more well known bowlers today. And the only reason to bring him up is because Ed pointed out a very fun video of of Pete Webber in after winning a tournament, and you got to see it because it just Ed says, you know, he shouted nonsensically, who do you think I am? Or who do you think you are I am? And I was like, what does that mean? And I said it was nonsensical? But did you see the video? Oh? Yeah, I kept watching it over and I did too. It's so funny. He gets so fired up and he's screaming, and he just goes, who do you think you are? I am? And just the double thumbs and everyone went what yeah, And and of course has happened in two dozen twelve, So it immediately became a meme. And so a lot of people who are not at all the bowling are familiar with who do you think you are? I am? Apparently it's on coffee mugs and shirts and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, I've not heard of it before then, but I looked into is definitely a meme. But yeah, he was. He was the kind of like the John McEnroe of bowling, but he from what I could see it, I mean, it's definitely great in a personality, but um, he also did it to keep attention on bowling at a time when bowling was losing viewers like left and right. As a matter of fact, the Pro Bowlers Association the p b A was purchased in two thousand by three Microsoft employees for five million dollars. That's the state that bowling was in back in the day. That's how far it declined, And slowly but surely it's starting to tick back up. And I've got a couple of stats. If you'll indulge me real quick, because I've got more okay, so um. In the heyday in the sixties, there was something like twelve thousand bowling alleys and there were ten million Americans who were considered regular bowlers. Today, there's less than half of that in the number of bowling alleys, and it's down to less than three million regular bowlers. So it's been a pretty precipitous drop. And one of the things that that this group White Hutchison, who from what I can tell, is basically the KPMG consultants of Amusement Um Games. Uh, they did a bunch of studies and focus groups and they kind of put their finger on the idea that the old bowling alleys were kind of neglected as customers dropped off and they got to be really sad, cigarette e stale, beer smelly places that you would not want to take your family. It was just a pressing place to hang out. And now people are starting to tear those down, remodel and replace them with these new, happy, huge fund centers, and as a result, bowling is actually starting to make a comeback. Yeah, and a league bowling too, has been a big part of that hit. Um, I think it used to account for about sevent of total bowling revenue. And I mean when you and I are growing up, like my parents didn't do it, but league bowling was big thing, like a lot of people did it. Uh. Now that's down to total revenue is from league bowling. And you're right like with I think like Lucky Strike is one of them. And there's all kinds of sort of new fancy schmancy bowling centers that where you can get you know, like a quality cocktail and like for bowling alley maybe decent food. Definitely more family friendly for you know, holding like birthday parties and stuff there. I mean, those places are fine. I am a fan of just sort of an old school um you know, not gross, but like an old school bowling alley. No, I know, to mean for sure, that's what I grew up into. Yeah, if you can find one, I do want to shout out. They're both closed now, but I know I've talked about the Hollywood Star Lanes, which I lived down the street from an l A Lebowski Lanes where they film The Big Lebowski and on any given Friday night, you know we'd be in there. Hanging out and there'd be like, you know, the cast of the seventies show bowling and Vince Vaughn and Jon fabrou over there having a drink, and it was like a really cool place to see celebrities on the d l uh. And then when I moved, we moved to Eagle Rock and there was Eagle Rock Lanes which had a killer karaoke uh. And I just looked up in Eagle Rock Lanes closed a couple of years ago, which makes me very so I want to shout out my home lane, which was not nearly as hip or celebrity studded as yours. Um Southwick Lanes, where the bowling alley I grew up bowling at. And also, if I remember correctly, the place where I first really smelled a cigarette and thought, I wonder what it's like to smoke one of those. Yeah. I probably bowled more in my twenties when I lived in l A and early thirties because it was just fun and you know, pretty cheap, like these new places are a lot more expensive. I mean you used to could go in there and bowl for you know, ten bucks or so for a couple of hours, you know, not including your beer and stuff, but um, maybe we should close on the seventin split. Oh nice thinking, buddy. So I've always heard about the dreaded seven tin split, which means the only two pins remaining are the ones on the very very back corners opposite one another, uh, the seven pin and the tinpin. And I knew it was like a really hard thing to do, but I had no idea, literally until today, that it's only been done four times in like televised pro bowling tournaments. Yeah. I think the first time it was ever shown live was like two thousand and ten or twelve. When was that one? Well, I mean I saw I don't know about live, but I saw clips from the eighties. Okay, so so, so what I saw on CBS Sports is that there was a bowler who did it. It was a PBA bowler. He did it, and it was the first time it was captured on live, live television. The last time that it had happened was like and apparently it wasn't televised live, So it is extremely rare and the chances of you actually making it happen are really really slim. I saw something like a point eight five or maybe even point zero eight five percent chance point eight m of sinking a seven ten split. And it's because you have to hit either the seven pin or the tenpin in such a way that you knock it directly into the other pin opposite it, in a direction that's perpendicular essentially to the direction the ball's traveling. And in that sense, you're you're knocking both pins down, using one pin to knock the other pin down. It's extremely hard to do. I didn't realize how hard it was to do either. I'm like you. I was just like, yeah, the seven tenths play. Everybody knows that's hard. Yeah, but I did not know is that rare? And just to shout out the gentleman who did it most recently, you can look it up on the internet, eighteen year old name Anthony Newer. Uh. It's kind of fun to watch because people go nuts. It's it's you know, it's kind of fun to see something like that happen. But the announcer screamed out because his kids got red hair. The ginger Assassin, he did say that not only is the have red hair, he's got a luxurious mullet. I believe it looked pretty mullody. I didn't get a side of view, but it looked like he was partying in the rear. It definitely did like Molody too, So congratulations to you, sir, Um And I guess that's about it. Bowling still goes on that the change in balls didn't just change it for the casual bowler changed it for the pros too, so that it's undergoing or in the process of a big sea change as far as how the game is played by the pros. But it's still hanging around. I think bowling is ever going extinct anytime soon, agreed, I need. I haven't been in so long. This has inspired me to go go out. I think I think my daughter would enjoy it at this age. Would be fun. I'll see you there, Chuck, Let's do it. And one more thing, I want to shout or direct everybody to the um song that I usually think of any time I think of bowling, Camper Van Beethoven's take the Skinheads Bowling, which is a surprisingly happy song. You know. Uh. And since I said it's a surprisingly happy song and Chuck said, yeah, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a quick pronunciation tip. This is from Teresa and Melbourne, Australia. Hey, guys, enjoy the podcast. Firstly, I would like to know which one of you had the delightful giggle. Oh, I think we know who that is. I guess that's me, right, I was gonna say Jerry, okay, but that is not my genuine question. Like many Americans, you struggle to pronounce English towns and cities and locales and government names. Particularly. I've noticed the ones that end in s h I r e sheery the unofficial rule, guys. When standing alone, it's pronounced shire like wire, but when used as a suffix, it's it rhymes with beer, so Oxfordshire, Worcestershire obviously instead of Worcestershire or Leicestershire. I say worh to sure worceter Shire, Worcestershire, sauce. I don't say any works us. I say it three times in secession just like that. Pronounces correctly and you will probably get many free beers next time you're in the UK. Uh. And again, that is from Teresa in Australia. Thanks a lot of Teresa. That was a great one. Cheer, cheer, delight um. If you want to be like Teresa and give us some tips on how to talk good. We would love to hear from you. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.