Pins, Machines, and the Perfect Game

Renee: I want to start with a sound, not a modem handshake this time, something older and I think more satisfying, to be honest. It's the sound of a 16-pound polyurethane ball traveling at approximately 17 miles an hour down 60 feet of oiled maple and pine, striking 10 pins arranged in perfect equilateral triangle and converting all of them in a single contact event. You know, a strike. And that sound, that specific crack in that scatter, is the result of about 4,000 years of human beings slowly, painstakingly, obsessively optimizing every single variable in that chain. Right? The ball, the lane, the pins, the oil pattern, the scoring system, the shoes. All of it is engineered, re-engineered, argued over by people who, I guess Mark seriously care about this.

Marc: Yeah i mean that's a lot of that's a lot of dedication for that so, i bet they take it seriously i i i guess you know i bowled i don't know maybe a lot maybe not a lot it's not not too often but it was often enough in high school but i was never good at it and one of my friends, was you know i'd say better than average and he liked going so you know we went.

Renee: So you guys would go so he could feel good about himself because he was good at bowling

Marc: Well i think oh you know it's a common teenager right it's a common teenager thing.

Renee: And it's the only place you're allowed to go without your parents

Marc: Right that's right so did y'all do.

Renee: Overnight bowling did you ever do that

Marc: I think we probably did yeah night you know yeah late night bowling and stuff but you know come on the reason it was we went it was it was cheap, right? Cheap food, cheap sodas. And you could sit in there for hours, right? You know, on a hot afternoon. I mean, growing up Southern California, in the summertime, it gets hot. You want to go places, you know, and they didn't kick you out. So it was just sort of a rotation when we wanted out of the house, right? You know, mall, movie theater, arcade, bowling alley. I think my best was somewhere under 200 but I don't think I've ever bowled better than that so it's not like I was any good but it was a fun thing yeah so.

Renee: The basic social experience of it, right? Renting shoes, sticky floors, someone's name spelled wrong or rudely on the overhead display. The guy two lanes over who brought his own gloves and like swears when he misses stuff because he takes it extremely seriously. It's all been unchanged for almost 60 years. That's the strange part of Bowling's relationship with technology. The technology is pretty radical. The experience it produces is deliberately, almost stubbornly, familiar. The machines got smarter, but the vibe stayed exactly the same, which is kind of cool.

Marc: Yeah, I mean, yeah. But that tension between technical sophistication and cultural accessibility runs through all of the history of bowling. So it's a story about a recreational activity that keeps getting more complex to operate and less complex to enjoy. The engineering underneath the modern bowling centers, it's pretty deep. There's a lot going on there. The experience on top of it is designed to feel like something, you know, grandma could do on a Tuesday afternoon. Both of those things are true simultaneously. And, you know, that's that's not an accident for the experience.

Renee: 4,000 years, pharaohs, monks, pin boys, automated pin setters, reactive resin, ball tracking. We're going all the way back because this is a strange and deeply human story about our need to knock things over and then measure exactly how well we did it.

Marc: So, okay, 1930, a British anthropologist named Sir Flinders Petrie discovers artifacts in an Egyptian child's grave dating to approximately 3200 BCE. That appear to be equipment for a game involving rolling a ball toward pins. Stone balls, stone pins. Archaeologists argue about both the dating and whether the objects were a game at all. So, you know, treat it as a, you know, sort of story of bowling tells about itself rather than the settled fact. But what is clear is that rolling something at something else to knock it over is a pretty old human endeavor.

Renee: Which raises the question that what is it about knocking things over that's so satisfying to human beings that we've been doing it right in some kind of organized form for 40 centuries? I guess it combines two deep wire drives for me, I guess. The throwing accuracy instinct, which has obvious evolutionary utility, and the visual satisfaction of a cascade. Things falling in sequence, right? The strike is a cascade. Despair is a problem-solving exercise. And really, the game is just a loop between those two experiences. And it turns out that loop is basically irresistible, kind of like, you know, I don't know, doom homescrolling, to the human nervous system. So kids, if you're wondering what your parents used to do when they were homescrolling and you all are doing that, we were at the bowling alley instead. Same thing. Same difference. Pretty fun. At any rate,

Marc: Yeah, so the Germans have like a long bowling tradition. Kegel, dating to practically the third century. It involves rolling a ball at a single pin called a kegel, which is a wooden club carried by German peasants as a walking stick and a self-defense implement. See, throwing things and striking things. The game becomes associated with a religious ritual used by monks to test the moral fortitude of parishioners. Roll the ball at the kegel, which represents sin. Because, of course, knock it down and you're free of sin. You know, miss and, well, there's a message there. So this is how bowling becomes culturally embedded across Central Europe for centuries.

Renee: I'm sorry. So it's the monks deciding that they need to automate confession. So they're just going to use this ball and sticks so they don't have to do this anymore. Because it's just too much to listen. It's just too much.

Marc: You throw the thing. You know what?

Renee: Roll this. Yeah, and if you knock some stuff over, you're good.

Marc: Yeah, but if you miss, what did you do?

Renee: I know what you did. You don't have to tell me. I know what you did. The sticks tell me, because that was medieval Europe at some point, right? The sticks tell me. Religion has done a lot of things with recreational technology over the centuries, but bowling as mortal examination, that's one of my favorites, actually. It's a good example. There's this insistence that measurement and precision have spiritual significance and that getting the angle right means something just beyond getting the angle right. Here's what I'll say. Shakers, you know, the shakers, the people who make furniture, they have elevated furniture making to a religious experience. And in their minds, the closer they are to perfect, the closer they are to God. And so they spend all of their time making furniture, just trying to make it absolutely perfect because that's how they pray. Right. And so, like, hey, if I get it, man, if if you worship at the at the altar of, you know, AMF, is that who they are? Like, who are the people that make the equipment? Like, if that's where you want to worship, then go right ahead. Maybe it's not just about getting the ankle right. Maybe it is a spirit I saw these guys play Like the professionals It really is a different thing for them It really is

Marc: By the time bowling arrives... Kingpin, right? Those guys were pretty serious.

Renee: They were pretty serious, too.

Marc: By the time bowling arrives in North America with Dutch settlers in the early 17th century, it's played with ninepins arranged in a diamond pattern on outdoor day courts. You can actually see a ninepin in Hampton Court Palace in England. And at the Tudor Court, it was a popular game. So it gets exported to America by the Dutch settlers. Ninepins, as it's called, becomes enormously popular and also enormously associated with gambling. Surprise. which prompts Connecticut to ban it in 1841, specifically as a gambling game. The legend, which is probably too good to be entirely true, is that bowlers added a tenth pin and changed the formation to a triangle, specifically to circumvent the nine pins ban on a technicality. Whether or not that's the actual origin of the ten pin configuration, it captures something true about the relationship between popular recreation and the people who try to regulate it.

Renee: The standardization problem is the technical turning point because for most of bowling's history, there were no standards. You know, ball weights varied, pin dimensions varied, lane lengths vary, right? Every alley is running its own version of the game, which means you can't compare scores between venues. You can't have meaningful competition across regions, and you can't develop equipment systematically because you don't know what conditions the equipment needs to perform under. So the American Bowling Congress found, huh, huh, it's good, ABC, founded in 1895, exists primarily to solve the problem. Its first major act is to establish uniform specifications for pins, balls, and lanes. And that sounds bureaucratic and unglamorous. And it's the single most important technological moment in bowling's American history.

Marc: I couldn't find too much about this part, but like, you know, who are the dudes in the back room that are like, Lenny, you know what? We need to form a Congress.

Renee: Right? It's about time. Well, if you were in Wisconsin and you wanted to compete with someone in New York, and you both practice on different kinds of lanes with different kinds of balls with different kinds of – there's no competition. There's no competition, right? Because then it's the guy in Denver with a really long lane who's going to beat everybody because he practices where the oxygen's thin and the lane's really,

Marc: Really long. A thin oxygen thing again. Oh, boy. All right. The ABC specifications create the conditions for everything that follows. Lane length, 60 feet from the foul line to the head pin. It's fixed. Lane width, 41 and a half inches. Fixed. Pin weight between 3 pounds 6 ounces and 3 pounds 10 ounces. Fixed. Ball circumference, not more than 27 inches. Fixed. These numbers seem arbitrary, but they're the result of extensive experimentation to find the configuration of products that produces the right ratio of difficulty to achievability. A game where strikes are impossible isn't fun. A game where strikes are easy isn't interesting. Those specifications are tuned to find the band where skill is meaningful and rewarded, but perfection remains rare.

Renee: And once you have standards, you have data. And once you have data, you have engineering. The trajectory of bowling from 1895 forward is downstream of the standardization decision. And you know me, you know, NIST is out there saving a world one standard at a time. Like, I love them. You know, I have to tell me twice, I'll follow them.

Marc: I've sat on many standards bodies. I love it.

Renee: Yeah. The rad. Good for bowling for figuring it out so soon.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Before I talk about the automatic pin center, I have to talk about pinboys because pinboys are a piece of human history that we have automated away so thoroughly and so quickly that most people have no idea they ever existed and they deserve a moment. So pinboys were people, usually young men or boys, who sat at the end of the bowling lane and manually reset the pins between the deliveries, right? They sat in a pit behind a pin deck. They cleared the fallen pins, set the remaining pins back up, return the ball, and reset simultaneously for hours and hours and hours. They did it for every single lane, working multiple lanes. Oh my God, it would be worse than bagging groceries. It would be worse, way worse. In a loud and physically demanding environment for very modest pay. This was the standard employment for teenage boys in American cities from roughly 1880s through the 1950s. If you didn't have a paper route, you were a pin boy.

Marc: Didn't Happy Days, didn't one of the Cunningham kids, weren't they a pin boy at the bowling alley? I vaguely remember that.

Renee: Is that what Richie did? Because that's who would have been doing it in the 50s.

Marc: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Or the unnamed Chuck that never gets mentioned past the first season. Yeah, I'd have to look that up, but yeah, I vaguely remember that. Anyways, so the pin setter problem, like we talk about this all the time, where there's like this brief period of time where there's some job that exists that technology eradicates. You know, so, yeah, and the pin center problem is a genuine engineering challenge, right? Because it requires a machine to reliably identify which pins are standing, remove the fall of ones without disturbing the standing ones, return the ball, and reset the complete formation for the next frame. All in a consistent cycle time, fast enough not to disrupt the pace of play. That's a multi-step manipulation task in an uncontrolled environment, and doing it mechanically requires several distinct hard problems, solving those problems simultaneously.

Renee: Godfrey Schmidt files a patent for an automatic pin setter in 1936. AMF, American Machine and Foundry, acquires a patent and spends over a decade engineering it into a commercially viable product. The AMF pin spotter goes into commercial deployment in 1952, and Brunswick's competing machine debuts at Rosell Lanes in New Jersey in April 1956. Within a decade, pin boys are gone from American bowling. Within a decade.

Marc: Gone.

Renee: They were replaced by machines. The automation happens fast by the standards of most labor displacement events, sure. One decade from first commercial deployments and your complete replacement of an entire category of employment. So yeah, it can happen. But it happened to pin boys. I'll put that out there.

Marc: Like somebody looked at the breadth of manual labor tasks in the marketplace and said, you know what? I'm going to automate this.

Renee: Get rid of this kid. Yeah. Get rid of this kid. He costs me too much.

Marc: I mean, there's no way. I don't know what the cost on these vintage systems were, but there's no way that a pin spotter for an entire big lane facility costs less than a kid.

Renee: No, of course not. Just like AI didn't cost less than your developer. Of course not, right? Of course it didn't.

Marc: Yeah, it's always more expensive, you know, from an upfront investment perspective. The mechanical engineering of the original pin setters holds up for the era. So the AMF machine uses a combination of mechanical arms, a sweep bar that clears fallen pins, a pin elevator that retrieves pins from the pit, and a distribution mechanism that places pins in the correct formation. The whole thing runs on electromechanical logic relays and cams and timing wheels, without any programmable electronics. Cause you know, the fifties, you know, getting the sequence, right. The timing, the tolerances, the failure modes requires solving problems of mechanical design that hadn't been attempted at that scale before the machines break constantly in their early years, which is why AMF provides onsite technicians with every installation for the first several years of deployment. Wow. I know. Yeah.

Renee: Could you imagine an EMC sitting in you some storage guy for a year just being like, just in case you need me? Wow.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: That's amazing. You go AMF. The pin center also changed the economics of bowling. And this is the part of the story I think that doesn't get told enough, actually. Before automation, the cost of operating a bowling center scales with volumes, right? More bowlers mean more pin boys, which means more labor costs. After automation, the marginal cost of additional bowlers is close to zero once the capital equipment is paid for. This transforms bowling from a relatively expensive, you know, recreation into an affordable mass market one. The pin setter is why bowling becomes the dominant participation in sport of America through the 1950s and 1960s, partly because it was fun, which it always was, and mostly because the economic shift in a way that make it accessible to working-class families in a way that it previously wasn't.

Marc: All right. So at peak bowling in 1963, there were roughly 11,000 bowling establishments in the United States with a combined total of over 150,000 lanes. That's a huge infrastructure investment, and it's enabled by the automated pin center, making the per-lane operating costs Low enough that the business model works at scale. The pin setter is a technology that reshapes an entire recreational industry's economics in less than a generation. And it does it by solving a problem that seems almost comically specific. How do you reliably pick up pins and put them back in the right place at the right time and return the ball?

Renee: And not disrupt play, like the pace of play, right? The human cost of that automation is real and largely invisible to the historical record. And, you know, maybe in a way, labor displacement usually does this, but pinboys don't show up in the economic statistics as a category of the way factory workers do, right? But they were a real source of employment for young men in urban areas, and the automation of their role happens faster than any equivalent job care, you know, category could absorb them elsewhere. It's a clean example of a pattern that recurs throughout history of automation. The technology is good for the industry. It's good for the customers. It's economically efficient. And there's disruption for the specific people whose labor it replaces. So, yeah, right? Yes. Yes. Like, what they did at Bell Labs got rid of operators.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. I mean.

Renee: And operators, telephone operators don't show up in the historical record as being like, You know, this huge part of the economy that got jacked when telecommunications got better. We don't even talk about them. It's like they never existed. Yeah.

Marc: They just disappear. And I guess it's like it's different. There's different types of what's the what's that that that paradox effect. I can't remember the name off the top of my head now. But, you know, some new technology comes into existence and it actually spurs more demand for that particular, you know, use case.

Renee: So, OK, so here comes Expedia, right? Here comes Expedia. It plugs into all the airlines. It plugs into all the hotels. At the time, that was really, I know you kids are like, come on, Renee, that's not so great. But that was revolutionary at a time, right? Yeah. So Expedia, it does. More people traveled. You know, airlines booked more seats. All of that really happened. But we also don't use travel agents anymore.

Marc: Except in the UK where they love travel agents. And there's like literally.

Renee: Like you could go to the mall. Honestly, I could see why.

Marc: You could go to the mall.

Renee: I could see why though. Yeah.

Marc: Like it's, there's multiple stores in the mall. The highest retail rent location you could see. And you can go to the mall and book travel, like book whole packages.

Renee: Yeah. You know what? And I know that the young people don't think that there's any upside to any of that. Because whatever you need, you can just get online. But it used to be like, oh, I stayed there at this really amazing place. You should stay here for your honeymoon. Like, that's it.

Marc: Yeah. When travel agents were useful and, you know, they provided context and information that you couldn't get, you know, or can't get still. Yeah. Anyways. All right. Back to bowling, right? So my grandparents had it on on the TV. That's my other kind of bowling memory. We'd go over on Saturdays or Sundays or whatever. And somewhere in that, you know, kind of noon to three stretch when there's nothing on in this, you know, that afternoon, or at least nothing that my grandparents would allow to, you know, anyone to watch. The television would be showing you golf or bowling. Those were the two options. I kind of filed this away as an old people thing, you know, that they watched, right? The Pro Bowlers Tour ran on ABC from 1962 to 1997. So this is like, you know, in the years when I was a kid.

Renee: And you know who picks it up after that?

Marc: Oh, no.

Renee: Fox, because that's where the ABC viewers went. Oh. Fox picks it up. And they keep it going until I think last year or dear. Oh, boy.

Marc: Yeah, Saturday afternoons at 3.30, right before Wild World of Sports. So it was right in that time frame when I remembered it, you know. A guy named Chris Schenkel called it for 36 years. Through the 70s and into the early 80s, it was, you know, outrating college football and college basketball. And when ABC finally drops it in 1997, the research they cited said 67% of the network audience was over 50. So, yeah.

Renee: So you were right. You were a child making a sweeping demographic judgment from your grandparents' living room, and you were correct within a couple of points. Fair made a math. Way to go. And in 1962, it's not a coincidence either. That's the same window as the pin setter boom. The machines fill the country with lanes, the lanes fill with people, and then the sport is big enough to put on national television on a Saturday afternoon. All of that is just one event. Yeah. That's crazy.

Marc: All right. So I've watched the How It's Made segment. Did you know that thing? Like it used to be on a Discovery channel, How It's Made.

Renee: Yeah, it's like, yeah, they would do like Twinkies and Twizzlers and bowling balls.

Marc: You can get it on YouTube now. Yeah. All right.

Renee: Oh, nice.

Marc: So the bowling ball one is a personal favorite. I've probably watched it more times than I can count. You know, and it's so, it's cool the way it works, right? The core gets molded first. It's a sort of dense lump sitting in the middle of nothing. Then the cover stock gets poured around it. Then the whole thing goes on a lathe and gets cut down to a sphere and then gets drilled and sanded and polished. My favorite parts of polishing, you watch this sort of lump become a precision object in about four minutes. And what the lump is made of tracks through the history of polymer chemistry in the 20th century exactly. The original balls through the 19th century were lignum vitae, a tropical hardwood so dense and hard it was used for ship bearings and machine components. These lignum vitae balls are beautiful objects. They're also super expensive. They're scarce. And they vary in quality because they're made from, you know, wood, biological material.

Renee: So hard rubber replaces wood around the turn of the 20th century. And hard rubber is the standard for about 60 years, which is a long technological plateau for a piece of sports equipment. Right? Like even baseball bats change faster than that. Hard rubber works. It's consistent density. It can be manufactured to specification. It produces predictable behavior in the lane. The problem with hard rubber from a performance standpoint is that it doesn't hook very much. A hard rubber ball rolls fairly straight, which means that high-level bowlers are attacking the pocket from a limited angle, which means that margin for arrow on the entry angle is relatively small,

Marc: Right? Yeah. Yeah. The physics, you know, I can't imagine throwing a hard rubber ball. Like, yeah, it just would feel weird. I don't know. But the physics of, or a wood ball, you know.

Renee: A wood ball would feel weird. They would seem light. Yeah. You'd have to whip that thing down there, like probably overhand.

Marc: Although I bet you that those wooden balls probably perform better than those hard rubber ones, because you could polish them and you'd probably get a good hook on them.

Renee: Yeah, probably.

Marc: The physics of pin action rewards a ball that enters the pocket at an angle rather than straight on. A ball entering at approximately four to six degrees produces a different pin deflector pattern than a ball entering at zero degrees. And that different pattern converts more corner pins and produces higher carry percentage on off-center strikes. Hooking the ball is mechanically advantageous on top of being satisfying to watch. It gets so close to the gutter.

Renee: To the gutter.

Marc: It's like right on the edge. Yeah. Yeah. The evolution of ball technology from the 60s forward is the story of how to make a ball hook more controllably.

Renee: Polyester balls arrive in the early 1960s and replace rubber as the standard material. Polyester is harder than rubber, more consistent, and cheaper to manufacture. It doesn't change the fundamental hook behavior very much, but it democratizes high-quality equipment. And then urethane arrives. That's right. Evanite builds the AMF Angle in 1981. Okay, in 1981. It's now like, I'm in the history of my lifetime. Like, 1981, I'm going to start high school next year. Like, 1981.

Marc: That's ridiculous. Yeah.

Renee: Ridiculous. The first urethane ball comes to the market. Oh, so, like, the whole time I'm playing, like, as a kid, I'm actually playing with that stupid, I guess, polyurethane ball.

Marc: Yeah, polyester ball.

Renee: Yeah, there you go. So anyway, the urethane ball comes to the market and that ball follows the same year with the hammer, which is the one everyone remembers because they put a claw hammer logo on the side of it.

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: The performance envelope shifts. Urethane is a higher friction coefficient with the lane surface. It hooks more. It reads the lane differently. Bowlers who switch to urethane immediately see their carry percentages improve on certain lane conditions. The ball has become a meaningful performance variable in a way it had never been quite before, mostly because you couldn't hook it.

Marc: You know, I mean, the late 20th century is this is all sports are like this, right? Material science develops, you know, real mechanical engineering goes into the design of so many different sports products. Shoes, right? Like, you look at the way that the mile, the record for the mile lasted for so long. And now has been, you know, every, you know, few years, it keeps changing and changing and changing. It's all because of shoes, you know, the materials and the likeness of the shoes.

Renee: Yeah, golfing, because they change clubs a lot. Clubs. They get better and better and better, yeah. And then I would also say, yeah, to some extent, baseball. Like, while we think of it as being pretty settled, it's actually pretty not.

Marc: Yeah, you know, Barry Bonds, robo-arm, you know, it's.

Renee: Yeah. Dude, I saw Barry Bonds one time in person. Like, his neck and his head were the same shape. He went straight from shoulders to the top of his head. It was just like one column. Like maybe his ears were bolted somewhere on his neck. Like it was just one big thing. He was freaky looking. Saw him in Culver City once.

Marc: Yeah, the reactive resin revolution of the early 1950s is a big material science moment. Reactive resin is a urethane coverstock that is chemically modified to absorb lane oil rather than simply sliding over it. The ball behaves differently in the oil-saturated front portion of the lane, sliding with relatively low friction, and then differently again in the dry back end of the lane, where it grips aggressively and makes a pronounced angular move toward the pocket. The shape of the ball's path down the lane changes from a gradual arc to something with a distinct inflection point, a long skid phase followed by a sharp hook. The shape of motion is mechanically more effective at pin carry, and it's adjustable based on where you place the ball in the oil pattern.

Renee: And this is where bowling technology starts to have a governance problem. Okay, there's just my other favorite thing, governance problem. Because the equipment...

Marc: Are we going to talk about risk too?

Renee: Right? Because the equipment keeps outpacing the ability of the sports governing bodies to understand what they've sanctioned. When reactive resin balls arrive, average scores go up measurably and quickly across the competitive bowling population. The conditions that were calibrated to produce a certain distribution of scores, so it was rigged, a certain frequency of perfect games, oh, so it was rigged, and a certain ratio of strikes to spares are now out of calibration because the equipment has changed and has changed the underlying physics. The ball is better than the game's infrastructure anticipated.

Marc: Calibration.

Renee: We have to talk about, like, how the oil on the lanes. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: They don't just oil the lane. It's not a guy with a mop, right? It's this machine that makes these crazy patterns that does jack stuff to your ball. And now, and that's how they were like keeping it. That's how they were rigging the game, right? They had their patterns. They were playing against the bowlers. It was probably kind of fun. But now it doesn't work because the resin ball, where there are patterns, it just sops it all up. And when there isn't, it gets really fast and hooks, which is the two things you'd really want it to do after it eats all the stuff off the lane. Like, so, yeah, right? I mean, imagine how disruptive resin, imagine how disrupted resin was to bowling.

Marc: The governing bodies respond by adjusting lane oil patterns to compensate, right? So here's their, they say, we have to standardize, right? Of course, governance, that's a common, you know, standardization, you know, controls. What's your compensating control? More oil.

Renee: More oil.

Marc: Different patterns. Yeah, more oil applied in patterns specifically designed to penalize the sharper angular motion that reactive resin produces. This begins an arms race between ball technology and lane conditioning that continues to the present day. Ball manufacturers develop more aggressive resin formulations. Lane maintenance programs develop more complex oil patterns. The equipment becomes more sophisticated on both sides. The bowler is now navigating a system where the lane surface is itself a designed variable that interacts with their ball choice in ways that require real technical understanding to exploit.

Renee: Oil.

Marc: I know.

Renee: I swear to you, I thought it was a guy with a fucking spray thing with the...

Marc: Pam, you're saying Pam.

Renee: I really did think that's how it happened. It didn't occur to me that it was the house trying to rig the game, right? And that's kind of like, there's two, it's like bull riding, right? There's two games going on here. Like, the people who made the bulls are going to try to win for the rankest bull. So if your bull eats enough people, like, you win. And I think you win a pickup truck, right? And then the bull rider who rides the rankest bull for the longest it's time, they get a buckle and probably some money. Like, you're playing two games here. It's like craps. But I didn't realize bowling was like that. There's the game being played by the people trying to limit your score. And then you're playing the other side of that game where you're trying to get the highest score no matter what they do to you. And if it takes knowing a ball guy, then so be it. How about that? The weight block inside the ball is the other variable that people outside of competitive bowling almost never think about. The core of a bowling ball, The dense internal weight block determines how the ball's mass is distributed relative to its rotational axis. So different core geometries produce different flare potential, which is the degree to which the ball axis migrates as it rolls. You know, when you see them spin, that's the core. The core is doing all that. Core design is as much of a performance variable as cover stock chemistry. A modern high-performance bowling ball has a custom-engineered core shape that was optimized through computational fluid dynamic simulation and physical testing. Just bowling. Bowling. And you know what? The pro bowlers will come with many, many balls, like ball bags. They call them ball bags. I'm like, I got like eight ball bags to go get, right? Because they don't know. They've got every ball they have has a different core. Every ball they have has a different kind of resin on the outside. They're going to throw one of those balls. It's going to come back. They're going to be like, I need that one, right? And so they're allowed to Bring so many to the competition. They're trying to read it before they get there. Like, it's a whole thing. It's a whole thing for bowling. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.

Marc: Go ahead. The other one, the ball drilling pattern, which determines where the finger holes are placed relative to the core, adds another layer. The relationship between hole placement and the ball's pin location relative to its mass, the mass bias, creates a specific layout that determines the ball's motion characteristics on the lane. There are bowlers who study this the way golfers study club fitting. They work with certified ball drillers who use measurement tools and motion analysis software. Software like for motion analysis of bowling balls right, to design a specific drilling that that matches their physical delivery to the specific ball's core geometry and so the optimization on this goes very deep which is like like surprising.

Renee: Though can i tell you that that's why your game sucked it's because you didn't go and roll some stuff down a hill like let them take video of you and then come back and say, you know, you twist your arm like this. Because of that, I'm going to move this center of gravity just a little bit that way so you don't get an overturn. Like, yeah, that's what they're doing. That's what they're doing, right?

Marc: I mean, I'm sure you've done this. I've done this. You know, you've played for the golf thing, you know, and you do the golf and they do the video of your swing and help you adjust your swing and all that stuff.

Renee: Sam takes his lessons over at PGA West. They record the whole thing. And then you sit down with your instructor and they say, okay, you see how you did that? You see how you did this? You see, here's where you corrected it. do you see how it's different like yeah i actually i think him seeing it like that actually improves his swing to be honest

Marc: Yeah when i was doing that i mean i i was playing much better i can't i can't do it because the shoulder doesn't like me but like i was playing much better, you know and they were like oh well you know don't do it this way you know because you're just naturally not gonna you know do that so this is the type of club, you know this you know you stand up straighter because that's the way your posture is. That's where you're, you know, all of that stuff that was, you know, calculated and recorded and every single swing, you know, I took was measured against a standard. And then it was like slight adjustments every time.

Renee: Like everything in life just kills me because, you know, no one helps you when you, how can I say this without saying it? When you have breasts, like there's no, there's no measurement for that. There's no measurement for the boobs are on the way. Right. There's no like a different, like, Hey, I seems like your boobs are on the way. You need a different club. Like, no, there's nothing that's going to help with that. Nothing, literally nothing. So let's just quit talking about it.

Marc: I don't, I don't have that particular problem, but like, I think that most of these, these professional setups, they, they probably have some compensation for that. I think they, they, yeah.

Renee: Like stick your butt out more?

Marc: Yeah, I don't know.

Renee: Bring them along for the ride. Quit fighting them.

Marc: Strap it down better. I don't know. Yeah.

Renee: I don't know. No one's giving me a really good... All right. Where are we at here? For most of bowling standardization history, scoring is done by hand on paper, which is more technically demanding than it sounds because the scoring system's not straightforward.

Marc: Oh, my gosh. It's so confusing.

Renee: Right. A strike in the 10th frame scores differently than a strike in the first frame. Spares carry bonus pins. The running total accumulates in ways that require tracking not just the current frame, but the next one or two. Yeah. Deliveries. So keeping score correctly requires genuine mental arithmetic and attention. And doing it wrong in the middle of competition, right, is a source of conflict. And it has endless, it's ended endless, endless friendships.

Marc: Yeah. It's not like, okay, 300 is a perfect score, but that first frame isn't worth 30 points, you know, unless you do, you know, unless you progress all the way, you know. So it's like, yeah.

Renee: Yeah, 300 is nothing, is 10 strikes. That's how you get 300 points, right? Yeah. So you do the math.

Marc: A strike isn't always worth 30 points, you know? Right.

Renee: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. It's anyways. AMF and Brunswick both introduced because these are the two companies that are doing like the big, you know, the the big infrastructure for bowling.

Renee: Right. Right.

Marc: They introduced computerized scoring systems in the early 80s, and the technology adoption of bowling centers is rapid because the value prop is clear, right? The machine scores accurately, displays the scores visually for everyone at the lane, removes arguments, and frees bowlers to focus on bowling rather than record keeping. The first systems use dedicated display terminals with vector graphics rather than raster displays. Then eventually large flat screen overhead displays that are now standard. Like, yeah, everybody's seen that. The computing infrastructure that manages, you know, a multi-lane bowling center tracking system, you know, across 40 lanes simultaneously coordinating with the, you know, pin center control systems, managing lane reservations, food ordering, shoe rentals. It's kind of a, you know, it's a big piece of software.

Renee: The ball tracking systems that have arrived in the last decade are the part that surprises people when they encounter them for the first time, because the level of instrumentation is far beyond what the recreational context seems to be called for, right? Overhead cameras track the ball's position through the entire delivery. Infrared sensors at a foul line capture every angle and ball speed. The system computes the hook distance, the breakpoint location, and a replay shows the ball actual path overlaid on an aerial view of the lane. All of this is displayed on an overhead screen automatically after each delivery without the bowler doing anything to activate it. You throw the ball, then you watch a data visualization of the throw you just made.

Marc: It's like, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Renee: I don't need that. I don't need to watch my gutter ball again. It was embarrassing the first time. Like, why don't I do this again?

Marc: You know, of course, because, you know, the kids, you know, go bowling and we do that. Sometimes the, you know, if you do throw a gutter ball, it's like a cartoon animation, you know, for each one of the different, you know, outcomes that happens. So, you know, you get a strike and the little pins are animated and they dance and they, you know, they, you know, or like the ball comes out of like an angry ball and it knocks them all down. And the pins are like, oh, you know, scared. So, yeah, it's, you know, so instead of data visualization in our local lane, you get this kind of animated frenzy, you know, depending on that.

Renee: That's nice for the kids.

Marc: Yeah, the instrumentation available at the elite competitive level goes, you know, like really a lot further. The Specto ball tracking system.

Renee: Oh, that's so good, Specto.

Marc: Specto.

Renee: It's so 50s.

Marc: Yeah, it's used at major professional events, captures ball speed, revolution rate, axis tilt, axis rotation, in addition to all the positional data. A professional bowler's delivery can be fully characterized as a set of physical parameters after each shot. And that data is used both for broadcast presentation and for the bowler's own post-round analysis. It's like F1, you know, terabytes of data, you know, just a crazy amount. The best bowlers in the world are athletes who could make precise adjustments to their delivery based on real-time measurement feedback. It's the same, you know, data-driven optimization process that has transformed every other elite sport, you know, but applied to bowling.

Renee: Oh, so like cycling.

Marc: Yeah, cycling. Or even, you know, professional football, the pads and the helmet have sensors in them, you know?

Renee: Yeah, they should. They should have this whole time. Those guys get, it's like you're being hit by a car for a whole afternoon and like, you know. Yeah, they should have.

Marc: You know, baseball, the same thing. You know, it's not just a dude sitting there with a radar gun anymore. It's like multiple sensor arrays and cameras and all that stuff. You know, it's big time.

Renee: So I can see Prince Harry eating a hot dog.

Marc: Well, I mean, you know.

Renee: The recreational side of this is a design problem because bowling centers have had to calibrate how much of the technical infrastructure they expose to just casual bowlers like me and Mark. The overhead scoring system is fully visible and universally accepted. The ball tracking is becoming standard and generally appreciated, but the full data suite available to competitive bowlers, rev rate, access, tilt, launch angle, is not displayed by default in recreational settings because most people bowling on a Thursday evening with their co-workers don't want a quantitative assessment of the mechanical deficiencies in their delivery. Yeah, never do I We don't need to sit down and talk about it. I'm good. The technology is there for sure. The UX, the user interface decision, is about how much of it to surface and when. I think that's a good idea. Like, why confuse me? I don't need to be.

Marc: Yeah. If it's just, you know, a casual game, like, it gets a lot less casual when you expose all the foibles and issues. Yeah, right? Yeah.

Renee: And then you're out having, like, Sundays and you're all like, remember when you did that? and then like, oh, let's watch it. I videotaped it. Like, yeah, no, I don't need it.

Marc: There aren't too many lanes near us in England. We've been, you know, a handful of times. There's a, you know, kind of a bowling alley in our town near our little village. The youngest bulldozers last week with some, you know, with some friends. Of course, they put the bumpers up. So the bumpers to protect the gutters, right? The bumper is a piece of technology nobody thinks of as a piece of technology. It removes the gutter as a possibility. So a six-year-old, she's not six, but, you know, a six-year-old gets the cascade every single frame and, you know, stays interested long enough to want to come back. The other thing they do, you know, I think she threw the ball, but they also have these, like, I don't know, ramps that you can set the ball on and then roll it down the ramp. Oh, shit.

Renee: Shut up. I want to do it like that.

Marc: Yeah. But, you know, that's for little kids, right? But that, you know, that same calibration you're talking about, you know, running kind of on the other end of the scale to help, you know, to help this sort of technological advancement keep people moving at the, you know, interested in the game. So the through line of bowling's technological history here is the question of, you know, what you're optimizing for. The standardization movement of the 1890s is optimizing for, you know, comparability. Scores need to mean the same thing regardless of where you bowl. The pin center is optimizing for economics labor costs need to come down to make I still I'm not so sure about this over the long haul of a of a bowling alley yes, I don't know. Those things got to cost hundreds of thousands. So anyways, the pin center is optimizing for economics. Long-term labor costs here need to come down to make the activity viable at the mass market scale. The ball technology arms race is optimizing for performance. You know, what physical configuration produces the highest scores for skilled players? The digital infrastructure is optimizing for experience. How do you make the activity legible and enjoyable for both the casual participant and a serious competitor simultaneously? Each wave of technology answers a different kind of question, and the question it answers shapes the technology's character.

Renee: What I keep coming back to is the pin setter because it's the hinge point, right? Before the pin setter, bowling is a craft activity supported by human labor. It has real costs and constraints. After the pin setter, bowling is an industrialized recreational product where the economics scales in a different way. That transition happens in less than a decade in the 1950s, and it shapes everything. There's a suburban bowling room, the corporate leagues, the bowling alley is a social institution, the game's particular cultural identity as something that belongs to working people in a way that golf never actually did. I mean, I live next to a golf country club. I live between two country clubs. PGA West is just down the road, right? Like, I don't have 40 grand. I can't join, but I can go bowl, right? I can go join a bowling league. That's a whole different thing, right? So, you know, the automation decision produces the culture as much as the operational efficiencies.

Marc: Yeah, corporate leagues, man. I don't think I've ever been at a company that had a corporate league.

Renee: So, yeah, back in the day, if you worked at a manufacturer, if you were a GM, like, they definitely had the right, yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah, dudes on the line. The ball technology stories, you know, underneath the polymer chemistry, core engineering, that's, I mean, because you know me.

Renee: Yeah, right.

Marc: Polymers, resins, yay. You know, that story about the internal relationship between equipment and rules in competitive sports, you know, as the equipment improves, rules respond. The equipment improves further, and you get further responses and rules, and neither side ever, you know, fully wins because full victory would break the thing that makes the game actually interesting. So if the ball is so good that everyone bowls a 300, the perfect game stops being meaningful. If the lane conditions are so punishing that no one scores well, then participation collapses. The governing bodies are constantly calibrating a moving target, and the fact that they've, you know, kept professional bowling scores in a range that still feels meaningful. Over 40 years of dramatic equipment improvements is a real governance achievement.

Renee: I started with the sound of a strike, and I want to end with it too, because the sound hasn't changed. The ball's different. The lane surface is different. The pins are manufactured to tighter tolerances than they've ever been. The scoring system is a distributed computing platform. The shoes are technically engineered for the approach surface, and the sound, when a well-thrown ball hits the pocket correctly is the same sound it was in 1955, in 1895, and in some form it would have been recognizable in a Roman courtyard in 100 AD. The technology gets more sophisticated. The satisfaction it delivers is ancient. That's the part that keeps bringing people back. You've been brainwashed by the ancient Romans.

Marc: Well, I mean, yeah, well, we can talk about Rome some other time. yeah, If you've ever watched a pin setter jam and felt an unreasonable amount of frustration about it, you know that the machine is solving a hard problem and occasionally it knows it too.

Renee: If you ever had rented bowling shoes and tried not to think about it too hard. Yeah, I might have done that. I also might have kept them. We respect your coping strategy. Have you ever stolen bowling shoes? I've definitely stolen a pair of bowling shoes. Never. I let them keep. Oh, come on. I let them keep my tennis shoes and I took my bowling shoes. Oh, no way. Then went to school the next day. Yeah.

Marc: I would rather just buy tennis, like bowling shoes. And I have some shoes that look like bowling shoes, but because I have a fabulous collection of shoes. But yeah, I would never. No way. Like those are like they're beat up and they're nasty.

Renee: And you can't find them in secondhand stores. They just throw them away. Why? They're good leather shoes that just happen to be worn by a bunch of sweaty people.

Marc: Yeah. I don't. I don't. Yeah. No, I don't want the sweat. Thank you. Yeah.

Renee: All right.

Marc: Just buy some new ones and then throw them in the dryer.

Renee: No, they need to be broken in. Way broken in.

Marc: Throw them in the dryer for, you know, hours. If you've ever drilled a bowling ball with a specific layout designed to match your rep rate and access tilt to a particular oil pattern, you're a person of serious technical commitment, and we salute you. And I should disclose that I own a lot of bowling shirts. Not because I bowl. I just think they're a good shirt.

Renee: You don't bowl. You just dress like you do. This is the nostalgic nerves where the recreational activities that seem simple turn out to contain 40 centuries of human ingenuity and one very sophisticated lane oiling machine. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, share this with someone who takes their Thursday night league more seriously than their job. And we'll be back next week with more technology hiding in plain sight. Thanks, Mark.

Marc: Thank you. It went down, it went, went down.