CORPORATIONS: The Automatic Pin Boy

At the Jewel City Bowl in Glendale, Calif., 300 spectators gathered for an unusual bowling event. They had come not to watch bowlers but machines. As a bowler sent his ball crashing into the tenpins, the ball hit the cushion, set off an automatic switch. Almost before a spectator could say "Strike," an intricate machine swept the alley clean of pins, set them in place on a rack, dropped a second set of pins into place, and sent the ball back to the bowler. It was an impressive demonstration of the American Machine & Foundry Co.'s new automatic pinspotting machine, in operation for the first time on the West Coast. Last week Jewel City totted up the results of its first two weeks with the pinspotters: business was 30% better than it had ever been before. Said Proprietor Hugo Kohn: "Yessir, it looks as though these machines will revolutionize bowling."

There was no doubt in the mind of A.M.F. President Morehead Patterson that the machines would do just that. Bowling is already the fastest-growing participation sport; the machines should give it a big boost. They not only replace hard-to-find pin boys but they enable bowling alleys to stay open 24 hours a day, a big advantage in industrial communities where teams on different shifts bowl round the clock. Already A.M.F. has installed more than 800 in bowling alleys, plans to step up production to 250 per month next year. Even so, it will take years to supply the 60,000 U.S. alleys, especially since new ones are being added at the rate of 2,500 a year. By renting its pinspotters for an average of 12¢ a game (about the same cost as pin boys), A.M.F. expects to gross $22 million a year from the machines by 1960.

Comfortable Cushion. The pin-spotter is also symptomatic of the revolution that has taken place in the American Machine & Foundry Co. Formed in 1900 as the cigarette machine-making subsidiary of James Duke's tobacco trust, A.M.F. became an independent firm after the trust was broken up in 1911. Under the presidency of Rufus Lenoir Patterson, who had been an American Tobacco Co. vice president, A.M.F. developed the first cigarmaking machine. With a patent monopoly in the field, A.M.F. was able to charge the entire cost of the machine (about $4,800) upon installation, then collect a royalty of $1 for every 1,000 cigars produced. The company then expanded into bakery machines and specialized sewing machines, many of which it also rented out.

Morehead Patterson (Yale '20, Oxford, and Harvard Law School '24) joined his father's firm in 1926 after he had taken a one-year fling at the law. He watched the company, with its cushion of royalties, sail through the Depression, paying dividends every year. But he decided that no company could expect to live on its patents forever. Says Patterson: "We could tell by 1938 that after 1946 we were going to have dividends of only half of what we had been counting on."

Hardening Arteries. He began to look for a new machine for a relatively unmechanized market. A.M.F. got the patent rights for a crude model of a pinspotting machine from Fred Schmidt, the inventor, even though nobody before had ever succeeded in perfecting such a device. Finally, after 14 years, a satisfactory model was produced.*