Bowling

Bowling is among the oldest sports still played in recognizable form. Artifacts resembling bowling balls and pins were found in a child's grave in Egypt dating to roughly 3200 BCE, and South Sea Islanders played a game called ula maika, rolling stones at a target over a distance of about 60 feet -- coincidentally the same length as a modern bowling lane. In medieval Germany, a game called Kegeln was played in church cloisters, and the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther is often credited with settling on nine pins as the standard number.

Modern ten-pin bowling was standardized in the United States by the American Bowling Congress, founded in 1895 by New York restaurateur Joe Thum after a meeting at his establishment brought together bowling club representatives from around the country. The ABC fixed the 60-foot lane length, the 10-pin triangular rack, and core equipment rules that still define the sport today.

A well-known story holds that ten-pin bowling was invented specifically to dodge a legal crackdown: in 1841, Connecticut outlawed nine-pin bowling alleys to curb the gambling associated with the game, and bowlers supposedly added a tenth pin to create a technically different game the law didn't cover. It's a good story, but newspaper references to ten-pin bowling actually predate the Connecticut ban by roughly two decades, which undercuts the loophole legend even though nine-pin bowling's gambling reputation and legal troubles were real.

Ten-pin also isn't the only regional variant that survived. Candlepin bowling, which uses slim pins and small balls, took hold in New England starting around 1880, and duckpin bowling emerged in Baltimore around 1900 with shorter pins and smaller, fingerhole-free balls. Both remain regional alternatives to the ten-pin format described here.