5 Pin Bowling History
5 Pin bowling was invented by
Thomas (Tommy) F. Ryan in Toronto in 1909. Mr. Ryan had actually co-founed and opened the first 10 pin bowling alley in Toronto, the Temperance Street Bowling Club, four years earlier in 1905.
Tommy's great invention came about when his customers complained that it took too long to setup 10 pins each frame during their short work lunch breaks. In order to speed-up lunchtime matches, he decided to remove 5 of the pins and got his father to whittle down the remaining five to about 75% of their original size. He also introduced a new scoring system (all pins in tenpin are worth 1 point) assigning each pin a value from 1 to 5 (4,2,1,3 and 5 from left to right) and substituted the large tenpin ball with a much smaller bowling ball. In those days, to make the game a challenge, you had to knock down the left '4' pin in order to score any points in a frame!
When the first 5 pin bowling centre was opened in Western Canada in 1930, they opted for a different scoring system assigning the pins' values as 1,4,5,3 and 2. It was only in 1952 that the modern-day 2,3,5,3,2 scoring system was established and it it took until 1959 before it was fully adopted nation-wide and the requirement to knock-down the left pin was abolished in 1967.
While there is evidence that the sport has been played in pockets of the United States, Scotland, the British West Indies, the Phillipines and Argentina, today 5 pin bowling is a uniquely-Canadian sport.
Today five pin bowling is played on a weekly basis, from coast-to-coast-to-coast, by over half a million Canadians from ages 3 to 99.