Thomas F. Ryan, also known as 'Tommy' Ryan was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1872. Mr. Ryan was a Canadian sportsman and entrepreneur, best known as the inventor of 5 pin bowling.
At the age of 18, Ryan moved to Toronto. According to a 1957 CBC Television interview, Mr. Ryan stated that he was a talented enough baseball pitcher to have received a professional league offer, but that in the late 1800s, the money as a professional baseball player wasn't good enough.
Ryan had been running a pool hall on Yonge Street and in 1905 opened the city's first regulation tenpin bowling alley above a store at Yonge and Temperance Street. By 1909 tenpin bowling's popularity in Toronto had grown in popularity, but some of Ryan's customers complained that the ball was too heavy, while others complained that it took too long to set up all 10 pins for 10 frames during his customers' lunch hour break.
Sometime in 1909, he devised a new game with a smaller ball and only five pins, with a new scoring system. After receiving complaints about the pins bouncing out the window to the street, in 1912 he added a rubber ring around the pins.
Ryan purchased the Turtle Hall Hotel in Toronto in April 1914 for $45,000. He later bought the former home of the Massey family, which he converted into an antique gallery and auction house. For decades, he was a judge of the Miss Toronto pageant.
He remained a bachelor until he was 82, when he married his secretary. On November 19, 1961, Tommy Ryan died in Toronto at age 89. He was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1971. He is buried in the Mount Hope Catholic Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario.