In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, the game spread into the Low Countries and also into Austria and Switzerland. The playing surfaces were usually cinders or clay, specially treated and sun-baked to a hardness resembling concrete. The roofing over of lanes, first done in London for lawn bowls around 1455, was the beginning of bowling as an all-weather, around-the-clock game. When the lanes were covered or put into sheds (called Kegelbahns in Germany and Austria and usually attached to village taverns or guest houses), the playing surfaces ranged from wood or hardened clay to, in later years, asphalt.

Among other significant historical references to bowling are an account of a great feast given the citizenry of Frankfurt in 1463, at which the venison dinner was followed by bowling; notations from 1325 in which “gambling on bowling” in Berlin and Cologne was limited to five shillings; and the award of an ox to the winner of a bowling competition in 1518, given by the city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Pol.).

The passage of time brought an increase in the size of the stone rolled at pins, and eventually the ball came to be made of wood. Many variations of the game developed, some played with three pins, others with as many as 17. A biographer of the 16th-century cleric Martin Luther has written that Luther built a bowling lane for his children which he occasionally visited, sometimes throwing the first ball.

Articles found in the tomb of an Egyptian child buried in about 3200 bc included nine pieces of stone, to be set up as pins, at which a stone “ball” was rolled, the ball having first to roll through an archway made of three pieces of marble. The modern sport of bowling at pins probably originated in ancient Germany , not as a sport but as a religious ceremony. As early as the 3rd or 4th century ad, in rites held in the cloisters of churches, parishioners may have placed their ever-present club, or Kegel (the implement most Germans carried for sport and, certainly, self-protection), at one end of a runway resembling a modern bowling lane. The Kegel was said to represent the Heide (“heathen”). A stone was rolled at the Heide, and those successfully toppling it were believed to have cleansed themselves of sin. Although the peasants’ club evolved into pins, the association remained, and even today bowlers are often called keglers.

Bowls and pins in North America

There is confusion about how and when bowling at pins came to North America, arising from the inconsistent use of the terms bowl, bowler, and bowling. The early British settlers brought lawn bowls with them to America because that was the game they knew best. Dutch explorers under Henry Hudson were said to have brought some form of pin bowling.

Many of the early European pin games involved rolling the ball along a wooden plank, 12 to 18 inches (30 to 46 centimetres) wide and 60 to 90 feet (18 to 27 metres) long, toward a diamond-shaped formation of nine pins. The plank still can be found in parts of Europe, notably in eastern European countries, where bowling games called bohle, asphalt, and schere are popular. In these, the nine pins are smaller than tenpins, and the duckpin-type ball, without finger holes, is held in the palm of the hand. The Netherlands has a “plank” game in which a large ball, with only a thumbhole, is rolled on the plank toward the nine pins. The earliest known reference to bowling in the United States was made by Washington Irving in his short story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819–1820).

Emergence of the tenpin game By the mid-1830s, as bowling at pins was flourishing, the scourge that periodically struck the game in Germany, France, England, and other countries—gambling—became a plague on the U.S. bowling scene. To combat the problem, the state legislature of Connecticut in 1841 banned the playing of “Nine-Pins, whether more or less than nine-pins are used.” However, a month before the Connecticut legislation, the town of Perry, N.Y., had enacted a law banning tenpins. There are other earlier signs of tenpin bowling, including a painting, traced to 1810, that shows English dandies playing a game with 10 oddly shaped pins set up outside a factory in Ipswich, Eng., an area that was populated by many Dutch immigrants in the 1700s. Regardless of how tenpins came into being, its popularity spread as German immigrants began populating Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis (Mo.), Cincinnati (Ohio), Detroit, and other cities. Although intercity bowling events were becoming common, the lack of uniform playing rules and equipment specifications stifled the development of the game. In 1875 delegates from nine bowling clubs in New York City and Brooklyn, N.Y., organized the National Bowling Association. Some of the legislation agreed upon then is still in effect in modified form, but the group lacked national acceptance.

Organization and tournaments Disagreement over rules continued, principally as an alignment of New York bowlers against everyone else. On Sept. 9, 1895, the American Bowling Congress (ABC) was organized in New York City. Rules and equipment standards were developed, and the game as it finally was organized remained basically unchanged as the sport grew steadily. An early technological development that helped the sport’s progress was the introduction of the hard rubber ball in 1904, its predecessor having been made of lignum vitae, a tropical wood that was durable but that often chipped or otherwise lost its shape. The next big advance was the introduction of the automatic pin-setting machine in the early 1950s. Later, balls made of polyester and urethane were developed and in some cases replaced the hard rubber ball. In 1901 the ABC started its national tournament. The Women’s International Bowling Congress (WIBC) was organized in 1916 and conducted annual national championships from 1917. While the ABC and WIBC are autonomous organizations, each billing itself as the “world’s largest” men’s or women’s sports organization, respectively, they share a number of functions, including equipment testing and research and the joint issuance of credentials to the mixed leagues that made up more than 70 percent of their late 1980s combined membership of approximately 7,000,000. A third membership organization, the Young American Bowling Alliance (YABA; established in 1982), administers to the league and tournament needs of young bowlers through college age. In the late 20th century it was estimated that more than 60,000,000 persons bowled at least once or twice a year in the United States. The backbone of the sport continued to be its highly organized, competitive league structure. Most men’s and women’s leagues consist of eight to 12 teams, but some have 40 or more, depending on the number of lanes in the bowling centre. League play is conducted under rules laid down by the three major membership organizations, including the handling of prize funds by the adult leagues. The prize funds are developed from the contestants’ entry fees and are distributed to the various teams and individuals on a performance basis.