A portion of this video was sponsored by Salesforce.
This is the biggest, most in-depth video about bowling ever.
How bowling balls are made, the best way to throw them,
maximize strikes, how the lanes are oiled,
what it takes to be a pro
and how this sport has continually been reinvented
for literally thousands of years, up to the present day.
(bowling strikes)
This is the science of bowling,
the most popular participatory sport in the United States.
I'm super impressed with how that went.
- I'm even more impressed than you are.
- What is inside a bowling ball?
I sent this ball to Creative Electron
to get a 3D x-ray scan
and this is the result.
What is that?
I always expected bowling balls to be, you know,
perfect solid spheres, but there's something inside here
and it's not symmetric
and it's not even centered in the ball.
So I went to Storm Bowling,
one of only 11 bowling ball manufacturers in the world
to find out how bowling balls are made.
- Yeah. Basically when we make bowling balls,
we always start in the center
and the center part of the bowling ball is the weight block.
And as you can see this is an example
of an asymmetrical shaped weight block,
so it's actually a different shape
about the X, the Y and the Z axis.
(serene music)
- The weight blocks are embedded
in a core of lightweight glass beads.
- That is so silky-soft.
I feel like I have not felt anything this soft.
What's the difference in density between
this sort of filling material and this core?
- It's quite a bit.
About two and a half to three times more dense
in the inner weight block
than it is in the core material.
- If you were to look for example at this actual core.
Number one, it says 9 6 0
which means that it weighs 9.60 pounds.
And then the description here underneath,
which is a 0 3,
this indicates what type of a weight block is inside of it.
- What happens over here?
- So this area right here is our urethane area.
So basically what we have
are a number of different tanks that are set up.
So there's a chemical reaction that occurs
once it actually fills the mold
and we pour that cover stock material around the pour.
It gets extremely hot in just a matter of minutes.
You go right down here,
she's actually pouring the pin material
inside the tops of those cores.
So you can see for this particular bowling ball,
it's a bright orange type of a material,
and she's actually filling that hole
with that plug material.
We've got the lane at the right here
which is where we take the balls that come out of the mold.
And then they actually spin almost 2000 RPM.
On top of there there's the blades that come around
and it actually makes the balls perfectly round.
So they'll actually trim those up.
- [Derek] Since the balls are not symmetric,
they are heavier on one side than the other.
- And you can see there the last four or five pumps of air,
where it actually floats the air then it stops and pauses,
that the ball has completely settled.
And then basically a needle will come out
from the bottom part
and all of a sudden it'll shoot it up.
And then it'll be where the center of gravity is
on the surface of the ball.
- When it comes right off the lane, right here,
it is extremely porous and very, very dull,
and there is a ton of friction
between the ball and the lane at this point.
So every ball from right here will be smoothed up,
it's just a matter of how much it's gonna be smoothed up
in order to get what is the desired finish.
- [Derek] But before they can use these balls,
they have to be drilled.
But that is specific to each bowler.
How many balls are you making a day?
- [Steve] We're making over 3000 balls in a day now.
they come out of this plant right here.
(smooth calm music)
- Wild.
I found the bowling ball equivalent of clickbait.
"You won't believe your eyes",
"The mind bending hook".
- Right? - Yeah.
It's how you have to sell your stuff.
I get it. - Exactly. Yeah.
- [Derek] But how did it come to be this way?
Well, bowling seems to be an ancient game.
Archeologists have found wall drawings of a sport
that looks like bowling in an ancient Egyptian tomb
dating back 7,000 years.
In Germany, bowling was used as a religious ritual.
Pins represented your sins,
so you're a good Christian if you could knock them all down.
Martin Luther himself was apparently a bowling fanatic
and fixed the number of pins at nine.
When the game made its way over to America,
nine-pin bowling was banned because it promoted gambling.
The legend goes that people cleverly came up with
10-pin bowling to get around the law.
Whoa, totally different game.
Today in the US, nine-pin bowling is only played in Texas
because it was the one state that didn't ban it,
instead, charging it tax.
Bowling lanes are about three-and-a-half-feet wide
and 60 feet long down to the headpin.
I'm using Imperial units here
because that's actually how they're defined.
The lane is made of 39 narrow boards
that bowlers number for reference.
They used to be made of maple and pinewood,
but these days, most lanes are synthetic
and made of fine particles coated with melamine resin.
One game of bowling gives you 10 frames
with two throws per frame
to try to knock down all 10 pins.
The highest score you can get in a game without a strike
is only 190,
but strikes allow you to double count your next two throws,
so a perfect game with all strikes
gives you a score of 300.
If you're anything like me,
the whole game is just
trying to throw the ball as straight as you can
down the middle of the lane, hit the headpin
and try to take as many other pins down with it as possible.
Do you wanna give me any tips or-
- I've watched LeBron bowling, you won't be worse than him.
- You say that now you.
(Chris laughs)
- See, that's what I would normally do.
And I would normally be like
reasonably happy with a shot like that.
But for pro-bowlers like Pete Weber or Chris Barnes,
- [Narrator] For a perfect game,
- Yes!
- [Derek] The game is different.
And not just because they are way better than me.
- [Narrator] And he get it!
(crowd cheering)
- Who you think that you are? I am.
(crowd continues cheering)
Hitting the headpins square on
is not the perfect strategy.
If you hit the headpin square on going straight,
you're unlikely to knock down all the pins.
You could end up with a split
where the ball goes through the middle,
or with the ball deflecting off to one side
after hitting the headpin.
Chances for a strike are much higher
if the center of the ball hits the pins
just to one side of the headpin.
Board 17 and a half.
In which case the ball takes out the 1, 3, 5, and 9 pins,
which take out the others.
- So we want the ball to hit the 1 pin, the 3,
the pin behind the 1, which is the 5 pin.
And then the 9 or the 8 and the 9.
- [Derek] You want the ball to hit all of those pins?
- [Chris] Yeah.
- Now the pins don't always fall this way,
but the pin shape helps.
Pins roll in circles like eggs,
which help knock down the others.
- That's right baby!
Come on, don't miss.
You wanted it, you got it.
- [Derek] But to have an over 90% chance
of getting a strike,
the center of the ball has to hit
with an error smaller than half a board.
Needless to say, throwing a ball 60 feet
straight at a target smaller than a dime is a tough task.
Especially to do it consistently.
Luckily there is a better way.
- Now, if we look at the pins
and as you look at them from here, from straight on,
the spot between the headpin,
the one that's in the center,
and the 3 pin which is just right at that,
that gap's pretty narrow.
But as the ball hooks more,
now we basically shift over,
and now that space is considerably wider.
- [Derek] If you can hit the pins not head-on,
but at an angle of six degrees,
you dramatically increase your chances
of knocking them all down.
Now the margin for error is greater.
The ball can be coming in
anywhere from board 17 to 18 and a half,
that is a board and a half of room.
And that still gives you
greater than a 90% chance of a strike.
Now, six degrees may not sound like a lot,
but it's actually extremely difficult to hit.
The problem is, if you wanted to throw the ball
straight at the pins and hit them at six degrees,
you would have to be bowling from 3/4 over on the next lane.
And that is impossible.
Well, with the two gutters in between and all.
So the solution is
you've got to curve the ball on one lane.
I feel like I have never spun a ball.
Is that, (Derek laughs)
Is that hard?
- So if you've got it under your hand
and the ball's underneath,
and you're trying to spin it,
that's especially the motion that players use these days.
- [Derek] This really became
a big part of the sport by accident.
- The wood gets beat up
with the damage from all the balls going into it.
And so they basically created slip agents,
lubricants much like oil on a car
so that the lanes didn't get damaged so quickly.
- [Derek] So the original idea was to protect the wood.
- The original idea was
just to protect the surface of the lane.
It was not to manufacture anything
for my competitive-scoring type environment.
- But applying oil to protect the wood
meant that balls no longer grip the lane
and roll without slipping down to the pins.
Instead they could skid,
rotating not in their direction of travel.
Now, I've been to a lot of bowling alleys
before making this video
and I noticed it was a bit greasy,
but I always thought that was just
the nature of bowling alleys.
Like the stinky rental shoes.
I didn't know they intentionally put oil on the lanes.
Vox has a great video specifically about oil patterns.
These days, there are machines
specifically for applying oil to the lanes.
- [Chris] And then as proprietors went,
"Huh, well yeah, it does make the ball skid.
Well, if I put more in the middle than the outside
my baller's bowl a little bit better and they're happier."
And then as technology advances like everything does
now we have $30,000 lane machines
that can put a specific amount of oil on each board.
- [Derek] They work kind of like dot matrix printers.
They can lay the oil on
with varying degrees of thickness across the lane
and extend the oil pattern different distances.
There are hundreds of different patterns that can be used.
Usually the oil extends about 2/3 the way down the lane,
so to around 40 or 45 feet.
But there's always a dry patch of wood before the pins
that increases the friction with the ball,
getting it to start rolling without slipping.
And this leads to the three parts of any pro bowler's throw.
The skid,
the hook
and the roll.
When a bowler releases the ball,
it can be going 20 miles an hour
and spinning at 500 RPM.
That's nearly 10 full revolutions per second.
Right-handers typically throw the ball to the right
on the lane while spinning it to the left.
During the skid phase, the ball slides down the lane
spinning but not rolling.
As it comes to the end of the oil,
the friction increases and the ball accelerates to the left.
It hooks because of its spin,
and the spin starts lining up with the direction of travel,
leading to stage three, roll.
The ball is rolling without slipping
as it barrels into the pins.
Ideally, as close to that six degree angle as possible.
Like the ball starts on the left side of the lane,
goes straight across almost rightmost.
Then hooks like at the last minute, rolls in there.
So that's almost like a perfect shot, right?
straight in the pocket there. - Close.
- Yeah. That's where you want to hit the pins.
Yeah.
(ball hits the floor)
- My very first game,
it was ABC back then, American Bowling Congress.
I filled out the application to bowl in men's league.
Dad gave them the letter saying that I could,
and the first game of bowl was 300
and they handed me a hundred dollars too,
and it was like, yeah, making money now.
And actually, my first, my sixth, my ninth,
my 13th, 17th, 20th
were all 300 games.
I like, seven or eight 300
in my first year of men's league.
- [Derek] How do you explain that?
- To shoot 300
you have to get lucky somewhere along the line.
Like that. (Derek laughs)
Like that.
It came in to hit the 1 3, 5, 9.
And that that's what we call the perfect shot.
- I mean, you just keep hitting them.
That's almost the identical shot.
Look at that, that yellow and the purple,
they're almost exactly on top of each other.
- Oh, it just goes a little bit straight.
- That one, the purple one
was just a little bit higher on the head pin,
but it still hit the 1, 3 and the 5 and the 9.
Can't get much better.
- [Derek] This type of throw is only possible
because of the oil.
If you try to throw a ball the same way on an unoiled lane.
Oh no.
It just doesn't work.
Can I actually ask you to bowl like you normally would,
but on the dry lane?
I know it's crazy.
I just want to see what like a normal shot would look like
If there was no oil. - No oil.
It's gonna hit the lane and go in the left gutter.
- That's what I want to see.
- All right.
You're gonna throw it just like it's a regular lane.
- Yeah. - All right.
- Oh yeah, there's no oil on the lane
so the ball can't get down.
As soon as it hits the lane,
it's going to start hooking, you know?
'Cause if you do this, who's skidding a ball on this.
- So they want the oil.
- Yeah. We need the oil.
If we didn't have oil, this is what it would be.
And nobody would have fun.
This is not fun. - The bowling sucks,
We don't want to do this.
(Derek laughs)
- For pro bowlers, the oil on the lane
is a key part of the game.
- Oh whoa.
- Wow. Hey.
- Do you look at the oil?
Are you trying to scope it out
or are you just kind of guessing?
- I usually don't look at the oil.
I let my ball be the guide.
You know, I know some guys that are,
you know, they get down like this and they look in
and it's like, oh, you know,
they're seeing the same thing I do
when I sit down, I go like that.
Nothing.
I see absolutely nothing.
- Whether you can see it or not,
figuring out the condition of oil on the lane
can make the difference between a strike and a miss.
As the game wears on the bowling balls move the oil around,
pushing it further down the lane
and stripping it off the most common paths.
So players have to adjust to the changing conditions.
Some people say left-handers have an advantage
because right-handers aren't playing
on their side of the lane.
At most bowling alleys,
they use a pattern of oil that is thicker in the middle
and thinner out toward the edges.
This is a forgiving layout
because balls that drift too far out start to hook earlier,
while balls going straighter
can continue down the lane for longer
before making their turn into the pins.
But for pro bowlers, the oil conditions vary
and players have to adjust their games to the conditions.
Some people seem to think that like league bowlers
are better than they are, maybe,
'cause they say like, "Oh, this league bowler
can shoot two 10, and I just saw pro shoot two 10."
- That's why they call it league
because you bowl on the same shot every week.
Because each week on tour,
I'm bowling on a different condition.
Not the same condition every week.
We have Cheetah, Chameleon, Scorpion, shark,
one more. - Bear?
- Bear. Yeah.
- [Derek] But it's not just the oil on the lanes
that is transformed bowling.
It's also the balls themselves.
- Hard rubber bowling balls was what I started with.
Maybe mid 70's and then the Yellow Dot,
the Columbia Yellow Dot, which is a plastic ball.
And then they came out with urethane bowling balls.
I won a lot of titles with the urethane stuff.
And then they come out with the
reactive resin bowling balls.
- [Derek] Reactive resin is just a modified polyurethane
with a more porous surface,
which gives it more grip in the oil.
It's the most popular surface or cover stock
for bowling balls today.
Balls started out as perfect symmetrically-weighted spheres.
And when you go to a bowling alley,
the house balls there are still just that.
But when you drill holes in the ball,
you take some weight out of one side.
So to rebalance it, ball manufacturers
added a small pancake weight on the same side as the holes.
But then ball manufacturers got the idea,
they could add different weights inside the ball
to improve their performance.
You can have two balls that look identical from the outside,
weigh exactly the same amount,
and yet roll differently.
If the mass is more concentrated
around the axis of rotation,
say you have a dense cylinder inside the ball.
Well then it has a lower moment of inertia.
And this means for the same amount of energy input,
it will spin faster.
In bowling, they prefer to talk about an analogous concept.
Radius of gyration or RG.
If you were to concentrate the entire mass of the ball
onto a hoop with the same moment of inertia,
it's radius would be the radius of gyration.
So smaller radius of gyration
just means lower moment of inertia,
which translates into more rotation
that a bowler can get on the ball.
- Some people are lower leverage
it just spins faster, like,
eh, it's of crazy, and then
somebody finally did a study on that.
Yeah, it turns out,
yeah, it's like 8%, you know, for every 0.05.
And so it depends on what your leverage is.
Can be fairly significant.
- [Derek] An ability to spin the balls faster,
gives a bowler the ability to hook the ball
more sharply further down the lane,
giving them a better chance of achieving
that six degree entry angle.
What was amazing for me to learn
is that the weight blocks in these balls
aren't even centered.
There's a heavy side and a lighter side on purpose,
and you can find and mark this side
by letting the ball spin freely on a cushion of air,
until it comes to rest, heavy side down.
They showed me a great demonstration
of how the position of the center of gravity
can affect the movement of the ball.
When the center of mass is on the left side of the ball,
it pulls in the same direction as the spin,
helping the ball hook to the left, into the pins,
- Same exact ball, same numbers,
just different static and balance basically.
- [Derek] But here is a flipped bowling ball
where the center of mass is on the right.
Now the ball starts to hook into the left,
but at the end, something weird happens.
The center of mass pulls it over to the right.
This effect is only really noticeable
when the ball is thrown slowly.
These days, there are tons of different weight blocks
that go inside bowling balls
and they can be grouped into two categories,
symmetric and asymmetric.
For all these weight blocks,
the minimum moment of inertia
or in bowling terms, the smallest RG axis
is identified by a pin,
which is visible on the outside of the ball.
It will spin most easily about this axis.
For the symmetric weight blocks.
The ball doesn't change as you rotate it about this axis.
So the maximum moment of inertia
is rotating about any axis that passes
through the equator of the ball.
I certainly didn't expect bowling balls
to have asymmetric cores,
but it turns out what looked like perfect spheres,
actually have three different principal axes of rotation.
Minimum moment of inertia,
maximum moment of inertia
and intermediate moment of inertia.
- So this right here is our Dark Code.
This is one of our asymmetric ball
that has the Rad 4 core in it.
So this has a preferred spin axis.
And what we're going to do now
is we're going to put it onto the determinator
and show how it actually will spin it and find it
no matter how we position it on there.
- [Derek] So you spin them up on this machine
until they settle into the way they like to spin
where the bowlers call their preferred spin axis or PSA.
But why would you want a ball to be an asymmetric top?
Well, professional bowlers drill their balls
so that at lunch the axis of rotation is somewhere between
the minimum and maximum moment of inertia.
And as a result, as the ball goes down the lane spinning,
it precesses like a gyroscope.
The axis of rotation rotates around
causing the point of contact
between the ball and the lane to change.
This precession means that
different parts of the ball contact the lane.
And you can see this when the ball back
by the spread-out lines of oil on the ball surface.
Bowlers call this track flare,
and it's desirable because it means
once the ball hits the unoiled part of the lane,
it gets traction faster
and hooks more dramatically back to the pins.
This is what asymmetric cores are used for.
They have larger differences
between their moments of inertia in different axes
or what bowlers call RG differential,
which makes the ball precess.
If you spin a ball around it's minimum
or maximum moment of inertia, it processes less
and there's much less flair,
meaning oil builds up on one part of the ball.
This reduces the friction over the dry part of the lane
so the ball hooks less.
- See the oil there, very faintly,
but it's pretty much next to the finger,
right next to the thumb,
and it just continues to be right that way
all the way around the ball.
- [Derek] But how important are
each of these factors in actually getting the best shot?
Well, the US Bowling Congress,
or USBC, the governing body that sets all rules
and regulations for US bowling.
They did a landmark study in 2008,
trying to tease out the most significant factors
that affect ball motion.
In order to determine the impact of each factor,
they had to make sure that throws were identical.
So they turned to Harry,
at the time, the most consistent bowler in the world.
He is a robot.
Bowling robots are designed to be able to throw
hundreds of identical shots.
In fact, the robot Earl,
Harry's successor in 2011,
actually lost to Chris Barnes when he debuted
in part because his throws were so consistent.
He wore away the oil in a single part of the lane.
So his shots hooked too much.
The people managing him
did their best to adjust to the oil conditions,
but few people are Chris Barnes.
The USBC ball motion study
used Harry to throw thousands of shots
with different bowling balls.
And they found that the center of gravity
affected the ball motion relatively little.
Around the same level as environmental factors
like room temperature or humidity.
RG, and RG differential,
essentially the moment of inertia
and difference between maximum
and minimum moments of inertia.
That affected the ball motion significantly more.
But the factor that affected ball motion the most
was the surface of the ball.
The top five individual factors were
the amplitude of surface roughness,
meaning the height of microscopic spikes on the ball,
the coefficient of friction with an oiled lane,
the surface roughness by spacing.
That is the distance between microscopic spikes,
the coefficient of friction with the dry lane,
and how quickly the ball surface absorbs oil.
Now, bowlers recognize just how important
the surface of their ball is.
They pay close attention to what it's made of
and how it's finished.
Rougher finishes,
give the ball more traction in the oil
and get it to start hooking earlier.
This is useful for long oil patterns
and slower axis rotation.
- Sometimes maybe I'll go to a little more sanded ball
or a little more ball surface
to get it into a roll quicker for me,
because they use a lot of oil.
- These two shots are thrown identically.
The only difference is the ball on the left
has a rougher surface.
Rough surfaces act like winter tires,
helping to dig into the oil and give the ball traction.
They also act as badly as winter tires on a clean road
on a totally dry lane.
They actually have less friction
because their rougher exteriors
mean that less surface area is touching the lane.
You can get many different levels of smoothness
up to a near mirror shine.
This is better for short oil patterns
to prevent the ball hooking too much, too early.
Ultimately, pro bowlers carry many different balls
to each competition.
- I'm not afraid to change balls in the middle of the game.
I go to the game and I've got like
a spare, a spare, a spare.
All right. It's time to change balls.
- [Derek] Yeah.
- So now I gotta find the right ball to
get down the lane again and find the proper,
which usually I have a pretty good idea.
- [Derek] So they select their ball
a little like a golfer selects their club,
to suit the conditions.
But does all this tech actually make people better bowlers?
Well, over the last 20 years,
average scores have increased by more than five points.
Plus the number of perfect 300 games
bowled per year per thousand bowlers
has increased dramatically since the 1980s.
This graph shows the percent change year over year.
In 1976, soaker balls,
balls chemically softened to absorb oil and hook more,
were banned, and there was a dip in perfect games.
But the same year a new rubber ball was introduced,
the Brunswick LT-48
and more 300 were hit in the years that followed.
In 1991, reactive resin balls were introduced
and there was another significant jump.
Now, obviously there were other improvements in equipment
and natural variability,
but some of the big changes do correlate
with the introduction of new ball technology.
So yes, the wild bowling ball technologies out there,
especially anything to do with surface,
significantly affect ball motion and your bowling game.
But ball motion is likely minutely affected
by hundreds of other factors.
Even the color of the ball can have a small impact.
A USBC study in 2016
found that different pigments absorb oil at different rates.
Bowling is the sport of re-invention.
That goes back to ancient Egypt,
but has transformed many times.
Now, when you get up to throw a single shot,
you have to think about the oil pattern on the lane,
the stage of the game and how the pattern has shifted,
the weight block in your ball,
whether you want symmetric or asymmetric,
which axis you'll spin it about to affect precession,
where the center of mass is
to pull the ball to the left, to the right,
what the cover stock is made of
and whether it's rough or smooth,
all to make a shot that skids, hooks, and rolls
to the pins between boards 17 and 18 and a half
at as close to a six degree angle as you can master.
Now do that again 12 times in a row
and you have a perfect game.
(techno sound effect)
Hey, this portion of the video was sponsored by Salesforce.
Bowling may be complicated,
but managing relationships with your customers
doesn't have to be.
In our modern work-from-anywhere world,
Salesforce makes it easier for your business
to meet the needs of your customers.
You can help them find answers about your business
by creating a help center page.
You can also meet your customers where they're at
by connecting your email, phone and social channels.
You probably spend a lot of time on your website,
So make it work harder for you
by leveraging lead capture forms from Salesforce
right on your site.
And you'll be able to generate new business
and develop relationships with your customers
straight from your CRM.
Sending out messages or special promos is easy.
Salesforce has a whole array of personalization
and message targeting options.
So you can request a demo
or get started for just $25 per user per month
at salesforce.com/veritasium.
I want to thank Salesforce
for sponsoring this portion of the video,
and I want to thank you for watching.