Lyndon “Lynn” Durant has posthumously entered the Amusement Industry Hall of Fame as one of its first legacy inductees. He was a designer of pinball machines in the post-World War II period until his invention of a table-top bowling game called Shuffle Alley in 1949.
That’s when he founded the United Mfg. Co. Shuffle Alley, which used a metal puck to slide down a playfield over electrical contacts to play the game of bowling.
The product took the industry by storm and spawned many future versions of the original game. That game’s very name would become the generic description of this type of amusement. Durant sold his company to Williams Electronics, Inc. in the mid-1960s and retired from the industry, leaving a lasting legacy.
