The Lane Shark

It was a bad night at the bowling alley. Strikes were few and far between.  A far cry from the normal repeated flashing “strike” on the scoring monitor. Bowlers were a buzz about what could be the problem. The bowling mechanic made his usual nightly appearance to greet the bowlers, to see how they were doing. “Something must be wrong with the lanes,”  we all told him. “We are just not scoring tonight. What could be the problem?” 

“Hmmm,” he said. “Must be some dirt on the lanes.”  His comment made one of the bowlers stop and think.  If there is dirt on the lanes, it must need to get cleaned on a regular bas is. Thinking this through, it seemed   like it would take hours for one person to clean that many lanes.  “There has to be a better solution, and I am going to find it,” thought one bowler on an off night of bowling way back in 1987. The cogs started turning and he wouldn’t give up until he had a better solution to the dirty lane problem. He thought and he thought, and he drew and he drew. He built and he rebuilt, until at last…the invention of the Lane Shark lane cleaning machine was born.

Tom Westenberger, the creator of the Lane Shark lane cleaning machine,  is now a successful  bowling contractor and is proud of his invention made in 1998. Tom was at the age of 31 when his brilliant invention of a bowling lane cleaner came to thought.  He had always been  a person who liked to build, improve, and tinker with many things that his dad had lying around. He got inspired by his dad, also a bowling contractor, who was tired of wiping up the floors with a broom and a towel. Tom started working for his dad in the summer at the age of ten. Ever since then he has been very interested in everything that has to do with bowling, bowling lanes, or a bowling alley.

Tom is also interested in creating his own products. He also liked to help his dad with whatever he could help with. Tom invented this machine because of the hours of work it took to clean all of the bowling lanes in one alley. Before he created his machine you would have to clean the top layer of the lane with a towel and sweep it with a towel . You would also have to put a solution of water and soap on the btowel .  After that, you would have to go over the lane again to dry it. Tom was tired of doing this long process, so he created the Lane Shark. The Lane Shark is a machine that automatically squirts the solution of soap and water on the lane, and then vacuums it back up. The only work that requires you to do is gently pushing the machine down the lane and back. Although now they have a machine that goes down the lane and back with the push of a button, I think we can cut him some slack since that was a few years ago!!!

The way that Tom came up with this was with a lot of thinking. He said,” I had to put in lots of tough thinking, and a lot of drawings were also included.” One of the first steps in this idea was to make a working model out of wood, then fabricated with steel.  He also made many improvements within 6-8 months.  There was a total of one main frame, as well as 75-100 different smaller parts.  When he was done building and improving, he worked with a company called DBA Products Company from Chicago. Once he developed a distributorship with DBA ,he sold all machines to their company and DBA sold to all of their distributors. After that the distributors sold Lane Sharks all around the world in individual bowling allies. DBA sold a total of approximately 1,500 Lane Shark’s,  and there is at least one Lane Shark in every country where bowling is popular.

In a nutshell, there is a solution to every problem.   If you think long enough and hard enough, you could just develop the solution to a common problem.  And who knows… if you find one solution, maybe, just maybe, you’ll find more!!!