Pool & Pills - pg 20

But, of course, that is only half the story because after marking the balls the Billiard Marker needed a token to give to each player. This is where the pills come in. The oldest pill sets we see are ivory or bone, probably fashioned from broken billiard balls. Early pill sets could number twenty or more, and in both games, Pool and Pyramid, mention is made of up to 21 balls in play.

There is ample evidence that the pills preceded the leather shake bottle we now store them in. This would all make sense if the original purpose of the pills was a token to give players in order to keep track of which balls they brought. The pills could be kept in a bag or wherever worked for the players.

The traditional Pill bottle that we still use today has a unique shape, but not if you look at beer bottles from the 1870ís where one will note a striking similarity, right down to the lip of the bottle. This seems like more than a coincidence, and again not much of a stretch to conclude that a beer bottle was the original container. It would also explain the size of the pills themselves. They fit perfectly in a beer bottle, I know, because Iíve seen it happen.

By the last quarter of the century 1875-1900, Pyramid was increasingly popular, and was being played with fifteen balls. If you wanted to play, youíd go to a billiard parlor and pool your balls with some other players. With Pyramid being the dominant game, it was evident that what the Billiard Marker needed was a set of pills for each table playing Pyramid, and each bottle needed exactly sixteen pills to mark the balls in play. I believe this is why there are sixteen pills in the set even today.

In 1894 Calistus ìKellyî Mulvaney of Chicago invented Kelly Pool and the true calling for the pills was found. Kelly Pool came to dominate the American Pool scene for the next 35 years or so, and the peas became known to everyone as Kelly Pills. To this day, if you want to buy numbered billiard balls in Great Britain, just ask for a set of Kelly balls, because thatís what the British call the numbered balls.

And what became of the Billiard Marker? By the turn of the century inexpensive resin balls and even cheaper clay balls in numbered sets of sixteen were the norm and cheap enough so that you no longer had to bring your own balls to the pool room. After the pool halls were able to afford their own sets of balls, and games that required scoring of points were passed over, the job of Billiard Marker was no longer necessary, and the job became a casualty of progress.