6
Pinball Wizards

Shortly before Christmas 1930, a Youngstown, Ohio, carpenter named Arthur Paulin was cleaning out his barn when he chanced upon a board with several holes carved out of it and about 30 nails stuck in it. The board reminded Paulin of the game of bagatelle, a countertop game derived from a billiard variant first played in eighteenth-century France that requires the players to shoot the cue ball up the side of a sloped table to land it in one of several scoring holes guarded by nests of pins. In 1871, an English inventor living in Cincinnati, Ohio, named Montague Redgrave created a countertop version of the game with a spring-loaded plunger replacing the cue stick, and variations on this design achieved modest popularity in subsequent decades.¹ The recent onset of the Great Depression wreaked havoc upon the steel mills that drove the Youngstown economy, and with his own financial situation precarious, Paulin decided to fashion the board into a bagatelle game as a Christmas present for his daughter. The game proved a hit with the neighborhood children, who formed lines around the house to play the game.²

With his game board proving popular, Paulin thought he might have a salable product on his hands, so he brought it to his friend Myrl Park, operator of a local drug store. Park felt the game lacked appeal as a consumer product, but he also knew that coin-operated countertop games had recently come into vogue and thought they might be able to market it as a commercial product. Therefore, Paulin took the board to another friend, electrical salesman Earl Froom, who helped him design a coin slot, a ball return, and a glass enclosure. Completed around the middle of January 1931, the final game, dubbed Whiffle, consisted of a sloped playfield encased in glass sporting a series of scoring holes surrounded by pins. For a nickel, the player received ten balls launched via a spring-loaded plunger that would subsequently deflect off the pins into the holes, each of which carried a specific point value.³

¹ Redgrave’s game was not coin-controlled. The first bagatelle game with coin control and a glass enclosure was a “Coin Game Board” patented by Charles Young in 1892.

² Richard M. Bueschel, Pinball 1: Illustrated Historical Guide to Pinball Machines (Wheat Ridge, CO: Hoflin Publishing, 1988), 13.

³ Ibid, 14.

Paulin and Froom tested the game in Park’s drug store, where it took in $2.60 worth of nickels in just one hour. The three subsequently formed a partnership called Automatic Industries on January 28, 1931, to sell their new game all over the country. Before long, they were booking orders for over 2,000 Whiffle games per month, but could not manufacture boards fast enough to meet demand. The pinball boom had begun.

***

Pinball was the latest entrant into a coin-operated machine industry that first emerged in the late nineteenth century. The earliest coin-operated amusements began appearing in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and were primarily displayed at fairs and other travelling shows. The first widely exhibited amusement was a figure of a chimney sweep developed by Henry Davidson in 1871 that came to life and performed a series of actions upon the insertion of a coin. The chimney sweep was one of the first examples of a “working model,” a category of coin-operated amusements that achieved significant popularity in the late nineteenth century.⁴

The first recorded individual able to make a living entirely through the manufacture of coin-operated machines was a Leeds mechanic named John Dennison. In May 1875, Dennison displayed his first working models, demonstrations of a drilling machine and a hand lathe, at the Yorkshire Exhibition, where they were well received by the public. He soon began building both mechanical fortune teller machines and working model dioramas for installation at exhibitions, fairs, and bazaars. In the early 1890s, Dennison struck a deal with the Blackpool Tower Company – formed to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the English coastal resort town of Blackpool – to supply his working models to the tower exclusively from its opening in 1894. This arrangement afforded Dennison a steady income for the rest of his life and continued long after his death in 1924 until his daughters finally sold their interest in the venture to Blackpool Tower in 1944.⁵ The tower continued to operate the original machines until 1963.

⁴ Richard M. Bueschel and Steve Gronowski, Arcade 1: Illustrated Historical Guide to Arcade Machines (Wheat Ridge, CO: Hoflin Publishing, 1993), 15.

⁵ Kitty Ross, “The Dennisons of Leeds: Pioneers of Penny Slot Machines,” Secret Lives of Objects (blog), Leeds Museums and Galleries, August 31, 2016, https://secretlivesofobjects.blog/2016/08/31/the-dennisons-of-leeds-pioneers-of-penny-slot-machines.

While Dennison was successful, he was not an entrepreneur and contented himself with building a small number of custom installations. The man who birthed a full-fledged coin-operated industry was British inventor and entrepreneur Percival Everitt. In 1883, Everitt introduced the first successful vending machine, a penny postcard vendor of his own design, and in 1884, he debuted one of the first popular coin-operated amusements, a penny-activated weighing machine. Between 1885 and 1887, Everitt established the Post Card and Stamped Envelope Company, the Weighing Machine Company, and the Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company to place coin-operated scales and machines vending everything from chocolate to chewing gum to cigarettes in thousands of locations across the United Kingdom and Continental Europe.⁶

Frustrated by scarce capital in Europe, Everitt leaned on family connections to set up shop in the United States, thus playing a critical role in introducing coin-operated machines across the Atlantic as well. The first known American coin-operated amusement machine was a working model of a steam locomotive developed by William Smith of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1885 and displayed in several East Coast railroad stations. Everitt was not far behind with both scales, which he launched through the Vermont-based E. & T. Fairbanks Company in 1885,⁷ and vending machines, debuted in 1886 through his own New York-based Automatic Delivery Company.

In the wake of his success with coin-operated scales, Everitt also led a host of British inventors who turned their attention to the attractions found in bars and saloons. These locations often featured devices such as grip, punch, and lung testers that patrons could use to settle arguments about who was stronger, but did little to increase revenue for bar owners aside from a small amount of custom from the losers buying drinks for the winners. Sensing an opportunity, Everitt and others began designing coin-activated testers that allowed owners to monetize these contests. These were joined by coin-operated machines designed to deliver an electric shock, as electricity was thought to provide significant health benefits.⁸

⁶ Nicholas Costa, Automatic Pleasures: The History of the Coin Machine (Cincinnati, OH: Seven Hills Books, 1988), 12–16.

⁷ Bueschel and Gronowski, 1993, 30–31.

⁸ Ibid, 16–27.

While scales, testers, and shock machines proved popular, the lynchpin of the rapidly developing coin-operated amusement industry as it entered the 1890s was the phonograph. Although invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, the phonograph remained little more than a curiosity until the underlying technology improved in the late 1880s. In 1888, a businessman named Jesse Lippincott successfully commercialized the phonograph by purchasing companies established by both Edison and his main rival in sound technology, Alexander Graham Bell, to unite all the important patents under his own North American Phonograph Company. Lippincott proceeded to divide the United States into regional sales territories and assigned franchises to entrepreneurs willing to peddle the new invention.⁹ The phonograph attracted attention as a modern marvel and novelty attraction, but it proved prohibitively expensive for ordinary citizens. Therefore, Lippincott’s franchisees began exhibiting machines publicly at venues like bars, saloons, and train stations and emulated the testers appearing in the same locations by regulating their play through coin control.

The first coin-operated phonograph installed in the United States was placed in San Francisco’s Palais Royal Saloon by Louis Glass of the Pacific Phonograph Company in 1889,¹⁰ but it soon became apparent that bars were not a good venue for phonographs because the patrons were rough on the machines and the establishments were not frequented by the women and children constituting the prime demographic for this new form of entertainment. The solution to this problem came from James Andem, a Civil War veteran, former stenographer, and proprietor of the Ohio Phonograph Company. Andem opened storefront locations in Cincinnati and Cleveland in which a dozen phonographs were grouped together so an attendant could keep them in working order and easily change out cylinders to provide new experiences. The Cincinnati location opened in a building called the Emery Arcade, which may have played a role in the adoption of the term “arcade” to identify an establishment offering coin-operated entertainment.¹¹

In 1892, the Edison workshop struck again with the first motion picture player, the Kinetoscope. Invented by William Dickson, the device allows a viewer to peer into a wooden box containing a roll of film displaying a short scene. The first Kinetoscope parlors opened two years later, but the establishments quickly merged with the existing phonograph parlors. In 1898, Dickson, who had since broken with Edison, co-founded the American Mutoscope Company to introduce an improved moving picture viewer called the Mutoscope. Rather than a filmstrip, the Mutoscope displays a series of pictures attached to a wheel similar to a rolodex in rapid succession when a patron turns a crank, giving the illusion of movement. The Mutoscope displaced the phonograph and the Kinetoscope to form the heart of the rapidly expanding arcade industry.¹²

⁹ Raymond Wile, “The North American Phonograph Company: Part 1,” ARSC Journal 35, no. 1 (2004): 1–36.

¹⁰ In Britain, an American engineer named Charles Adam Randall patented a coin-operated phonograph in 1888 called the Automatic Parlophone, but it did not appear to have any influence on developments in the United States.

¹¹ “The Penny Arcade,” Billboard Magazine, March 15, 1947, 124.

¹² Bueschel and Gronowski, 1993, 71–101.

The arcades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not centers for playing games as they would be in later years. Instead, they were positioned as mechanical Vaudeville shows in which rows of phonographs, Kinetoscopes, and Mutoscopes provided a variety of music, recorded messages, and short films to entertain the public. These would be supplemented by strength and lung testers, coin-operated weighing machines, electric shock machines, card vendors dispensing fortunes, jokes, love letters, and other messages, and machines vending small items like perfume and scented handkerchiefs.¹³

These early coin-operated machines were typically priced at a nickel per play until a Buffalo, New York, entrepreneur named Mitchell Mark discovered during the 1901 Pan American Exposition that an arcade located in an area that experienced high-volume foot traffic could achieve greater profits by lowering the cost for using a machine to a penny. In 1904, Mark partnered with two furriers named Morris Kohn and Adolph Zukor to open a new arcade on Union Square in an upscale New York City shopping district under the banner of the Automatic One Cent Vaudeville Company,¹⁴ which established a template for subsequent arcades and began a shift toward penny play.¹⁵ At the height of their success, the penny arcades represented perhaps the most popular form of public entertainment for the working class in the big cities of the United States and attracted waves of immigrants who could not afford to frequent the theater or similar attractions.

¹³ “The Penny Arcade,” 1947, 125.

¹⁴ Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (New York: Open Road Media, 2015), Google Books.

¹⁵ Mark was also a pioneer in movie theaters credited with installing the first theater organ in 1907 and establishing one of the first so-called “movie palaces” designed exclusively for the viewing of motion pictures, The Strand, in 1914. His partner at Automatic Vaudeville, Adolph Zukor, later co-founded Paramount Pictures, while a fourth partner brought in later, Marcus Loew, became an early movie theater magnate.

In the latter half of the first decade of the twentieth century, the American arcade industry fell apart. The introduction of cheap spring motors finally brought phonograph ownership within the reach of the working class, while the rise of the Nickelodeon transformed the motion picture industry, which reinvented itself around public viewing of projected feature films. With the emerging popularity of the cinema, arcades no longer attracted the high-volume traffic required to maintain themselves in high-rent locations. Consequently, they relocated to dark, cramped, poorly ventilated facilities on side streets and were mostly frequented by men looking to view one of the racier film shorts not welcomed in the more respectable movie houses. By the end of World War I, the arcade had become a relic of an earlier age.

***

As the arcade lay dying, coin-operated entertainment evolved in a different direction. Starting in the late 1880s, a variety of countertop devices called “trade stimulators” were developed in which a patron could insert a coin to spin a wheel, shoot at a target with a mechanical toy gun, or navigate nests of pins like those found in a drop case carnival game for a chance at winning a prize.¹⁶ In the 1890s, these devices evolved into the first slot machines, culminating in the introduction of the first three-reel slot machine with automatic payout by Charles Fey of San Francisco sometime between 1898 and 1905. Fey only produced small quantities of his Liberty Bell for the local market, but after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake destroyed his shop, Fey’s design was either licensed or stolen (depending on whom you ask) by the largest coin-operated machine manufacturer in the country, the Mills Novelty Company. Mills began mass production of its three-reel Mills Bell slot machine in 1907, which attained nationwide popularity.¹⁷ The rapid spread of slots was slowly curtailed by government regulation, but during Prohibition, the cash-only nature of the machines drew elements of organized crime, and they could soon be found in all manner of illegal speakeasies and private clubs.

Early slot machines, like the penny arcade machines that preceded them, were large floor models unsuited for mass distribution. Outside larger cities they could only be found in select establishments. As the United States rapidly motorized in the 1920s, a new breed of coin-operated machine operator emerged who maintained truck delivery routes to place and service machines at retail and restaurant locations across small-town America.¹⁸ This phenomenon led to a new emphasis on countertop games, which could be shipped more easily and find a place in even the smallest establishments. As slot machines faced increasing legal challenges and confiscations during the decade, however, coin-operated machine manufacturers began injecting a degree of skill into their countertop games of chance.

¹⁶ The earliest known trade stimulator is a device called the “Guessing Bank” developed by New Yorker Edward McLoughlin in 1876, in which inserting a coin would cause a dial to spin and stop on a random number, but trade stimulators did not achieve wide distribution and popularity until the next decade.

¹⁷ Tony Wohlers and Eric Schmaltz, “Charles August Fey,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 3, ed. Giles R. Hoyt. German Historical Institute, last modified March 25, 2014, http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=51.

¹⁸ Bueschel, 1988, 72.

In 1926, a company called A.B.T. Manufacturing deployed a countertop pistol game called Target Skill that became an industry sensation, selling over 300,000 units and remaining in production into the 1960s.¹⁹ That same year, a company called Norwat Amusement Devices deployed a machine called Steam Shovel in which the player controlled a miniature replica of a steam shovel and attempted to pick up candy and nuts strewn about the base of the cabinet.²⁰ The machine proved so popular that the “digger machine,” the ancestor of the modern crane unit, became a staple not just at amusement parks, boardwalks, traveling carnivals, and the few surviving penny arcades, but also in hotel lobbies and department stores. Even the Mutoscope briefly came back into vogue. As the industry expanded on the back of these products, it gained its own trade publication – Automatic Age – and annual trade show before the end of the decade.

The coin-operated amusement business of the 1920s was largely a countertop and carnival trade as penny arcades continued to experience a protracted slump that changed in 1930 when the Chester-Pollard Amusement Company developed a new arcade concept. Brothers Frank, Charles, and Ernest Chester – Pollard was their mother’s maiden name – first entered the coin-op business with a fortune telling machine in the early 1920s, but experienced their first real success in 1926 when they acquired the rights to a British manikin soccer game called Play Football. In this game, housed in a large wooden freestanding cabinet, two players control the sides of a soccer match by pressing a lever to cause all the players to kick their legs at once. For a nickel, the players receive a single ball and must time their kicks to score a goal on their opponent. The Chester brothers changed the theme of the game to American football and had a hit on their hands.²¹ Golf and horse racing games followed, and Chester-Pollard cabinets could soon be found in thousands of hotels, clubs, and railway depots.²²

¹⁹ Ben Knauf, “Pa, Ma, and Kids Are Totin’ Shootin’ Irons,” Billboard, November 20, 1954, 1.

²⁰ Bueschel and Gronowski, 2003, 244.

²¹ Bueschel and Gronowski, 1993, 250.

²² Robert Cantwell, “The Fun Machines,” Sports Illustrated, July 4, 1977, 29.

With nickel sports games proving so popular, the Chesters developed a new arcade paradigm called the Sportland. In this setup, a variety of coin-operated machines like strength testers, target shooting games, diggers, sports games, and pinball machines would be placed at the front of the venue, while the majority of the space consisted of a fenced area occupied by large table games with themes like baseball, table tennis, hockey, and bagatelle. The table games would not be coin-operated; patrons would buy 30 minutes of time in the table area for a quarter. The first Sportland opened in an outlying district of Brooklyn, New York, in 1930 and proved profitable despite its less-than-ideal location.²³ By 1933, there were 52 Sportlands in the New York City area alone, which served as models for entrepreneurs across the nation.²⁴ Consequently, the arcade completed its transition from a novelty attraction to a venue for games of skill, taking on the basic form it would maintain for the next 60 years.

The success of the Sportland arcade – and indeed of the entire coin-operated game industry – can largely be attributed to the Great Depression. With worsening economic conditions severely restricting the amount of money most Americans could afford to spend on leisure activities, arcade machines that could be played for a nickel, or even a penny, were some of the few affordable means of entertainment in the country. In 1930, over 250 companies manufactured 250,000 units of over 400 different games,²⁵ and by 1934, these manufacturers were taking in over $10 million annually.²⁶ Meanwhile, many arcades were soon raking in over $800 worth of pennies and nickels a week, while venues in prime locations could pull in as much as $1,200 a week despite an ever-worsening economy.²⁷

***

Pinball first hit the coin-operated amusement industry in early 1931 through both the Automatic Amusement Whiffle and a game called Whoopee independently developed in Chicago by a Belgian immigrant named George Deprez.²⁸ While both games experienced immediate popularity, the tables were relatively expensive and set to nickel play, and were thus unsuitable for the new economic realities brought on by the Depression. Subsequent tables quickly appeared that were both cheaper to purchase – around $16.50 rather than $100 – and capable of accepting pennies, but most of these machines were shoddily constructed, and the manufacturers could not keep up with burgeoning demand. The man who finally struck the proper balance between availability, quality, and affordability was Dave Gottlieb.

²³ William Gersh, “‘Sportlands’ Seen as Evolution of the Penny Arcade,” Automatic Age, April 1932, 28–31.

²⁴ “Sport in the Nickel Age,” Business Week, March 29, 1933, 14.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ “Business & Finance: Pin Game,” Time, December 24, 1934.

²⁷ “Sport in the Nickel Age,” 1933, 14.

²⁸ Bueschel, 1988, 14–16.

Born in May 1900 in Milwaukee to Russian Jewish immigrants, David Gottlieb served in World War I and then spent two years at the University of Minnesota. Gottlieb left school in 1920 to work as a movie theater booker and traveling salesman based in Minneapolis before relocating to Dallas, Texas, two years later. Gottlieb rode the rails across Texas to sell punchboards, pressed paper boards full of holes each containing a slip of paper that listed a cash or merchandise prize, to workers at isolated oilfields.²⁹

Quickly growing tired of lugging around suitcases full of coins and sleeping with a gun under his pillow, Gottlieb turned to the motion picture business. Procuring a Ford Model T automobile, he carted a film projector around Texas to show films in towns too small to have their own cinemas while also pedaling slot machines and countertop games. When Texas cracked down on slot machines, Gottlieb acquired the rights to produce a countertop grip tester and relocated to Chicago, already the manufacturing center of the coin-operated machine industry due to the success of Mills and several other early slot machine manufacturers, to establish D. Gottlieb and Company in 1927.³⁰

In September 1931, Gottlieb obtained exclusive rights to manufacture a pinball game called Bingo from its designers, Nate Robin and Al Rest, who had been unsuccessful selling it themselves due to quality issues. Gottlieb redesigned the game and began manufacturing units, only to have Robin and Rest break their exclusivity agreement. Gottlieb responded by designing a new game called Baffle Ball. Unlike previous pinball manufacturing efforts, Gottlieb developed an assembly line to churn out his new game, the first to achieve true high-volume production. Producing 400 machines a day at his height, Gottlieb sold an astounding 50,000 units of Baffle Ball after its November 1931 release. While this represented far greater sales than any coin-operated game to come before it, Gottlieb still fell short of demand by a good 25,000 units.³¹

²⁹ Roger C. Sharpe, “Gottlieb Changes Name but Legacy Endures,” Play Meter, February 1, 1984, 64–65.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Richard M. Bueschel, Encyclopedia of Pinball Volume 1: Whiffle to Rocket 1930–1933 (LaGrangeville, NY: Silverball Amusements, 1996), 19–20.

Why did pinball suddenly take the United States by storm in 1931? Once again, the Depression was the main culprit. Unlike the big Chester-Pollard sports games, early pinball cabinets like Baffle Ball cost less than $20.00, so even at the height of the economic crisis, it was possible for someone to scrape together enough money to buy a few machines and experience a sizable return on investment in coin drop. Indeed, while a significant number of entrepreneurs lost their businesses in the early years of the Depression, they did not necessarily forfeit their entire savings, and many of them invested in pinball machines and other countertop games to make a living.³² This led to a surge in operators and jobbers and the subsequent rise of a new middleman, the regional distributor. Distributors essentially served as sales representatives for the manufacturing companies by marketing and selling their products to operators within a geographic sales territory. The operators would then place the games on location, keep them in working order, and split the proceeds with the venue owner.

Early pinball machines were also small, contained few moving parts, and were relatively easy to maintain, making them suitable for a wide variety of retail venues more than willing to try anything to attract customers into their stores. As a result, pinball quickly spread from arcades, boardwalks, and amusement parks to roadside stands, bus and rail depots, gas stations, cafés, drug stores, tobacco stores, barber shops, and the bars and taverns that were once again legal with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. By 1941, when the industry peaked, an estimated 250,000 pinball machines were on location in the United States.³³

***

In 1931, when Whiffle and Bingo started spreading around the country, no pinball games were shown at the annual coin machine trade show. In 1932, with Baffle Ball a national sensation, roughly 60 games crowded the show floor, and over 100 pinball games were introduced over the course of the next year.³⁴ Despite the competition, one machine stood head and shoulders above the rest: the Ballyhoo table introduced by Ray Moloney.

³² Walter W. Hurd, “A History of Pinball,” Billboard, May 29, 1943, 91.

³³ “The Coin Machine Industry,” Billboard, February 26, 1944, 66.

³⁴ Russ Jensen, Pinball Expo ‘96, summary of talk given by pinball historian Richard Bueschel, http://www.scholzroland.de/VPStuff/EXPO96.htm.

Born in November 1899 in Cleveland, Ohio, Raymond Thomas Moloney, Sr. spent his early adult life wandering the country while tackling a variety of jobs. After trying his luck in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, harvesting crops in California, and working in sugar refineries in the South, he returned to his birth city to work in a steel mill where his father served as the foreman. After losing that job, Moloney relocated to Chicago in 1921, and his brother-in-law secured his employment in a print shop that produced punchboards like those Dave Gottlieb was selling in Texas.³⁵

At the print shop, Moloney became close friends with a co-worker named Joe Linehan. When Joe and a partner named Charlie Weldt bought out the firm to create the Joseph P. Linehan Printing Company in 1922, they placed Moloney in charge of its punchboard operation. The trio named the punchboard subsidiary the Lion Manufacturing Company after deciding to make use of stationary ordered from Linehan Printing bearing that name that had never been picked up. In 1925, the trio bought out one of the suppliers of prizes for its punchboards to establish the Midwest Novelty Company as a subsidiary of Lion and began distributing coin-operated products such as slot machines and trade stimulators via mail order. Moloney served as president of both Lion and Midwest Novelty, while his partners remained focused on the printing business.³⁶

When Baffle Ball became a hit, Moloney could see that pin games were going to be the next great fad in the industry and signed on as a distributor. When Gottlieb could not fill his orders in a timely manner, Moloney decided to manufacture his own game instead. Both his partners balked at entering the manufacturing business, but Moloney convinced them that pin games would be hot over the next year, and they would be foolish not to dive in. Linehan and Weldt agreed to a limited investment in a new manufacturing subsidiary on the condition that they pull out as soon as they recouped their costs. All three partners figured they were catching a passing fad and planned to end production once they cleared $100,000.³⁷

With funding in place, Moloney began working his industry contacts for a game idea, which lead to a royalty deal with designers Oliver Van Tyl and Oscar Bloom for their new pin game. While Moloney liked how it played, he felt the design lacked the pizzazz necessary to stand out in what looked to become a crowded field. To make the table more eye-catching, he designed a colorful playfield based on the cover of the December 1931 edition of satirical magazine Ballyhoo. Consequently, Moloney named the pintable Ballyhoo and dubbed the new manufacturing subsidiary he officially organized on January 10, 1932, the Bally Manufacturing Company. The game quickly caught fire, selling 50,000 units in just seven months to rocket Bally to the top of the industry.³⁸

³⁵ Christian Marfels, Bally: The World’s Game Maker, 2nd ed. (Enterprise, NV: Bally Technologies, 2007), 1–2.

³⁶ Ibid, 2–3.

³⁷ Bueschel, 1996, 23.

³⁸ Ibid, 23–29.

Over the next two years, the hits kept coming as what could have easily just been a fad turned into a thriving business. In August 1932, Gottlieb and Bally each released a follow-up to their original hit products, Five Star Final and Goofy, respectively, thus proving neither company was a one-hit wonder. That same year, the Mills Novelty Company, the leader in coin-operated amusements and gambling machines, debuted a machine dubbed “the Official,” providing a certain legitimacy to the pin table industry. The Mills Official was also the first table advertised under the name “pinball.”³⁹ Each of these games altered the standard pin game formula in small ways, but the most important innovations of the period came from a West Coast designer named Harry Williams.

Born in New York City in June 1906, Harry Edward Williams moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 15 years old. Although he graduated from Stanford with an engineering degree, Williams took employment as an artist in the advertising industry. Out of work with the advent of the Depression in 1929, Williams supported himself by turning to carpentry, set design, and the occasional bit part in Hollywood films, but had great difficulty making ends meet.⁴⁰

Desperate for a better source of income, Williams attended a sales convention for a coin-operated game called Jai Alai and spent his entire savings purchasing five machines at $100 each. He proved unable to secure prime locations for the games, however, and his new business failed. The owner of one of his locations then told him about the latest coin-op game sweeping the region, Geroge Miner’s All-American Automatic Baseball, which was similar to the Chester-Pollard sports output but was the first game to adapt that formula to the National Pastime. Williams purchased ten machines on credit and later bought the rights to the game from Miner when it proved successful, but the rise of pinball ended the brief hegemony of the sports games in the coin-op world. Williams once again found himself stuck with a game that could not earn any money.⁴¹

³⁹ Ibid, 55–56.

⁴⁰ Richard M. Bueschel, Encyclopedia of Pinball Volume 2: Contact to Bumper 1934–1936 (Poughkeepsie, NY: Silverball Amusements, 1997), 3–5.

⁴¹ Ibid, 5–7.

Williams beheld his first pinball game at a lunch counter across from Universal Studios in Hollywood and took note of its popularity. As pinball continued to spread in the Los Angeles area, Williams decided he had finally found the game he was looking for. In early 1933, he bought out the owner of a local company called Automatic Amusements to begin manufacturing pinball games himself. He started by creating new playfields for existing machines before entering full production on new product in August 1933.

Williams was likely one of the first actual engineers to create pinball games, and he pushed the design of pinball in directions no one had thought to before. His first major innovation came in his second pingame, Advance, released in October 1933. Frustrated with patrons cheating at pinball by banging on the tables or even lifting them off the floor, Williams developed an early tilt mechanism, which would cause the game to end if the table was jostled too much.⁴² His next machine proved even more significant. In Contact, Williams introduced more action to the game through a battery-powered kicker that launched the ball back onto the table after it entered a scoring hole to give the player the opportunity to score more points. Released by carburetor manufacturer Fred McClellan through a new firm called the Pacific Amusement Manufacturing Company in November 1933, the game became a nationwide sensation after Pacific opened a Chicago plant in spring 1934 and ultimately sold somewhere between 28,000 and 33,000 units.⁴³ Williams subsequently relocated to Chicago, where he played a key role in the continuing innovation of pinball over the next several decades.

After Contact, electricity, playfield action, sound effects – the game featured a bell that would ding when a ball was kicked out of a hole – and the tilt mechanism all became standard components of pinball, and an arms race commenced to add new features to the game. Bally struck the next major blow in 1936 when it eliminated pins and holes from the playfield entirely and replaced them with long, thin rods attached to coil springs it dubbed bumpers.⁴⁴ Now instead of scoring points when a ball fell into a hole, the player scored points whenever the ball made contact with one of the bumpers, while a display on the backglass would keep a running tally of the player’s total points. Introduced by Bally in 1936 in a game called, appropriately enough, Bumper, the bumper completed the transition of pinball from a variant of bagatelle into a new game. Just as the industry was entering the height of its success, however, a product appeared that signaled the beginning of the end of pinball’s first golden age.

⁴² In his own lifetime, Williams claimed to have invented the tilt, but this is not true. The earliest known mechanism dates back to a trade stimulator in 1931. Several pinball tables from Gottlieb and others introduced the tilt to pinball earlier in 1933, though it is certainly possible he had not seen them yet when he developed the idea.

⁴³ Russ E. Jensen, “A Visit with Harry Williams,” accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.pinballcollectorsresource.com/russ_files/harryvisit.html.

⁴⁴ Bally borrowed the flipper from a bowling-themed game called Bolo released by a New York ­company called Pacent Manufacturing. Pacent only had limited manufacturing capability, so Bally popularized the bumper. Bueschel, 1997, 110–113.

***

In February 1933, Bally released a pintable called Airway to which a New York distributor named Herman Seiden added a dry cell battery to power a payout slot that transformed the table into a game of chance that delivered a cash prize if the ball landed in the proper hole. Seiden shared this innovation with the engineers at Bally, who adapted it into a new table called Rocket. Released in October 1933, Rocket became an immediate sensation and took in enough money that Moloney was able to take full control of Lion Manufacturing and its Bally subsidiary by buying out Linehan and Weldt.⁴⁵

In 1935, Moloney moved Bally into a 75,000 square foot facility on Belmont Avenue in Chicago that remained the company’s home for half a century and capitalized on the success of Rocket by instigating development of the company’s first pure gambling machines. He introduced a dice machine called Reliance at the annual industry trade show in January 1936 and followed it with a miniature countertop slot machine called Bally Baby later that year. Though never a leader in the field, Bally remained a major player in slot machines for just over a decade.⁴⁶ This placed Bally in a prime financial position, but came at a cost for the larger pinball industry as it faced difficulties in the late 1930s due to its increasing ties to gambling.

The success of Rocket created a schism in the industry regarding the desirability of payout games. David Gottlieb ultimately refused to manufacture them after a brief flirtation because he figured they would draw unnecessary attention from crusaders against gambling. Harry Williams went a step further by pioneering the concept of awarding an extra play for achieving a certain score on his 1935 machine Flash in an attempt to provide the player an alternative reward to a cash prize. Ray Moloney, however, continued to strengthen his company’s position in the payout pinball and slot machine businesses, and many smaller companies followed suit.

⁴⁵ Marfels, 2007, 13–14.

⁴⁶ Ibid, 15–30.

Even without payouts, pinball had already been attacked in many circles as a game that incited juvenile delinquency and petty crime and corrupted the youth. Now with the gambling connection as well, it drew attention from crusaders against organized crime. Since the start of Prohibition, slot machines had served as a money-laundering outlet for bootleggers, but by the late 1930s, they had been pushed to the fringes of society by law enforcement efforts to wipe out the industry. Now that pinball could provide a payout, politicians believed that the machines were an attempt by organized crime to circumvent laws against slot machine operation.

Chicago, the center of the coin-op industry, outlawed pinball in the mid-1930s.⁴⁷ In 1939, Los Angeles followed suit through a narrowly passed ballot initiative.⁴⁸ In New York City, Mayor Fiorella La Guardia launched a spirited campaign against pinball machines as part of his larger assault on organized crime and scored a major victory in 1942 when New York Supreme Court Justice Aaron Levy upheld an earlier ruling from a magistrate that pinball machines were gambling devices and therefore properly subject to seizure.⁴⁹ The ruling effectively criminalized the operation of pinball machines in New York City, although they were not formally banned by the city council until 1948.⁵⁰ These bans, alongside many in smaller communities, assured that pinball manufacturers and operators would be linked with organized crime in the public mind and forced them to wage constant battles over the legality of the game for more than 30 years.

While the long-term effects of pinball being linked to organized crime were devastating, the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941 provided a more immediate threat to the industry. With raw materials and parts needed for military production, the government effectively banned the manufacturing of new pinball machines by deeming the amusement industry non-essential to the war effort, so the major pinball manufacturers turned to war-related work for the duration.

⁴⁷ The exact date appears to be lost to history, at least without a deep dive into city council records, but a group lost an appeal against the ban in 1938. Ryan Smith, “Chicago once waged a 40-year war on pinball,” Chicago Reader, May 5, 2018, https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2018/05/05/chicago-once-waged-a-40-year-war-on-pinball.

⁴⁸ Scott Harrison, “From the Archives: Pinball games banned in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2018.

⁴⁹ “City Wins Twice in its Pinball Ban,” New York Times, February 12, 1942.

⁵⁰ “Beame Signs Bill, Pinball Machines Are Legal Again,” New York Times, June 2, 1976.

To fill this void, a small number of designers began creating refurbished games by recycling old cabinets and parts and combining them with new playfield designs. One of the leaders in this field was consistent pinball innovator Harry Williams. While working for pinball and jukebox manufacturer Rockola in 1935, Williams met a young engineer named Lyndon Durant who impressed him with his innovative engineering designs.⁵¹ The duo continued to work together at several manufacturers for the rest of the decade, but with the start of the war, they went into business for themselves by establishing the United Manufacturing Company in 1942 both to refurbish old games and to seek out lucrative war contracts.⁵² In 1943, Williams sold his share in United to Durant and established the Williams Manufacturing Company, which refurbished old games and built radar components for the remainder of the war.⁵³

***

The leading pinball manufacturers of the 1930s and 1940s were small, family-run companies founded by individuals who had generally started as distributors or operators of coin-operated equipment and found their entrée into manufacturing when pinball grew so popular so fast that it was impossible for existing firms to keep up with demand. Over 200 companies would go on to release at least one pinball machine in the 1930s as demand continued unabated until the production halt brought on by World War II.

Immediately after the war, it appeared the coin-operated machine industry was poised to enter another boom period as manufacturers entered the post-war era with both better equipment and larger manufacturing capacity due to wartime innovations and operators needed to replace roughly 90% of the estimated 5,000,000 coin-operated machines in operation at the start of the war.⁵⁴ Instead, the arcade industry experienced a decline as small-town locations established to serve military training camps folded due to insufficient custom. The number of arcades in the United States fell by nearly half, and amusement manufacturers curtailed the introduction of new units and raised prices to compensate for the drop off in locations.⁵⁵

⁵¹ Bueschel, 1997.

⁵² “United Mfg. Co. Enters Games Field,” Billboard, August 22, 1942, 76.

⁵³ The founding year of Williams Manufacturing fluctuates frequently in the sources, but an examination of the trades shows conclusively that it was 1943, as Williams was still noted as being at United early in the year, and the first mentions of Williams Electronics come later in the year.

⁵⁴ “New Markets Seen for Coin Machines,” New York Times, April 22, 1946.

⁵⁵ “Holiday Play Sparks New Year Outlook for Arcade Operators,” Billboard, January 10, 1948.

Amusements were further hurt by continued attacks on pinball as a gambling device controlled by organized crime that led either to complete bans or heavy per-unit licensing fees around the country. Manufacturers attempted to compensate with a new type of game called a rolldown that operated similar to a standard pinball machine minus the plunger and with no possibility of winning a free game. Rolldowns surged in popularity in 1947, but skeptical lawmakers ultimately decided they could easily be modified into gambling machines and banned them alongside the regular pinballs.⁵⁶

With pinball no longer able to form the heart of the industry in many parts of the United States, a succession of new novelty products arose to replace it that would each spend two or three years in the spotlight before giving way to the next big thing. First came shuffleboard, a centuries-old game that suddenly became a popular coin-operated amusement in 1948. Next, United Manufacturing introduced a shuffleboard variant called the shuffle alley in 1949, in which the player slides a small metal-cased object similar to a hockey puck down an eight-foot lane to trigger switches on the playing field that cause suspended bowling pins to retract. Then came the kiddie rides in 1951 – mostly mechanical horses, but also cars, boats, and spaceships.⁵⁷ Bumper pool followed in 1955, in which players attempt to shoot a ball into a single hole surrounded by bumpers on one end of a pool table. Finally, in late 1956 coin-operated standard six-pocket billiards tables began to proliferate, which helped spur a new pool table boom at the beginning of the 1960s. Pool became a second pillar in the amusement industry just as crucial to its continued success as pinball.

These novelty games were introduced into a rapidly transforming industry in which the decline of the inner city and the rise of suburbia coupled with the onset of the Baby Boomer generation signaled a shift in coin-op venues once again. While the big inner city arcades did not disappear entirely, in the late 1950s coin-operated amusements began dispersing across fun spots like bowling alleys and skating rinks and shopping venues like department stores and discount houses. These locations generally housed fewer games and were interested largely in children’s entertainment rather than pinballs and shuffle alleys. As demand for many types of games declined, the industry began to consolidate until by 1965 what had been over a dozen major manufacturers at the end of World War II were whittled down to just five.

⁵⁶ Horowitz, Iz, “Rolldowns’ Future Puzzles Industry,” January 24, 1948, 82.

⁵⁷ The first coin-operated horse was created by a Sikeston, Missouri man named Otto Hahs in 1931, but they suddenly surged in popularity in late 1951.

Of the remaining players in the industry, Gottlieb remained most closely wedded to pinball and became the leading manufacturer before the end of the 1950s. While an individual pinball table in this period might sell only 1,000–2,000 units – down from tens of thousands in the early 1930s – Gottlieb maintained an aggressive release schedule of between ten and twenty tables a year to establish its dominance. The company also introduced the two most important pinball innovations of the period, flippers and multi-player tables. The flipper, first introduced on the Humpty Dumpty table in 1947, may well have saved pinball, as it injected a degree of skill into the game by allowing the player to press a button at the right moment to bat the ball back up the playfield and score more points.⁵⁸ Multi-player tables, meanwhile, introduced the concept of two players taking turns on the same machine and competing for the best score and played a leading role in raising the price per play of coin-operated amusements from a nickel to a dime.⁵⁹

The number two company in pinball during the period was the recently established Williams Manufacturing Company, which also played a significant role in modernizing the game in 1948 through the introduction of the pop bumper on its Saratoga machine. Unlike traditional bumpers, a pop bumper violently kicks the ball in a new direction when it makes contact, providing considerably more action on the playfield. In conjunction with the flipper, the pop bumper completely changed the way pinball played as the ball ricocheted around the table at high speeds and the player did his best to keep the game going with a well-placed flipper shot.

In 1948, Harry Williams sold 49% of his company to a distributor named Sam Stern. While working as a foreman in a coat factory in 1931, Stern received a tip from a Philadelphia police officer that people were making big money in coin-operated amusements, so he decided to put a few machines on location.⁶⁰ He became a major player after buying up a number of routes and then becoming a Rockola jukebox distributor in the city in 1939.⁶¹ Eager to move further up the chain, Stern walked into Williams’s office in 1947, put his feet up on the desk, and asked Williams to give him just under half the company. Williams had never been fond of managing the firm that bore his name, far preferring to focus on designing new games, so after some thought, he agreed to the deal.

⁵⁸ Roger C. Sharpe and James Hamilton, Pinball! (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 54–55. Humpty Dumpty sported three sets of flippers that faced outward. In early 1948, a competitor called Genco released a table called Triple Action featuring just a single pair of flippers facing outwards at the bottom of the playfield. In 1950, Gottlieb released a table called Just 21 with two flippers facing inward, establishing the standard configuration that exists to the present day.

⁵⁹ alleys were set to dime play from the start. Two-player pins and coin-operated pool tables were important in the migration of the entire industry to dime play, as two players justified double the cost. Gottlieb first attempted multi-player pinball in 1954 with a four-player game called Super Jumbo, but when it proved unsuccessful, they released a two-player game called Duette in 1955 that established the popularity of multi-player pinball. Bueshcel, 1988, 217.

⁶⁰ Keith Smith, All in Color for a Quarter (unpublished manuscript, 2016), 486.

⁶¹ “Sam and Gary on Stern’s,” RePlay, December 1977, 33.

Stern became a vice president at Williams in January 1948 and held the post for the next 11 years before orchestrating a buy-out of Williams in 1959 by Consolidated Sun Ray, a New York retail conglomerate that operated a variety of businesses from drug stores to discount houses. Both owners were offered cash or stock in the deal. Williams opted for cash and left the company, while Stern took stock and replaced Williams as president of the renamed Williams Electronic Manufacturing Corporation.⁶² The merger with Sun Ray did not work out, and Williams became independent again in 1961.⁶³

Under Stern’s leadership, Williams retooled its manufacturing line and deployed a series of pinball tables in the early 1960s that introduced new features like moving targets that could change position as the game progressed,⁶⁴ drop targets that would fall beneath the table when hit,⁶⁵ and a multi-ball function that allowed multiple balls to bounce around the table at once if the player hit the proper targets.⁶⁶ These innovations transformed pinball once more by turning it into a game of structure and sequence with a primary objective of hitting a group of targets in a specific order or targeting a specific part of the playfield at a specific time to gain added benefits and bonus points.

Although Williams never dethroned Gottlieb in the 1960s, the transformation of the company under Stern attracted the attention of jukebox powerhouse Seeburg Corporation, itself undertaking an aggressive expansion program aimed at transforming the company into the largest coin-operated machine manufacturer in the world. The architects of this expansion were Herbert Siegel and Delbert Coleman, who in the early 1950s went into business together as turnaround artists. In 1956, they bought a troubled Pittsburgh brewing company called Fort Pitt and merged it with two coat companies owned by Siegel’s family. Next, they marshaled the combined financial resources of the conglomerate to purchase Seeburg from the son of founder Justus Seeburg in November 1956.⁶⁷

⁶² Ken Knauf, “Williams Mfg. Purchased by Consolidated Sun Ray, Inc.,” Billboard, July 27, 1959, 94.

⁶³ “Williams Deal with Sun Ray Is Called Off,” Billboard, June 26, 1961, 50.

⁶⁴ First introduced in Magic Clock in 1960.

⁶⁵ First introduced in Vagabond in 1962.

⁶⁶ First introduced in Beat the Clock in 1963.

⁶⁷ “Corporations: Money in the Box,” Time Magazine, October 27, 1958. Seeburg was originally established to manufacture player pianos in 1902. It entered the jukebox business in the 1920s and became the leading company in the field after releasing the first 100-selection unit in 1948.

After consolidating the Seeburg purchase, Siegel and Coleman led a board coup in March 1957 to oust the president of Fort Pitt and have themselves appointed chairman and president of the company, respectively. They subsequently sold off the brewing business in November, and renamed Fort Pitt to Seeburg Corporation in April 1958.⁶⁸ A series of vending machine company purchases followed, before they purchased game manufacturers Williams and United Manufacturing in June and September 1964, respectively.⁶⁹ Stern stayed on to run the amusement business, continued under the Williams name but at the United factory, which remained the number two company in pinball as well as the leader in shuffle alleys and baseball games.

***

Once the leading manufacturer in the 1930s, Bally fell to third in traditional pinball after the war, but remained one of the leading producers of shuffle alleys and the newly emerging field of coin-operated kiddie rides. Nevertheless, Ray Moloney remained fixated on the games of chance he felt were more profitable. In 1951, however, the U.S. Congress struck the death knell of the traditional slot machine industry through the passage of the Johnson Act, which made it a federal offense to transport gambling devices to states where they were illegal, which at the time meant every state save Idaho and Nevada.⁷⁰ Two years later, Illinois outlawed the manufacture of slot machines in the state.

With sentiment once again turning against gambling machines, Bally exited the slot machine business in 1949, but Moloney found another way to stay in the gaming business. In 1951, the company released a table called Bright Lights that fell into a new category of pinball called the bingo machine.⁷¹ Unlike the newly emerging flipper games, a bingo machine required the player to launch his balls onto a playfield featuring holes in a standard bingo card configuration in the hopes of completing a bingo to win a prize.⁷² These machines were initially legal under the Johnson Act, which focused on slot, roulette, and crane machines. In 1957, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that pinball machines designed to deliver a cash payout were, in fact, gambling devices and could therefore properly fall under the Act.⁷³ As a result, when the U.S. House of Representatives looked to expand the definition of gambling devices found in the Johnson Act in 1962, the body proposed outlawing the transport of pinball entirely.⁷⁴ This outcome was averted after the bill passed to the Senate, where a compromise was reached only to restrict the transport of payout pinball machines.⁷⁵ With bingo machines discredited and subsequently banned by many states, Bally shifted its focus back to the manufacture of traditional pinball machines.

⁶⁸ “Seeburg Elects Siegel, Coleman,” Billboard, April 28, 1958, 73.

⁶⁹ “Seeburg Acquires Williams,” Billboard, June 13, 1964, 42.

⁷⁰ Marfels, 2007, 23. At the time the bill was passed, Idaho was in the middle of a brief flirtation with legal slot machines that proved so troublesome that they were banned again soon after, leaving Nevada as the only state where slots were legal. Certain states like Maryland left the decision on whether to ban slots to local government authorities, however, so there were a few isolated counties that allowed slot machines as well.

⁷¹ Bright Lights was not quite the first bingo machine, as it was beaten by a month by United Manufacturing’s ABC. Bright Lights was the more popular unit, however, and deserves credit for inaugurating the product category.

⁷² Marfels, 2007, 24.

⁷³ “Pinball Machines Lose in Supreme Court Tilt,” New York Times, June 18, 1957.

⁷⁴ “House Passes Bill to Curb Gaming Device Shipments,” New York Times, June 30, 1962.

⁷⁵ “Compromise Crime Bill Is Passed in Senate,” New York Times, September 29, 1962.

On February 26, 1958, Ray Moloney died suddenly of a heart attack at just 58 years old. His death threw Bally into turmoil. His entire estate, including Lion Manufacturing and its Bally subsidiary, was placed in a trust administered by the Chicago-based American National Bank and Trust Company. A new board of directors was elected that appointed long-time Bally executive Joseph Flesch as president, who subsequently ceded control of the company to Moloney’s sons, Ray Jr. and Donald, two years later. By that time, the decline in sales of bingo machines brought on by the 1957 Supreme Court decision had significantly impacted Bally’s bottom line, and the company was losing money. Ray and Donald proposed bringing Bally back into the slot machine business to turn the company around, but American National had no interest in entering a business that it assumed would have deep connections to organized crime and wanted to liquidate the company instead to pay off its debts.⁷⁶ Bally ultimately survived through the intervention of Bill O’Donnell.

Born in 1922, William Thomas O’Donnell was educated at Loyola Academy and Sullivan High School, but was forced to drop out in 1939 at the age of 17 to support his family after the death of his father. O’Donnell went to work for the Underground Construction Company as a laborer helping to build the Chicago subway system before enlisting in the Marines in 1941 and serving in the Pacific theater during World War II. Discharged in fall 1945, O’Donnell briefly served as a postal worker before a cousin who served as Ray Moloney’s bookmaker suggested he seek employment with Bally. O’Donnell joined the firm in 1946 to work in the purchasing department and caught the eye of Moloney, who named him assistant sales manager six months later. In 1951, Moloney promoted O’Donnell to sales manager, and upon Moloney’s death American National named him to Lion’s board of directors.⁷⁷

⁷⁶ Marfels, 2007, 26–28.

⁷⁷ Ibid, 29.

O’Donnell worked hard to secure a management buyout of Bally to save the company, but he could not secure financing due to the company’s alleged connections to organized crime. Therefore, he turned to the company’s distributors for help. Runyon Sales, a powerful New Jersey distributor fronted by Abe Green and Barnett Sugarman, proved amenable and brought in two additional investors of their own, a Brooklyn pool table manufacturer named Irving Kaye and a well-connected former vending executive named Sam Klein. Klein, in turn, brought in a concessions magnate named Lou Jacobs to finance a portion of the deal. Together, this motley group of investors – many of whom had ties to underworld figures – formed K.O.S. Enterprises and bought certain assets of Lion Manufacturing and the Bally corporate name on June 17, 1963, for $2.85 million. K.O.S. subsequently changed its name to the Lion Manufacturing Corporation with Bill O’Donnell as president and largest shareholder Sam Klein as executive vice president.⁷⁸

In 1963, Illinois repealed its decade-long ban on slot machine manufacture, and O’Donnell prepared to lead the new Bally back into the gaming business. Because the Johnson Act and the Illinois ban had been passed so soon after the complete halt in slot machine production brought on by World War II, the majority of slot machines in service still relied on decades old mechanical technology, so the industry was ripe for modernization. In 1964, Bally introduced the first electromechanical slot machine, Money Honey, and revolutionized the industry. Capable of more flexible payout schemes than traditional machines and incorporating a coin-hopper that allowed the payout of large sums without the need to stop playing and find an attendant, Money Honey increased casino profits by as much as 400% and created intense demand for modern slot machines. With little competition in the field, Bally cornered 94% of the Nevada market by 1968. Buoyed by this success, O’Donnell incorporated Lion as the Bally Manufacturing Corporation with the intent of taking the company public. A long Securities & Exchange Commission investigation followed to insure the company was not a front for organized crime, after which Bally became the first publicly traded coin-op manufacturer on March 13, 1969.⁷⁹

⁷⁸ Sal Recchi, “Gaming Giant has Checkered Past, Local Ties,” Boca Raton News, July 15, 1979.

⁷⁹ Marfels, 2007, 31–33.

***

Rounding out the big five coin-op manufacturers were two smaller companies that largely avoided pinball to focus on novelty products: Chicago Coin and Midway Manufacturing. Chicago Coin founder Samuel Harry Gensburg was born in Brest, Russia, in 1893, but the family immigrated to the United States not long after he was born and settled in Pittsburgh. A natural businessman, Gensburg helped out in his father’s grocery store for a time until opening his own store at 16. Before long, his store was outperforming his father’s, and he opened a second store the next year followed by a nickelodeon cinema the year after that when he was just 18. At around age 20, Gensburg left Pittsburgh to seek new opportunities in California, but those plans ended in Chicago when he stopped to visit relatives only to meet and fall in love with Dora Wolberg. He decided to stay in the city and worked as an order filler for Sears Roebuck before marrying Dora in 1919 and moving to Manchester, Iowa, to run a grocery store.⁸⁰

Eight years later, Sam learned about a company in Milwaukee that had installed a coin-operated machine that vended Hershey bars and decided to install one in his store. When it proved successful, he bought 100 of the machines and relocated to Chicago to place them in bars and taverns in partnership with his brother, Dave. Around 1929 or 1930, Sam and Dave were introduced to a countertop game called Little Whirlwind developed by coin-op innovator Howard Peo.⁸¹ Dave started placing the game on location until another brother, a manufacturer of prizes for Cracker Jack boxes named Louis, developed a knockoff of the game called Hearts that Dave could sell for a cheaper price. When Peo threatened legal action, the duo brought in a cousin who had previously invented an electric pencil sharpener and a bicycle coaster brake to build a new version that did not run afoul of Peo’s patents. With this new game in hand, Louis, David, and a fourth Gensburg brother named Meyer established the Genco Manufacturing Company and became big players in the early pinball industry by pursuing a strategy of taking concepts developed by other companies and building higher quality versions of their own.⁸²

⁸⁰ Roger C. Sharpe, “A Final Farewell to Sam Gensburg,” Play Meter, May 15, 1985, 50–51.

⁸¹ Like the early pinball games, Little Whirlwind was a countertop unit in which the player launched steel balls onto a playfield and hoped they landed in scoring holes, but it had a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one and featured spiral lanes rather than pins, taking inspiration from the allwin gambling games currently popular in Europe.

⁸² Ibid, 51.

As his brothers entered the manufacturing business, Sam Gensburg joined with his brother-in-law Sam Wolberg in 1931 to establish a trade-in business for used coin-op equipment dubbed the Chicago Coin Machine Exchange. Before long, Sam concluded he could make better pinball tables than his brothers and established Chicago Dynamic Industries as a manufacturer of games marketed under the Chicago Coin name.⁸³ The company started by making replacement boards for popular existing games like Ballyhoo before deploying its first original pin table in 1933.

Like Genco, Chicago Coin prided itself on improving on the ideas of others rather than pursuing technological innovation, so the company rarely had a leading game in the market. It released a constant flow of games across multiple genres, however, to remain an important player in the industry. In fact, although he entered the business after his brothers, Sam Gensburg ultimately surpassed them. In the early 1950s, Genco began to experience difficulties in part due to the owners’ attempts to break into the casino business in Nevada, so Sam bought his brothers’ company in 1952 and operated it as a separate subsidiary of Chicago Dynamic Industries under the direction of his son Avron until shutting it down in 1959.

While Chicago Coin dabbled in pinball even as it focused its main efforts on novelty products, the final important amusement manufacturer of the post-war period avoided the business almost entirely. Mechanical engineer Marcine Wolverton, who went by “Iggy” because many people considered Marcine a girl’s name, designed aircraft ordnance during World War II and then entered the coin-op industry after the war’s conclusion. He briefly worked at jukebox maker Wurlitzer before landing at the United Manufacturing Company. In 1947, he was joined at United by electrical engineer Hank Ross, who had previously worked for the amusement manufacturer Exhibit Supply. When United encountered financial difficulties in the late 1950s, Wolverton and Ross, regarded as two of the company’s top designers, decided to strike out on their own. Scraping together $5,000, they formed an equal partnership in October 1958 based in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park, Illinois, called the Midway Manufacturing Company.⁸⁴

⁸³ Ibid, 52.

⁸⁴ Smith, 2016, 162.

Wolverton and Ross planned to survive as a small company in the highly competitive coin-op industry through a low-overhead factory operation that would allow them to undercut competitors on price. To that end, they leased a modest 5,000 square foot manufacturing facility and fabricated most of their factory installations and game parts themselves.⁸⁵ Working long hours at the plant during the day, both men also attended night school to brush up on business. In January 1959, the duo began production of their first game, a shuffleboard with a rebound feature called Bumper Shuffle, followed in May by a unique game called Red Ball in which the player presses buttons to launch balls onto a bingo-style playfield in the hopes of arranging them in various configurations to score points. In 1960, Midway scored its first major hit with a pellet shooting game called Shooting Gallery and thereafter focused largely on gun games and pitch-and-bat baseball games. It also added a shuffle alley line in 1966 shortly before moving to a larger facility in nearby Schiller Park. Although the smallest and newest manufacturer among the big five, Midway proved itself one of the most innovative.

***

By the mid-1960s, the coin-operated amusement industry was running out of steam. In 1954, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the average revenue generated by amusement machines on location in the United States was $722 per machine.⁸⁶ By 1963, the average revenue per machine had fallen to $639 despite nearly ten years of inflation and the widespread adoption of dime play.⁸⁷ No major new product categories had emerged since the spread of shuffle alleys, bumper pool, and two-player pinball in the mid-1950s, while the combination of dwindling markets and consolidation had whittled down the number of manufacturers in Chicago to just five. With returns declining and so little competition in the marketplace, stagnation set in as manufacturers cut back on research and development. New game designs became stale and predictable, often merely incorporating small gameplay tweaks or cosmetic changes into existing concepts to differentiate them from the models released the year before. An increasing interest in pinball in Europe – particularly after France opened its market to imports and Italy partially lifted a pinball ban in 1961 – helped sustain sales for the surviving manufacturers, but without new game concepts, the long-term future of the industry looked grim. Just as coin-operated amusements appeared ready to enter an irreversible decline, a savior appeared in the form of a new type of arcade machine from Japan.

⁸⁵ “Midway in Groundwork on Three New Games,” Billboard, November 24, 1958, 102.

⁸⁶ “U.S. Releases 1954 Juke, Game Totals,” Billboard, July 15, 1957, 124.

⁸⁷ “1963 Industry Figures In,” Billboard, December 31, 1966, 45. The magazine reported the average for pinball and other amusements separately. I have taken a combined average.