Pinball Memories

I've mentioned One-Armed Bandits and other arcade machines but the machines I always used to make a beeline for in seaside arcades were the pinball machines.

When I was a boy there were still a few older machines without flippers. They had a coil around a central nail and the ball would press the coil on the nail and complete the circuit to score points. The ball simply fell from the top of the table to the bottom and that would be the end of the ball. Pinballs with flippers were a vast improvement. You had a chance to keep the ball in play longer, although early flippers were very weak. Some machines had three sets of flippers, top middle and bottom so you could try to relay the ball from one set to another higher set.

1950s machines had wooden rails at the side. Flippers were short 3-inch stubby things and often were miles apart with a huge gap for the ball to "drain" between them. Scores were shown by having different amounts shown in the back glass - a row of numbers showing hundreds of thousands, a row for tens of thousands and a row for thousands. One figure in each row would be lit and you added them to get your score. Later machines had score reels that clicked round, each movement accompanied by sound - machines had a bell or a chime bar that was hit by a solenoid. By the early 1970s they had up to 3 chime-bars sounding different notes for 10s, 100s and 1000s. Yes, with the score reels scores were more modest than the 1950s machines.

From the mid 1960s features such as zipper-flippers appeared - hitting a target on Bally machines caused the flippers to move closer, closing off the gap between them until another target caused them to open apart again.

Flippers became longer - 4-inches rather than 3-inches became the norm as on this 1978 Lucky Ace. Then in the late 1970s electronics replaced the electro-mechanical pinballs and they started to make electronic noises. At first bell and beep noises, imitating the chime bars. Then sound effects more like video games appeared until in 1979, "Gorgar Speaks!""

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