Why Pinball is Pinball

Every now and then someone will read my pinball articles and email to ask "why are they called pinballs then?". I hope the photographs will help make the answer clear!

The pinball shown is a German Rodello that I saw for sale at a 1998 event. Pinball started out as an extension to the small bagatelle games where the balls where propelled up the side ramp with a short cue, like a miniature snooker cue. For the coin slot version this cue became a spring-loaded plunger that you had to draw back against the spring and release. This same mechanism in use in the 1920s and 1930s is still the same mechanism used on today's pinball machines.

The early machines did not use electricity and were generally smaller than the games we know today. They used ball bearings the size of small marbles. In some cases they did use marbles! Scoring was done by the ball falling into holding places made from hoops or baskets of small nails - the pins of the pinball.

Early electric machines had coils of wire large enough to leave a space in the middle of the coil so it avoided touching a central nail attached to a circuit. When the ball hit the coil the coil touched the nail and completed the circuit to advance the score. There wasn't much the player could do to keep a ball in play. There were no flippers until 1947 when Gottlieb employee Harry Mabs invented them for a game called Humpty Dumpty. There had been mechanical bats on baseball games before but these were the first electro-mechanical flippers.

They weren't the most powerful of flippers. Humpty Dumpty had three sets of flippers and you had to relay the ball from the bottom set up to the middle and then up to the top - a feat calling for not a little skill and practice! It was the start of things to come!

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