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A Brief History Of Pinball

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 3m·held·Nov 28, 2022
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Silverball Chronicles traces pinball's history from lawn games to 1930s coinop era.

Summary

David Dennis and Ron host Silverball Chronicles in a detailed exploration of pinball's origins, tracing the game's evolution from 17th-century French lawn games and billiards through bagatelle to the coinop era. The episode covers key innovations like the spring-loaded plunger (Montague Redgrave, 1871), the first commercial hits Baffle Ball (D. Gottlieb & Co., 1931) and Ballyhoo (Raymond T. Moloney, 1932), and the industry's early manufacturing dynamics during the Great Depression.

Key Claims

  • Baffle Ball by D. Gottlieb & Co. sold 50,000 units in 1931 at $17.50 per unit, equivalent to ~$330 in 2022 dollars

    high confidence · David Dennis, citing ThoughtCo historical article with show notes

  • Montague Redgrave invented the spring-loaded plunger in 1871, patenting it as 'Improvements in Bagatelles'

    medium confidence · David Dennis, noting some historical discussion exists about true attribution but Redgrave received patent credit

  • Ballyhoo by Raymond T. Maloney also sold 50,000 units in seven months (January 1932)

    high confidence · David Dennis, citing Encyclopedia of Pinball Volume 1 page 29 and January 1953 Ballyhoo newsletter

  • Raymond T. Moloney founded Lion Manufacturing (later renamed Bally) as a distributor unable to obtain enough Baffle Ball units

    high confidence · David Dennis, explaining Ballyhoo's origin

  • Pinball's lineage traces through French 17th-century billiards with fixed pins, bagatelle, and billiard japon (confusingly named despite Western European origin)

    high confidence · David Dennis, citing ThoughtCo research on lawn games evolution

  • Abraham Lincoln was featured playing bagatelle in a political cartoon

    medium confidence · David Dennis, noting this detail came from Wikipedia

  • Baffle Ball dispensed 5-7 balls for one penny during the Great Depression

    high confidence · David Dennis, describing early coinop mechanics

  • Baffle Ball was manufactured under license by Keeney & Sons in Chicago because Gottlieb's original production couldn't keep up with demand

    high confidence · David Dennis, explaining manufacturing expansion

  • Redgrave's bagatelle design was manufactured in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is described as 'the capital of pinball'

    medium confidence · David Dennis, though this claim seems historically questionable for later eras

Notable Quotes

  • “In 1871, Montague Patton, the first game that resembles modern pinball, calling it Improvements in Bagatelles, where his design introduced the spring-loaded plunger for washing the pinball. That is the pinnacle improvement right there.”

    David Dennis @ ~30:00 — Identifies the critical innovation that defines modern pinball mechanics

  • “It sold for $17.50. The game dispensed five to seven balls for a penny. And the important thing to remember is the time period. What's going on in 1931? The worst time in North America and the world. The Great Depression.”

    David Dennis @ ~47:00 — Establishes the socioeconomic context driving pinball's rapid adoption

  • “The distributor wants to form their own company, so he did that... This game became an even bigger smash hit.”

    David Dennis @ ~65:00 — Explains the business model that created Bally Manufacturing

  • “No bugs in this game. Were bugs in the game an issue back then?”

    [name withheld pending review] @ ~52:00 — Humorous exchange about 1930s advertising language and quality assurance

  • “You've got lawn games and lawn games kind of split off into billiards and bagatelle and pinball. And then it kind of splits off into gambling devices and, you know, what would eventually become video lottery terminals.”

    Ron @ ~39:00 — Identifies the divergent evolutionary paths from lawn games, including the gambling problem pinball would face

Entities

David DennispersonRonpersonMontague RedgravepersonD. Gottlieb & Co.personRaymond T. MoloneypersonBruce NightingalepersonRyan TannerpersonBenperson

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Comprehensive traced evolution of pinball from 17th-century French billiards through bagatelle, lawn games, and coinop era; establishes Montague Redgrave (spring-loaded plunger, 1871) and David Gottlieb (Baffle Ball, 1931) as foundational innovators

    high · Detailed episode structure covering lawn games → billiards → bagatelle → coinop with specific dates, patents, production figures

  • ?

    historical_signal: Bally Manufacturing's origins as Raymond Maloney's distributor-turned-manufacturer response to Gottlieb production constraints; represents early industry consolidation pattern

    high · Maloney founded Lion Manufacturing after difficulty sourcing Baffle Ball; renamed to Bally after Ballyhoo success; pattern mirrors modern Jersey Jack origin story

  • $

    market_signal: Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo achieved rapid adoption (50,000 units each) during Great Depression via low cost of play (penny per game) and placement in high-traffic locations (drugstores, taverns)

    high · $17.50 machine cost = 1,750 penny plays to break even; 'locations were busy and they would recover the cost of the game very quickly'

  • ?

    content_signal: Silverball Chronicles emphasizes historical depth and primary research (ThoughtCo, IPDB, Encyclopedia of Pinball citations) over casual Wikipedia summarization; community feedback requests EM history episodes

    high · David Dennis explicitly contrasts serious research with 'super easy to make a YouTube video...looking up simple Wikipedia page'; listener Ben requested history episode; Ryan Tanner email requesting EM focus

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.372

0:00
A Mochi Moment from Sadie, who writes, I'm not crying, you're crying. This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi, because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP-1. He understood, and I felt supported, not judged. I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy. Thanks, Sadie. I'm Myra Amos, founder of Mochi Health. To find your Mochi Moment, visit joinmochi.com. Sadie is a Mochi member compensated for her story. Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? Doing that perfect meditation flow. On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes, so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
1:07
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles. Got my banana. Banana. Mm-hmm. See, the key to the banana is to eat it all in one bite.
1:28
Mm-hmm. Nope. Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month is Ron, Master of the Sanctum Hallet. What's up fella?
2:12
Hello. Hello, how was your trip to the Sanctum? Does anyone know what the Sanctum is? It's a place in Connecticut. That's a lot of games in it. And I have a 24-hour tournament that I played in. You played 24 hours. Your legs must be so sore.
2:29
No, I sat a lot. And there was 100 different players playing for 24 hours. Yeah. And you finished top 10?

  • The term 'Bagatelle' was first used in 1819, though the name 'billiard japon' refers to the metal-pin version despite no Japanese origin

    high confidence · David Dennis, citing research

    • Silverball Chronicles
    podcast
    Slam Tilt Podcastpodcast
    D. Gottlieb & Co.company
    Bally Manufacturing Co.company
    Keeney and Sonscompany
    Rockola Manufacturing Co.company
    ThoughtCoorganization
    Pinsideorganization
    The Pinball Networkorganization
    The Sanctumvenue
    Baffle Ballgame
    Bally Hoogame
    Bagatellegame
    Billiard Japongame
    James Bondgame

    community_signal: Silverball Chronicles Patreon growth and audience feedback shaping content direction; multiple tiers ($3/$6/$20) generating early ad-free access and priority questions; community commentary visible on Pinside forum

    high · 12+ named Patreon members listed; Discord chat with 'Speculation Corner'; POMC/Sir Machismo comments on Pinside; listener feedback on episode length preferences (10-45 min skip thresholds)

  • ?

    content_signal: Hosts emphasize research methodology and primary source attribution (ThoughtCo awards, IPDB links, Encyclopedia of Pinball citations); show notes include direct links to historical machines and documents

    high · ThoughtCo described as 'premier reference site' with 20+ year focus on expert education content; 2018 Communicator Award and Davey Award cited; show notes include links to all discussed pin games

  • ?

    community_signal: Dense interconnection between pinball podcasts: Silverball Chronicles, Slam Tilt Podcast, This Week in Pinball (TWIP), Pinball Party; Ron co-hosts multiple shows; cross-promotion and audience sharing evident

    high · Ron on both Silverball Chronicles and Slam Tilt Podcast; TWIP Promoter database referenced; Pinball Party podcast mentioned as 'killer podcast' under 45 min; contract-based cross-mention requirements

  • ?

    community_signal: Community participation through multiple channels: email submissions, Patreon support, Pinside forum comments, shirt purchases; geographic diversity (Jackson Heights, Sacramento, Vienna Virginia, international interest)

    high · Ryan Tanner, Ben, Cohen (new to hobby from corona pandemic), Sir Machismo, POMC all engaged via different channels; t-shirt orders from multiple US states and Europe

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Ron competed in 24-hour tournament at the Sanctum (Connecticut) with 100 players; finished 31st; Bruce Nightingale (Slam Tilt co-host) also competed

    high · Ron: 'You finished top 10? No, 31st. 31st, that's still pretty good.' Bruce Nightingale performance deferred to next Slam Tilt episode

  • ?

    product_launch: Stern's James Bond pinball recently released and playable at Pinball Expo; Ron's assessment: 'way too early to say anything' but past first tier with acceptable shot layout and no major design concerns

    high · Ron at Pinball Expo: 'I played your dream theme game...There was nothing like, oh my God, what were they thinking?...It suits fine.' Described as David Dennis's 'super dream theme'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Community discourse on Bond film actor rankings and nostalgia; David Dennis enthusiastic about Bond pinball regardless of which Bond actor; Roger Moore perceived as unexpected fan favorite despite comedic reputation

    medium · David: 'Every one of them is great...Even Roger Moore...Even George Lazenby?'; Roger Moore following on Pinside thread surprising to David

    • 2:41
    No, 31st. 31st, that's still pretty good. I'll take it. It's still pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. Pretty good. And on your other podcast, the Slam Tilt Podcast with Bruce Nightingale, where did Bruce Nightingale finish? I don't know. I'd have to look that up.
    2:59
    I'm sure he'll say where he finished in our next episode. Okay. Well, you can check that out in your podcatcher. Because we've got to mention that. We've got to mention that. It's part of my contract. It is indeed. And Bruce yells at me if it doesn't get mentioned. On our last podcast, it was just about Pinball Expo time. How's that long ago? Yes, it was. It was. It was like the week before. We released like when everybody was traveling to Chicago to give them something to listen to. Ah, smart. Yes. So they all thoroughly enjoyed that. And you had a good time? Yeah, it was good. You played James Bond? I did. I played your dream theme game. What do you think? I think it's way too early to say anything about it. Okay, but the shots? It's past the first tier. It suits fine. There was nothing like, oh my God, what were they thinking? This is horrible. There was nothing like that in the game. So, it's just, have to see how it develops from here. Great. Good to hear. I'm very excited. I haven't heard anything from my distributor. Mr. Dennis here, if you don't know, if you're a new listener, Bond is like his super dream theme. Although they did the correct Bond, which would be the incorrect Bond in your view. Oh, man. They're all great. Oh, they're all great. Every one of them? Every single one of them. Every single one of them is great. Exactly. Even Roger Moore. Even George Lazenby? George Lazenby was awesome. Not so much nowadays, but he was awesome back then. He's Australian, you know. Roger Moore was like the first actual Englishman to play James Bond. When you think about it, you had a Scottish guy, an Australian guy, and finally an English guy. Good for him. Comedy Bond. Nothing wrong with a little Comedy Bond. I've been spending a little bit of time just sort of watching what's going on in that James Bond hype thread on Pinside. And the amount of people that say, like, Roger Moore is their all-time favorite James Bond, I had no idea he had such a following. I like the car he had with the anti-theft device. You break the window, it explodes. It's not that much. Good stuff. Well, last month we mentioned that we had sold out, Ron. We had joined Patreon. And since then, we've actually had quite a few people join us on Patreon. Dennis K, Jonathan K, Rodney C, Robert G, Sully D, Dan L, some fella named Trampanchki, Scott E, David S, Jsonicthekid, Tony V, Adam D, Garrison T, and Brian D. Thank you all for joining us on Patreon. As mentioned last month, you get early ad-free access to the podcast in the Patreon app and in your podcatcher of choice. So everybody got to listen to our last episode on George Gomez about a week and a half, almost two weeks early compared to the free feeds. Are they like platinum cronies? So like plonies? Yeah, we're not going to go with plonies. But the pro cronies, $3 a month. You just basically want to say thank you with no big commitment.
    6:09
    Patreon takes a cut of that, and then we get, I don't know, like two bucks. But thank you so much if you wanted to do that. What do they get at $6 a month, Ron? That's the big tier. They get a free sticker after three months. Access to our private Discord chat room. We have one of those? Yes, the Discord chat room. That's where I post in Speculation Corner, the second best rumor corner in pinball. Anything that I hear rumblings about rumors or speculation goes into Speculation Corner. Well, for $6 a month, you also have your questions take priority on the podcast. You can also vote on upcoming topics and early ad-free access to Silver Bullet Chronicles before it's posted to the general feeds. Yes, $6 a month is where you get that ad-free access. The top tier, the elitist crony, that's the top level perk. You get all of the perks from the $6 a month, and you also get a free Silver Ball Chronicles t-shirt after three months.
    7:14
    I have been in contact with a pinball artist who's going to hopefully do a shirt for us, and we may not get it in time for the first three months, but we're going to get it out there for you. And we do have some elitist cronies in our Patreon. So thank you. Thank you so much for those individuals. I had no idea anybody would actually join us at $20 a month. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Yeah, if you want to chat with us outside of the Patreon or outside of the Discord, you can make a posting on our Facebook page. We're fully active there. And remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us, in your podcatcher, on the Patreon app, or in the This Week in Pinball Promoter database. That way more people can find us and we can enlighten the unwashed masses. If you wanted to just say thank you, you can also just pick up a t-shirt over at silverballswag.com. And even though we don't get the names of the individuals who purchased shirts, we just get an order number of where the shirt went, we want to say thank you to the individual in Jackson Heights, the individual in Sacramento, and the person in Vienna, all the way over there in Italy.
    8:32
    Really? No, it's Virginia. Oh. It's Vienna, Virginia. That would have been cool. But thank you so much to a few of the individuals that also sent us some emails. Tanner, he sent us an email to silverballchronicles at gmail.com, and he wanted to ask about doing an EM episode specifically, and Ron, we get a lot of emails asking for an EM episode. I guess we'll have to do that for them, right? I mean, they're the only affordable games left in existence at this point. Yeah, and even at that point, they're still ridiculously overpriced. But you can check out Tanner over on thepinballscientist.com. He is a bit of a genius when it comes to EM scorekeepers. So it's actually a micro-LED display that you can stick on the apron of your EM machine, and it keeps track of all that cool stuff. You can actually use the flipper buttons to enter your high score. So go ahead and check that out. That's some pretty cool tech, especially on an EM. And he's as good with names as we are. Mm-hmm. Because I'm Rob. I didn't know I was Rob. Hi, Rob and Davis. So you can call me Rob for the rest of the podcast now.
    9:55
    There you go. We also have a couple of new comments over on the TWIP Promoters database. Check these out, Ron. Oh, you're going to give me this one? I'm going to give you this name.
    10:07
    What's K-O-E-N? Cohen Lowiert? Lowart? It's got a W. Okay. Lowiert. I'm assuming you're from Europe, Cohen. Good old KL, I'll call Good old KL, oh my god On the Twit Promoter database says Because I'm quite new in this fascinating hobby Fell in love with pinball in the first part of the corona pandemic I have much to learn about the history and the important people who made pinball to what it is today Ron and Dave, love your podcast Thank you for all your time and effort Thank you so much We've also got Mr. I'm sorry, Sir Machismo over on Pinside that says, I like their podcast so much, I actually bought one of their T-shirts. Size large. Not a bad shirt. True, fit, and very soft.
    11:00
    Ooh, there you go. Everybody's favorite critic, POMC over on Pinside. Yeah, he says, heads up, ten minutes to skip at the beginning of Silver Balls. Seriously. Perfect. There you go. We better time this right to make sure it's exactly 10 minutes of fluff at the beginning before we get to our subject. Exactly. Last episode we went long because we went with that Patreon BS for everybody. Oh. So let's get into the topic here. We've rambled on too much. We don't want to make POMC upset over on Pinside that he had to use the skip forward button on his app. But we had the other listener. I think they said if it was, what, any more than 45 minutes, it's just a no-go for them. It's a no-go for them. They made sure they let us know that. Yeah. Check out Pinball Party. That guy's under like an hour, under 45. There you go. That is a killer podcast. It's just a little bite-sized little nugget. Is that also on TPN? It is. You've listened to it. I have listened to it. Very good show. I thoroughly enjoy it. It would be better if I had been on it, but that's how it goes sometimes. It's almost as good a slam-tilt podcast. with Bruce St. Gale and Ron Allen. This is a little bit of a different topic this month, Ron. With all of these requests for an EM episode or a deep ancient history of pinball, I decided to mix it up a little bit with what I call a brief history of pinball. And this is a great place to begin when it comes to where pinball came from. So we're going to wind the clock back way back with, like, who is the dog and the kid?
    12:43
    What was that, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? Yeah, that was from, it's the same one that Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. They were some of the friends. They were the friends. Yeah, it's like, didn't the kid have glasses on and the dog, and they went to the time machine and all that? Boomers are shouting at the screen right now, you idiots, how do you not know what they said? Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
    13:07
    Sorry, anybody who just crashed their car. So we're going to jump in a time machine just like Mr. Peabody and Sherman. We're going to go all the way back to the beginning of where pinball came from. And we've picked out some very specific bits and pieces of what makes pinball pinball today. What was the first machine it was on? Who was the inventor, if we know that? and any first-hand knowledge that we can get from those individuals. And why it's called pinball. Which could be kind of confusing. I mean, I don't see any pins. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Any sense. This is outrageous. This episode really came from an article that a listener named Ben emailed in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com called The History of Pinball. I've included it in our show notes. And then what I took is I took that, read the article, and then I sort of said, okay, let's beef it up and expand it out, and then I did some searching and looking around. Very, very important one. I didn't just look up the Wikipedia page like some people do when it comes to history. It's super easy to make a YouTube video with a bunch of flashy stuff or some sort of article by looking up the simple Wikipedia page and click it on some links and copy and paste it. So I actually did some particularly serious research this month, and I want to talk about ThoughtCo, who is the premier reference site with over 20 years focused on expert-created education content. That's the original article that this was based on. They are proud to be one of the top 10 information sites as measured by Comscore, whoever the heck that is, a leading internet measurement company. I thought you were just going to say you went to the library and everything. I use those microfilms, like a 1980s James Bond movie. Yep, microfilm. In 2018, ThoughtCo received a communicator award in general education category and a Davey award in the education category. So that's kind of where it all started. In the beginning, Ron, there were lawn games. Do you know what I mean by lawn games? I do, and I want to see if you can pronounce this one word. What one word? The one I'm looking at right now. Continue, continue. Lawn games are games played outdoors with rolling balls or stones on grass courses, such as bocce or bowls, that eventually evolved into various local ground billiard games played by hitting balls with sticks and propelling them through targets. This is often seen as a way to avoid obstacles and go around obstacles and through gates. A very popular and modern version of a lawn game would be croquet. That, of course, is an early variation on golf. Pall mall eventually derived into ground billiards variants. You said bocce. I did. I am surprised you got it right. As an Italian, I have to make sure that's said correctly. Yes. And a bocce and the balls. So like lawn bowling, right? That's like a lawn game. So fancy like rich folk back in the day in the 1700s, the 1600s, they would play lawn games. You'd come over. You'd be all dressed up. Your servants would come give you tea, and you'd be playing croquet, or you'd be playing lawn bowling. or there would be lawn bowling clubs that you would have. And that was like the big thing. That is really where pinball originated from. Not only that, other modern games kind of were derived from these lawn games, golf being probably one of the most obvious ones. The evolution of outdoor games finally led to indoor versions of that because, Ron, it rains outside sometimes. Yeah, it does. Is it raining there right now? Not right now. It was yesterday. You've got to play those indoor games on a table, sometimes on the floor of a pub. And then, quickly, tabletop variations of these games became the ancestors of modern pinball. Some French soldiers actually carried some of their favorite tables with them to America while helping fight the British in the American Revolutionary War. So it was like a big briefcase, right? You kind of folded it, and you would carry this game, which is a variation on a lawn game, and that's how it was more or less imported from Europe into North America and became so popular in America, even Abraham Lincoln was featured playing in a political cartoon. I did get that one from Wikipedia, actually. after it developed into bar billiards with influences from the French and Belgium game billiards or Russian billiards. So let's take a look here, Ron. What do you see? So I've got a picture of a billiards and what do you see here? Like when you first look at this, what do you see? I see a really long play field. Yeah. With a queue. It's like a pool table kind of. It's like a pool table, but the dimensions are more what I would say are like a play field. Yeah, like pinball-y play field. Yeah, even the top has an arch. So it's pretty neat. It's got a set of balls on the left. It's got like a balk line or a foul line. It's got the billiard cue. And then there's like numbers on the other side that you would shoot the ball into. So you can see that we're kind of coming together here. It's not a pool table like really big, right? Like pool tables were fairly large. But this was kind of the beginning of that. In France, during the long 1643 to 1715 reign of Louis XIV, billiard tables were narrowed with wooden pins or skittles at one end of the table. The player would shoot the balls with a stick or a cue from the other end in a game which very much would inspire bowling billiards. So when we talk about the pins and the play field, so the most important thing of pinball, right, the creation of that. Well, the pins took too long to reset when knocked down. So you've got this play field, basically. You kind of put the pins up, these little bricks or whatever. You knock them down. You've got to pick them up. You've got to put them down. And then if you're drinking, you know, you're putting them up like dominoes, and you knock it over. Terrible. So they came up with the idea to eventually fix the pins in the table. The holes in the table became the target. players could ricochet balls off the pins to achieve more challenging, scorable holes. So now with fixed pins, you can do, like, bank shots. How does that sound? Sounds like pool. Bank shot. Well, then there was this thing called bagatelle. You're familiar with bagatelle, everybody? This is where everybody's like, oh, I know bagatelle, right? Well, do you really know bagatelle, or do you just kind of know the name and kind of the general understanding of it? What do you think, Ron? Well, I think Bagatelle is a billiards-derived indoor table game, the object of which is to get a number of balls past wooden pins, which act as obstacles into holes that are guarded by wooden pegs. Penalties are incurred if the pegs are knocked over. There's your pins. So here we go. We're starting to see it come together, right? Well, the name Bagatelle was first used to describe the game in 1819. So when most people think of Bagatelle, Ron, they think of the variation using the metal pins. So when people say, oh, Bagatelle, they think of the square wooden machine with the arch at the top that has metal pins that look like nails. Now, that's actually called billiard japon, which is Japanese billiards. even though it was invented in Western Europe and had nothing to do with the Japanese. This would eventually lead to the development of pachinko and pinball.
    21:50
    You're a big pachinko collector? Not at all. So what's pachinko? What is pachinko? Is that a game on The Price is Right? so it's like the Japanese vertical pin dropping game that's kind of like the game on the Price is Right it's kind of like that that's got a whole weird collector community and I'm sure there's some listening to this podcast but it gets weird just like all sort of anime Japanese-y culture things it's a bit off the wall but there's some pretty cool little bits and pieces with that. Well who sort of gave birth to pinball as we know it. Montague Redgrave. Yes, Montague. That's a very fancy name.
    22:41
    The father of our hobby. Exactly. He was born in Lambeth, Surrey, which is in England, and he emigrated to New Jersey, where he worked as a grocery manufacturer. Wow, New Jersey. So not only was baseball invented there, but it's said that it was invented Cooperstown, which it wasn't. Now, pinball. Yeah. New Jersey is the key here. So they got baseball, they got pinball, they got not showering. They've got everything in New Jersey. Wow. Yeah, he said that, not me.
    23:13
    In 1871, Montague Patton, the first game that resembles modern pinball, calling it Improvements in Bagatelles, where his design introduced the spring-loaded plunger for washing the pinball. There it was. That is the pinnacle improvement right there. A spring-loaded plunger. So no longer do you have to pick the ball up and put it behind the line and shoot it up with a cue. You take it, you put it in the shooter lane, you pull the little plunger, and boop, there goes the ball up to the top of the bag of towel. But as usual, there's some discussion whether he was actually the one to come up with this, but he's the one who patented him. So Whoever patents it, patents it, is the one who came up with it. Now, the game also shrank in size to fit on a bar counter. The balls became marbles instead of billiard-sized balls, and the sticks became these metal pins. So the vision of bagatelle that most people have of the little plunger and the dark wood machine with the pins in the ground and the holes is Montague Redgrave's variation on bagatelles.
    24:31
    Redgrave popularized this new bagatelle design, and he had them manufactured in Cincinnati, Ohio, the capital of pinball. So it's not a Jersey. Cincinnati, Ohio. Yes. He died in 1934 in Montclair, New Jersey. Or I guess it's American, so it's Montclair, probably.
    24:55
    Now we're getting into some different stuff here. Now the funnel has gone from very wide. It's now coming down into more what we know today of pinball. The first pinball games were one balls. In the 1930s, pin games gained attention when the coin op mechanic was invented. The original games used mechanics to change coins into ball play, which unlocked a whole world of possibilities. It's the coin door. Basically, the coin door was created, or the variation of what would be the coin door. The coin mech, basically. Yeah, you put your money in, and it allocates the balls automatically. There's no more changing of things. You know, you've got to give the guy some money, and he's got some balls, or he's got to watch you so you're not sneaking balls.
    25:45
    One balls allowed for multiple coin play. It also meant that the player had one ball to achieve their goal, and the object was to win more replays in return. Now, there were two original models that were created of this first pin game with a coin mech in it. The replay version, which contained a three-digit replay counter, and the payout version, which paid the player in nickels directly upon winning. And the whole payout thing will come to hurt pinball in the future. Yeah, that sounds like gambling. It does. You know, you've got lawn games and lawn games kind of split off into billiards and bagatelle and pinball. And then it kind of splits off into gambling devices and, you know, what would eventually become video lottery terminals. You know what I mean? So, again, that funnel was really wide. It's now come down and you can see that it's other things are spinning off of it over, you know, this three, four hundred year period. Well, it was Baffle Ball that was a serious watershed moment. Baffle Ball was invented in November 1931 by D. Gottlieb and Company. It was designed by a gentleman named David Gottlieb. Of course, the artist is unknown. It sold 50,000 units. Yeah, people think, like, Adam's family with all their units. There's nothing compared to what these things sold. 50,000 units. That's like 80s arcade game sales. In 1931, David Gottlieb's baffle ball became the first hit of the coin-operated era. It sold for $17.50. The game dispensed five to seven balls for a penny. And the important thing to remember is the time period. What's going on in 1931? The worst time in North America and the world. The Great Depression. People don't have money. They need cheap forms of entertainment. And a penny is pretty cheap. A penny is pretty cheap. And $17.50. Now, today, you're like, oh, $17.50 is like nothing because of inflation, which we've all become very aware of over the last 24 months. That today, with an inflation calculator from 1931 to 2022, is only $330. So it's still be cheap. It's still cheap. So I have included a link in the show notes to all of the pin games we're going to talk about. Battle Ball is in there. What are we looking at here, Ron? It's a tabletop. It's got the plunger. When you look at it, you see all the pins. Look at those pins. But it's like, it looks a little bit like a field almost, right? Like almost like a baseball field. It looks like a baseball field. You know, it's green. It's got baffle ball. It's got a diamond on it, five balls for a penny. It's got these four, like, little holes to fall into. They're like gobble holes, but they've got metal flaps on them. It's not very large, though, is it? What is this, like the size of a, you know, 24-inch computer monitor or something? Like, it's not very big. It is not big. But it's pretty. Right? It's cool. It looks neat. It's very fancy. Now, have you seen a baffle ball before at any of these shows? Yes. What's it like in person? Is it kind of impressive? Well, it's usually in the pre-war section, so there'll be lots of games that look a lot like it. Cool. Some of the pictures here, some restored ones on IPDB, are just beautiful. It's just beautiful, right? It's real wood that's lacquered. Beautiful design. It's got that coin mech on the front. So the best way to describe the coin mech on this thing It's kind of like, you know, a washing machine back in the day where you'd put the coin in and you'd, like, shove it in. And then you'd get, you know, a credit. Do they not use that anymore? I mean, I don't know. It's been a long time since I've used it. Yeah, that's why I think of a laundromat. You put the coin in and you just push the thing in. You shove the thing in and it goes, and then your laundry is clean. It's very cool. It starts up. But there's that plunger, right, on the right side. It's got the shooter lane that goes up to the arch. So your kind of object here is to gauge how far you pull the plunger to bounce off the pins and then into these, like, guarded circles that are guarded by the pins. Take a look at the picture. It's hard to describe, but it's kind of beautiful. It's kind of neat. Now, the game resonated with people because they wanted this cheap entertainment, as you mentioned, in the Great Depression. And drugstores particularly, and, of course, taverns in the U.S., would operate these machines because the locations were busy and they would recover the cost of the game very quickly. Baffle Ball was also manufactured by Keeney & Sons in a separate Chicago facility under the direction of David Gottlieb because they couldn keep up with production They needed much more manufacturing might This is the best part The flyer There a flyer There's an ad. There's an original flyer from the 1930s NIPDB. Can you read this in your old-timey voice? Rap of all, the greatest value ever offered. Absolutely the finest pinboard game made. No bugs in this game. Were bugs in the game an issue back then? I don't know. Oh, like literally Bugs? Yeah, I wonder if that means that these games had issues. They're just saying, like, this game has no issues. Oh, okay, okay. Also made for a five-set play.
    31:38
    Vitas at the Big Show Hotel Sherman booth, 45 and 47, which was where it was unveiled. Elliot and that's in his untouchables. No, I'm sorry. It looks like, okay, this ad is actually for a distributor, the distributor itself. They're saying they also sell Baffle Ball, Bingo Ball, Buster Ball, and Planet Ball. This is great. I love this one, too. I love Planet Ball. I wonder, do they look like planets? The aces in pinball games. Rockola Manufacturing Co. Rockola Manufacturing. They're aces. That was the term right back then, eh? It's very cool. I really love it. Now, Baffle Ball came in sort of a couple of variations. One would be the one you'd put on the bar, right? You'd set it on your own table for $17.50, but you could buy one for $37.50. The fancy model that has its own legs, and it had intricate details on the sides. Very, very nice. They called that the senior version. I like how it says, Nuff Said. Yeah. I would think of that as a more contemporary expression, but no, this is from like the 30s. Nuff Said. It's some really, really neat history stuff here. This is from March 19, 1932. It's got the breakdown of what it is. This would be the show flyer. Wonderful, wonderful machine. So $1,750, how many pennies is that? It's $1,750. So you'd have to get 1,750 plays for this to pay itself back. I might up it to the old five-cent model. The old five-cent. You want to go with the five balls. Yeah. I'd put a topper on it and make it five cents. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but at that time, the topper would be, what, like $7? Because it's got to be half the price of an actual pin. Well, Gottlieb was not the only ones doing this. What came next? Ballyhoo. Oh, okay. So this is the one people know about, Ballyhoo. January of 1932, this is the Bally Manufacturing Corporation. Well, they weren't called that yet. They weren't called that yet. They were designed by Raymond T. Maloney, and it also sold 50,000 units. Link is in the show notes. When we look at the play field on this one, what stands out? It looks a lot like the other one, but bigger. Bigger and fancier colors. Like it's got a lot more, it's like a lot more attention grabbing. Yeah, they got the art going where it's like, you know, we could make a little fancier art. It might sell better. It actually says Ballyhoo on it in their play field. It's multicolored. It's beautiful. The wood looks nice. Yeah, it's really well done. So the Gottlieb distributor, Raymond Maloney, found it difficult to obtain more baffle ball units to sell. It was so difficult to buy baffle ball because they were selling so quickly that in his frustration, Raymond founded Lion Manufacturing and produced his own game design, Ballyhoo. named after the popular magazine. Very Jersey Jack-esque there. Mm-hmm. The distributor wants to form their own company, so he did that. This game became an even bigger smash hit. Its larger play field and ten pockets instead of four made it more challenging than Battle Ball. In seven months, it sold those 50,000 units. Maloney eventually changed the name of Lion Manufacturing to Bally to reflect the success of this game. According to the Encyclopedia of Pinball, volume 1, page 29, total production was approximately 50,000 units. In the January 1953 issue of Ballyhoo, the monthly newsletter from Bally, it states 50,000 were sold. So it's not like the 1990s of pinball where they had to, like, report how many units they sold to stockholders. This is kind of what they said they sold. So maybe they did, maybe they didn't. The same thing goes, I guess, for baffle ball. Check out this advertisement, Ron. Uh-oh. You need the magnifying glass. I can't. There's no magnifying glass on this one. Valley who never successfully imitated. So if you wanted to buy lots of five, so if you wanted to buy five Ballyhoos, they were $18 each. If you wanted to buy 10, they were $17. But if you just wanted one, as what they call a sample, it was $19. Comes complete with wood legs. And they're like the fancy spindle wood legs. Those look like staircase legs from the 1930s. Very fancy stuff. Ready for immediate delivery. It's the game sensation of 1932. A smashy success. You can get a seven-day free trial. You want to try it out, stick it in your bar, see how it goes? Put it in your pharmacy? Valley Manufacturing Company. I always wonder, it's got the address, I always wonder what's there now in some of these places. You want to just go and look and it's like still a pharmacy? Imagine. You've seen a Ballyhoo. This one seems to be the most popular one that you see. If you're going to see like the original sort of pinball machines, for some reason, Ballyhoo was always the one you tend to see in the pre-war sections of shows. Because they made a lot of them. A lot of them. So your people are finding these like in old storage units and barns and they're just everywhere. But these were all no electrification. You just sort of put the ball in the thing and you pull it and it pops up. Right. You push the coin mech in, all the balls fall down into the chute and into the lane eventually. Like there's no electrification in here. There's no solenoids. There's no real moving pieces that move unless you're physically hitting them or pushing them. Isn't that right? Mm-hmm. But that brings us to 1933 with Contact. Pacific Manufacturing Company, or PAMCO, designed by Harry Williams. the Harry Williams. We brought up Harry Williams in our Stern Electronics episode. We brought up Harry Williams in our Williams episodes. Right? Harry Williams is the Williams of Williams and he is the man. He's the king of pinball. Over at Patreon.com slash Silverball Chronicles I asked our Patreons who is on their Mount Rushmore of pinball. and everybody said Harry Williams. Scott E. said Harry Williams, Gary Stern, George Gomez, David Gottlieb. That is a heck of a Mount Rushmore. Robert G. said Harry Williams, Gary Stern, Roger Sharp, and George Gomez. So we had some engagement, some conversation there around that. They all said Harry Williams, myself included. Why was Harry Williams such a big deal, Ron? Not only was he a designer, he started his own company. Yeah, he started multiple companies. He was an inventor. He was a creative guy. He was doing things left and right. And he was designing games from the 30s into the 80s. Into the 80s! I know people think people have long careers, but that's... Good Lord. 50 years? That's a long time. Contact was his first game design. Now, we're going to do a whole Harry Williams episode. We'll talk about that later on. But contrary to popular belief, Contact was not actually the first game to use electricity. According to Dick Bushell, his notes in Pinball 1, a book on the history of pinball, there were some games and bagatelles in the early 1900s with electricity that rang bells and flashlights and kicked balls around in all directions, although I specifically could not find any information or any credible sources about those pins. But what I could find is that Contact was the first, or is generally perceived to be the first, modern-style pin game with electricity. It sold 28,000 to 33,000 units. Contact was an enormous success and prompted many copycat versions by other manufacturers. You're going to find that a lot. There was a lot of manufacturers in this era that would try to make the games that, I mean, they would just copy the games that were out there. Yeah, they'd change something just very slightly. Its success transformed Harry Williams into a major player in the industry. So in an interview with pinball historian Russ Jensen from April 7, 1982, Two, Harry Williams estimated the production of the four cabinet models. So there's the senior that would, you know, have the legs. There was the junior that sat on the counters. You know, there were a couple of, there were four major variations sold between $28,000 to $33,000. Now, the next two innovations were added after the first 100 units were built. The first one is the tilt. And Harry Williams says, I was testing the machine. I had a gate on this machine. This is the first machine that moved the ball. There was a little mechanical gate that a ball fell in front of the gate. And then by putting the ball through a hole at the top of the machine, it would raise this gate, allow this ball to roll down into a highest scoring area. And it could accept all ten balls, which was getting three or four or 5,000 points. Then I put it on location to test that in a drugstore. But I saw these fellows lifting the machine and hitting it underneath to make the gate bounce up because it was mechanical and it was on a counterbalance. then they could get the balls to go in without any skill. So I said, what the hell? They're cheating. So I went back, took the game off location, and I put nails all through the bottom of the machine, little fine nails, so when the guy hit underneath the table, he wouldn't do it a second time. Now there's something you can't do anymore.
    42:03
    They're banging the machine. I'm going to put sharp nails underneath so they learn they won't do that. You know, that's why the plungers that have the little pointy tip at the end, that's what that was for, to prevent people from slamming into it. You can't do that kind of stuff anymore. I mean, come on. People nowadays are such snowflakes. Back in the day, we used to put fine, dangerous nails and razor blades on something so you wouldn't hit it. Nowadays, the nanny state won't let you do that. Yeah. So after you put the nails in, then I thought, that's a very unsophisticated way. That's some emergency treatment. I've got to think of a way to stop them from doing that. That's when I made this little tilt, the one with the little pedestal and a ring and a little ball that if they shook the machine, it fell off the little pedestal down on the ring. And it was tilted. However, I called it a stool pigeon.
    43:01
    So when I put the machine and took it back to the same location, and one of the fellows that was a regular player of the machines says, oh, look, I hit it, and now I tilt it. I thought, my God, that's a more sophisticated name instead of stool pigeon. So I immediately went back and had the castings changed to tilt. So that's where the name tilt became associated with our games. That's how the tilt was invented. So some dude called it tilt. Some random guy that got, like, where's his money? This quote has come from these old Roger Sharp tapes, which I have been able to get a hold of from Josh Sharp. These were all used with creating Pinball, Roger Sharp's book. So he sat down with Harry Williams in a coffee shop and recorded for a very, very long time asking him various questions. And you get to listen to the voice of the Harry Williams. Which threw me because he is a West Coast, generally known as a West Coast guy. That's where he was. But he could not have been from the West Coast originally because he had a very distinctive New York, northeast accent. Very, very neat. So these old recordings are phenomenal. Some of the issues, though, especially with the Harry Williams one, is they're in like a diner. Yeah, and you can hear a lot of background noise. During a very busy time. So I had to put this like into AI software, and the AI software has extrapolated the words and who's talking. and then that has taken some actual cleanup to create a transcript. It's been kind of annoying, but I am working on the transcript of this. So we'll probably, I don't know if I'll put that up on the Patreon somewhere, or I'll give it back to Josh and do what you must. But it'll certainly help a person as they follow along listening to the Harry Williams interview. And it is, Ron, from somebody who's like me, I have a history undergraduate. it, hearing the actual individual telling the story of how the tilt was made was like, it was like I was looking into some sort of time machine window. It was amazing. I know that's very nerdy. Yeah, and the other part, there's parts of the conversation where he's drawing stuff for Roger, like, let me show you what this looked like, and you can't see it, obviously. Yeah, because you can hear him drawing on the table. You can hear the people on the table next door ordering coffee or getting sandwiches. It's hilarious.
    45:31
    But this brings us to the second innovation which was added to contact, about 100 units into the run. Harry Williams would say, the phone was ringing off the wall. We had a contact to show operators while they were waiting to pick up their machines that they could play in the showroom.
    45:50
    Jack McCullen's desk was right there because the phone was constantly ringing off the hook. Who's Jack? Jack was the business partner for Harry Williams that helped him create and manufacture Contact. He was part of Pacific Manufacturing Company. Again, West Coast. So Harry Williams said, I had a good joke. I got a hold of a doorbell, and I put it in one night. So every time the ball fell into the Contact hole, not only would it jump the ball, but it would also ring the bell. So Jack kept hearing the bell go off over and over. So he'd keep going to the phone, thinking it was the phone ringing. and it got to the point where he said he's going to call the phone company to find out why the phone keeps ringing for no reason. But several operators were there in the showroom standing around, and they gave it away that it was the machine that had the bell. And one of the operators said, I've got a spot that can take two contacts. Let me try this one with the bell alongside the one without it. So we did because I thought maybe it was a playing feature. We put them side by side, two identical machines, one with the bell, one without the bell. The one without the bell took in half the money the one with the bell took in. Needless to say, we had to order doorbells. And that's when Jack got angry. He said, geez, we can't raise the price. Now we've got to go out today and buy 27-cent doorbells. But it did increase the play on the machine. Harry Williams accidentally added the bell to the machine, and it increased the amount of earnings because people wanted to shoot it in the contact hole, and here are the bell. So the bell created more place. But, of course, his business partner, Jack McCauley, was very angry because it added to the overhead or build of materials of the pin.
    47:38
    27 cents, Ron. Yeah, it's going to bankrupt him. Well, 27 cents multiplied by 50,000 units, or actually, was it 28 to 33,000 units? Yeah. Now we're getting into trouble. Yeah, that's kind of putting him right out of business there. So let's talk a little bit about Harry Williams. I'm just going to give like a brief review here. Mr. Williams really started in the coin-op industry in 1932 as an operator of a game called... It's either JLI or Hi-LI. And it promised earnings of $2 an hour. After struggling to make money, he designed his own game called Advance in 1933. This was the start of Automatic Amusement Company in Los Angeles, California. During the Second World War, all major manufacturers of coin-operated machines, they turned their focus to wartime manufacturing. So in a period of less than a decade, Harry Williams actually founded three game producers in the West Coast. So another legend in the industry is Wayne Niance. and he always had wonderful things to say about Harry Williams. He says, Harry was a great idea man. He had ideas, ideas coming out of his mind all the time. He didn't like to turn the crank. He didn't like to draw the circuit up, and he didn't like to wire the game up. Those kind of things were below him. He had another idea that he wanted to work on. That's what made him so good. He had so many ideas going all the time. That's why he was a great designer. Harry Williams was an ideas guy. wasn't really a doer. Right? So the reason he's coming up with all these manufacturers, he's trying to improve this, he's coming up with the tilt, he's creating the bell, he's doing all these things, he's just off in all directions all the time coming up with ideas, he's innovating. We spoke a little bit about that in our Stern Electronics episode, didn't we, Ron, where he didn't want to own or run companies, he didn't want to deal with accounting, he just wanted to create and innovate and have fun. Well, Harry would pass away on September 11th, 1983 in his home in Palm Springs, California, where he succumbed to cancer at age 77. We'll do a whole episode on Harry Williams later on down the road once I get through the editing of that transcript. There's a lot of phenomenal firsthand accounting of what Harry Williams was doing on the West Coast when he came to Chicago, what he was doing, who he was working with. It was fantastic. but I don't want to get this episode to go too long because it's a brief history of pinball. It's a shame he couldn't have made it another few years. He could have made it to the first expo. That would have been nice. It would have been amazing for him to see that. The next major innovation in pinball with the onset of electrification, which created the tilt and the bell, was... Well, not the tilt. I don't think the tilt is actually electric. Because the ball would just be sitting on a thing and you shake it and the ball falls off and hits a ring. It was Skyscraper in 1934, a Bally Manufacturing Corporation pin. This is designed by Edward J. Woefeld. Art by Roy Parker, who is a name that will come up. It sells 6,500 units. So we're not talking like crazy innovation of all time, Ballyhoo stuff here. But this is the first pinball machine that is credited to have lights. Now, until this point, they actually didn't have lights on the playfield. Yeah, it didn't actually have lights. Now, you'd have to have a light to see what you were doing, but it didn't have something that turned on a light bulb. Because there was such a race on the innovation in the coin-op world in this pre-war time, there's really a difficult time to, you know, we have a very difficult time to really definitively say this is the first machine. Now, it's objectively the first machine. God knows somebody in their garage created something with 25 units or 100 units. But this, you know, we're trying to tie a bow. It's similar to the thing we've said on the show before, where in the 90s there'll be some innovative thing on a game, but it turns out it was used in some EM in the 40s or something. This is similar in that it looks like this is the first game that had it, but there might have been some other manufacturer you've never heard of before who did a one-off that had this feature before. Yeah, and this is the general understanding of the pinball machine that has the lights in the play field that we can point to that people have referenced in other popular media. Some people talk about Flashball by Great States Manufacturing Company, for example. But we're going to go with this one because, quite frankly, Ron, And you and I are the definitive experts of pinball history because we have two microphones and Google. Okay. What do you think of this play field? This is skyscraper. It has an actual skyscraper on it. It has a building in the middle of the play field. And then the art on the play field are the buildings in the background. And then there's the capture holes and the pins in the play field.
    52:57
    It's very, very cool. Yeah. So the object of this, just like all the other sort of pin games at the time, is to use the plunger, shoot it up to the top into the rounded arch, and then it'll fall down Pachinko style from the Price is Right into a hole or into a capture spot. If you land in one spot, you get 200 points. If you land in another, you get 1,000. You land down here, you get a free point. In 1934, we're already starting to get – we have lights.
    53:25
    We have – we're looking at the picture right now. we have a ball feeder that's below the actual um the plunger which captures the ball and pushes it in pushes it up to the shooter lane so you can actually shoot the ball and we have a tilt we can see the little tilt mechanism which is really just a ball that sits on a it's just like on a i don't know what you would call it podium or thing like a curved thing so if you shake it it falls off so yeah you could tell it tilts when you start a new game it would generally when you push the coin mech in, it would recenter the ball in the tilt location, so it's now not tilted anymore. The center of this, the lights in the building, is almost like a bonus, right? It keeps track of how many points you have by the holes you've fallen into, so it lights up in the middle. So, you know, you land on 100 points, the 100 lights up. If you land on, you know, two 100s, it'll light the 200, but if you land on two 100s and a 200, it'll go to the 400, and that will light up. And it's like you're going up an elevator in a skyscraper. Remember about a lot of these games, you had to have some math skills. Because you would hit them in the pockets and you would have to add them up after your game was over to know how much you had. Because they had no back box with a scoring display on it. Yeah, so we'll talk about scoring displays in a couple of minutes. We'll just leave that tease on the table. Before we have a scoring mechanism, we're going to need a back box.
    54:53
    And the reason I include the first pinball with a back box is because, quite frankly, the back box of a pinball machine is pretty iconic. You can't have a pinball machine without a back box. Yeah, pretty much. I'm trying to think of anyone who tried that or did that off the top of my head. Other than a home brewer, too, that I've seen without a back box. Yeah, can't have it without a back box. People even get angry when the back box is too crazy.
    55:23
    It's too different. Oh, my God, the sides of the back box have a design on them. That's crazy talk. What are you doing?
    55:29
    It's supposed to be square. Well, the first pinball with a back box was World Series from 1934. This was by Rockola Manufacturing Corporation, because there was a million different manufacturers at the time. There was no credits for design or art or how many units sold. Well, to be fair, Rockola would kind of make their name in jukeboxes. Oh, yeah, but they were a big deal. Rockola was a big deal. The back box, though, it didn't have any lights. It didn't have scoring reels. It didn't have anything. It was only designed to be advertising space, which is actually pretty smart. So you got this machine. It's up against a wall. It's on the legs.
    56:09
    Well, you can't really put a shelf above it. You can't really put anything around it, you know, vertically on top of it, because that's going to cover the play field. So you stick this thing on there. and you can put advertising on it. And then you can sell the advertising to people. Because there's a bunch of kids there all the time playing this game, or 20-somethings, and they're going to be looking at your ad. That is brilliant, if you ask me. It was a baseball game, as you can tell by the name, World Series. But the problem with putting a back box on the back, Ron, is lighting. Well, the first pin game with a lighted back box is Rock Light, 1935 by Bally Manufacturing Corporation. I couldn't find any design, credit, any art, any units sold. But this is the first pin game with a lighted back box. Rock-a-lite. But it had these score lights on the back. So sort of like on the play field with the Skyscraper game, you'd fall in the holes that would light up the circles in the back of Rock-A-Lite. It had the points that would light up in the back, but it's very small. It's not big, right? It's tiny. Yeah, it's like, what is that, six inches, eight inches? It's not very high. It's cool, though. The game kind of looks like crap. Hey, what does the ad say? The ad will tell us how great it is. Hold on, let me zoom in here. So we're looking at a – actually, this one has several games. This is from the billboard from March 30th, 1935. It's advertising for traffic. Here's a good example. You have this game on the left, Traffic. It's by Harry Williams. It has no back box, nothing on the back. Then you look at Rock-A-Lite, and it just looks different. I mean, like, whoa, what's that thing in the back? The other thing doesn't have that. This one must be better. I like it. It's got anti-tilt. It says, light up, anti-tilt. Without going near the machine. You tilted it. The tilter. Look at this little cartoon over here. It's like a cartoon of a guy in a bar who's playing the game, and the bartender has a word bubble that says, you tilted it. The tilter is lit. Because then, like I said, it just had the ball that would fall off the podium. He wouldn't be able to see it unless you're actually looking at it. This had a light that told you, tilt. So your game is null and void. This is the only game on the market which permits Merchant to check the score and anti-tilt just by glancing up from his duties behind the counter. Light up anti-tilt on the backboard is visible clear across the store, saves the Merchant time and trouble, and increases your net profit by absolutely eliminating payouts on tilted machines. And you'll be tickled stiff with this. Wow. Oh, whoa. And you'll be tickled stiff by the way Rock-A-Lite takes your money. Order this great light-up sensation from your jobber today. Jobber? Like wrestling terminology for some reason. Light-up sensation from your jobber today, bro. Yeah, it's absolutely stunning. I like how they call it anti-tilt, and they call it backboard. No backbox, it's a backboard. Wait a minute, I have to read both stuff now? You have to read more stuff, Suey. I want a raise. Join us on Patreon to support the show. Our pro-crony level is the perfect way to say thanks, and it starts at $3 a month. Want to get early access to episodes before everyone else? Who doesn't? Have a strange love for stickers? That's kind of weird. Do you know what Discord is? I think I do. No, probably not. Interested in having your comments and questions take priority in our episodes? jump on up to the $6 a month premium crony level. Really, you're going to call it crony. Want all the other perks and the shirt after three months? Join us at $20 a month, and you can be an elitist crony. Oh, my. This is $39.50. Yeah, that's how much one of these machines costs. And remember, what was it? Was it $17.50 for the Ballyhoo? And it's just two years later?
    60:30
    Or is it three years later? It's not that much later, and we're already inflation. These games are getting more expensive. Now we're up to $837. Wow.
    60:42
    $837 the cost for this. It's almost $1,000 now. This is some serious stuff all of a sudden here, right? There's some money to be had by manufacturing all these, which is probably why there's a million of these manufacturers at this time. What was the next huge leap forward now, Ron? So we're in 1935. Let's see. We got pins on the play field. We got these spring-loaded plunger.
    61:09
    That's a big one. We have lights. We have a back box called a backboard, at least by them. What are we missing?
    61:18
    What's going to make it really pinball? What do we need to make it actually pinball? We got tilts, but that's not coming in. You know, some way to actually hit the ball. Yeah, somehow if we could flip the ball.
    61:33
    Flippers. Oh, geez, it was right there, right on my notes in front of us. How did I not see that? The Flippers. And this one seems to be universally agreed that this is the first game. I've never heard anyone say, no, there was something before that. Well, there was the Jones & Co. It sold 220 units in Britain in 1932. No there generally no him and a hon over this one This is Gottlieb Humpty Dumpty introduced in 1947 It is the first game to have player flippers to keep the ball in play The low-power flippers required three pairs around the playfield to keep the ball moving and get it up to the top of the playfield. But why are we going from 1935, where there was, like, you know, a lot of innovation in the early mid-30s, now we're into, like, 47, which is almost like 19, which we're almost in the 1950s.
    62:40
    What happened? Oh, right, Germany took that vacation in Europe. Yeah. So everybody was busy doing something else.
    62:49
    Yeah, in the 40s. In the early 40s, yes. all the innovation sort of went into the war effort as opposed to amusement games. All the manufacturers, like I mentioned kind of in that brief Harry Williams, you know, biography there, was that all of a sudden they've all moved to the war effort as opposed to the innovation within pin games. But a lot of that innovation in the war effort has created the flipper. So this was created, the company was D. Gottlieb and Company. So, again, Gottlieb, you know, in the center of the manufacturing world here in the pinball world. This was designed by Harry Mabbs. Art by Roy Parker. It sells 6,500 units. But, Ron, I am going to play around here a little bit. This is the first game with electromechanical flippers. Because flippers were already used on many games prior to 1947. But they were non-electrical. Entirely mechanical. Humpty Dumpty is the first pinball machine manufacturer to flipers that were electromechanical. So, again, people are going to be like, oh, what about this? No, these are electromechanical. So I'm going to draw that distinction. So if you had a button and you push that button and it flipped the ball, totally different. Totally, totally different. Well, here's a quote from Wayne Nyans. He says, it enabled the pin game to become an amusement device. Before that, no one really knew how to really make an amusement device. It wasn't any fun to play. You shot a ball and, oh, yeah, there was a little fun to it, but the flipper, that made the game. It just changed the industry overnight. This also brings up an individual named Lynn Durant. And Lynn Durant is sort of an integral person around this time who's working with Harry Williams, creating these different companies. Very, very important and poignant person. I don't have a lot of information in this episode, but he will pop up later on, and he will pop up in other episodes. But he actually said at the time that he would never put a flipper on a pinball machine because it was terrible. And, of course, he was not working at Gottlieb at the time. He was working at a, I believe it was Rockola. Then within a couple of months, boy, oh, boy, he put flippers on his machines because he couldn't sell a single one that didn't have flippers. Changed everything. Well, why didn't Gottlieb patent the flipper? Yeah, they could have made tons of money, right? Nobody could use a flipper unless they paid D. Gottlieb & Co. Dave Gottlieb would say what was good for the industry was good for Gottlieb, so he didn't patent it. What a man. What a magnanimous man. Or they just forgot to patent it. What a legend. But apparently, you know, he would say there were a lot of innovations that Gottlieb had created, and he didn't patent any of them in this time. Because he figured if it would grow the industry, Gottlieb would grow as well. All rising waters rise all boats. Which is funny, because now, out of all the manufacturers, they have the most stringent. Like, you can't even get a manual online without going through proper channels and stuff. Yeah. David Gottlieb would roll over in his grave. Well, when we look at Humpty Dumpty, okay, so I brought up the photo here. Going to bring up the flyer to start. And the other thing about this innovation, they would come out with retrofit kits for older games to just stick flippers on them. Like, they need flippers on everything now. If you didn't have a flipper on your game, your game was just done. You're done. You need flippers.
    66:40
    Gottlieb, Humpty Dumpty, you know, this is the greatest triumph in pin game history. You know, I know that's a marketing thing, but that is as close to true as you could probably ever be in one of these. Yeah, that's not hyperbole or silly puns that we end up getting stuck with. Husty Dumpty with the sensationally new, not just new, but sensationally new, player-controlled flipper bumpers. That's what they call them. They call them flipper bumpers. The unique flipper bumpers are motivated by sensitive fingertip control buttons on each side of the cabinet. Look at this arrow over here on the cabinet. It says super sensitive control buttons on both sides. With skill and timing, a player can control balls and send them zooming right back up to the top of the playing field for additional scoring. The combination of controlled flipper-button action, no, the combination of controlled flipper-bumper action and controlled ball action provides amazing earning power. A proven shot in the arm for any location. There is something new under the sun. Get this game of skill and timing on location now. I'm sold. Humpty Dumpty also features high score, sequence, bonus, and kicker pockets. Who cares? It's all about those flipper bumpers. Yeah, this is pretty cool. This is pretty cool stuff. So if we look at the play field, right, we're on IPDB here.
    68:17
    Well, it's not quite what we would expect. Correct. So if you think about the pin games, as we have seen them here prior, you've got all these pins in the play field. The ball goes into the plunger lane, into the ball trough. You shoot it, it goes up the lane, up to the arch, and then it falls down using gravity where it bounces in these pins and into a hole.
    68:41
    Well, this is kind of totally different, right? Well, other things have evolved over time. Now instead of the pins, we've got things like dead bumpers that you just hit and get points. We get saucers, gobble holes, stuff like that. Yeah, now we've got like these rubber posts, these posts with rubbers on them that the ball bounces in. But even the flippers don't look like we would expect them to be. The flippers are two-inch flippers, and they're facing, they're along the left and right sides of the play field. Not in the usual. And they're anchored on the inside of the field. backwards how you would usually see them. But there's six of them. There's six of them, and they all fire at the same time. You hit the right button, all three fire. You hit the left button, all three on the left fire. And they're not that strong. Which is why there's six. Beautiful back glass with a bunch of, like, fairy tale kind of thing. Sumpty dumpty. Huh. What about the first production game with two flippers? Right? Because that's kind of a little more like today's modern pinball, right? two flippers at the bottom of the playfield? That would be Triple Action, made in 1948 by Genco, designed by Steve Kordick, art by Christian Marsh. Sold 3,828 units.
    69:58
    So when it comes to Triple Action, this is the game that had, like we said, two flippers at the bottom of the playfield, very similar to modern pinball today. But there's still something up with these flippers. They're facing the other way. They're still backwards, so they're anchored in the center of the playfield, so they pivot on the outsides, so they kind of flip upwards. You're kind of focused on the outside of the playfield, right, if you're flipping. It takes a lot more skill to kind of get it in the middle of the playfield. But the major innovation that Steve Kordick did here was that he added the more powerful direct current, or DC power supply, which made them stronger so the two could do, the two flippers could do the same thing that the six on Humpty Dumpty did. Yeah, Genco was primarily known not for pinball, but they made a lot of the arcade equipment. Like the baseball games, the pitch and pass. Or like a basketball. The guy throws a basketball into hoop games and all that, and they used DC current a lot. And this era is all about sort of massaging the ideas and making them better, where the previous pre-war era is very much the innovation-creating era, if you ask me. Well, this post-war era was dominated by Gottlieb for its innovation. Game designers like Wayne Nyans and Ed Krinsky were the big hitters. Artists like Leroy Parker, they produced some of the games that collectors considered to be the best classic pinball games of all time. Triple action cost $279.50. Oh my goodness. This is the equivalent to $3,500 in today's $20.22. So the first game that had the modern flipper arrangement, so we're talking anchored on the outside of the playfield and flipping upwards in the center of the play field was Spot Bowler, 1950 by D. Gottlieb & Co. What about the active pop bumper? The jet bumper, Ron, this one took me a little bit of searching and a little bit of looking to find. So before it had, what did you call it, a dead pop? Dead bumper. And what did that do? It looks like a bumper, but you hit the switch on it and it just gives you points. It doesn't actually fire or do anything. Yeah, it just kind of hits the thing. It kind of goes clunk and it goes bing. I'm trying to think of some newer games that might have something equivalent. Meteor has one, right? I was trying to think of something newer, but yes, Meteor has a few of them.
    72:43
    So does Nineball. Steve Kirk liked his dead bumpers, obviously. This was Saratoga from 1948 by Williams Manufacturing Company, designed by Harry Williams, art by George Moulton, and we don't know how many units were sold, but Saratoga is considered to be the first machine to feature the active bumper. That's the type with the metal ring that when the ball would hit it, it would depress the switch, which would then pop or thump, and it would hit the ball. A lot of people call them thumper bumpers. A lot of people call them jet bumpers, but they're pop bumpers. It's whatever the company decided to call them. For Williams, it was always jet bumper. This sort of style in Saratoga was eventually sort of replaced with the ones that we use nowadays with a spoon that would, you know, compress the metal ring that then sort of pops the switch. So it is the same thing, but it is slightly different. It's Stoner's 1938 Super Zeta, which has the sort of the new design. The new design. No, that would have the old design. I'm confused. Well, the current style of design. This style of active bumper would soon replace the older ones, like they used a compressed spring. You said the opposite way. That confused me. That's right. I'm saving you. That's right. What Ron said, people. What Ron said. So did Harry Williams design and create the pop bumper? Looks like it existed beforehand, but. Ah. So, Charlie Kastiker was the actual designer of the pop bumper. Now, Charlie was a supplier of plastics for the whole pinball industry in Chicago. His company was called American Molded Products, and he created two types of pop bumpers, and he gave them to all of the manufacturers. The idea was if he could get the manufacturers to use these plastic pop bumpers, he would make the plastics for them. And he would make a bunch of money, which is smart marketing. So Charlie, it was said by Wayne Nyans and others at the time, was a very smart business person. In 1936, he was a spring salesperson. He would sell springs. Then plastics became a big deal after the war. and he bought an injection molding machine, and he made posts for the pinball machines. Then he would sell them to the Western Manufacturing Company and other amusement manufacturers. So he was a marketer at hand. He had some money, he had some capital. He, you know, had injection molding machines when that was kind of the up-and-coming cool new technology after the war. Came up with the idea of the pop bumper, and he created the molded plastics and all that stuff, and he gave it away to the pinball machines. So you can thank Charlie Kastiker for creating the pop bumper. Quite frankly, Ron, if a pinball machine doesn't have a pop bumper, is it really a pinball machine?
    75:54
    Shadow says yes. Yeah, but it's, you know. No fear says yes. But it's still iconic. The pop bumper is iconic. Without a pop bumper, it's hard to be like, oh, it's pinball. Most people, like most pinball muggles, play pinball, and they're like, I want to get into the pop bumpers because it's doing something and I'm scoring points. even though it's completely useless and they're probably putting themselves in danger, pinball pop-upers are probably one of the most iconic things out there. It was also in the 1940s that something very popular was created, the bingo or bingos. I don't get this. So we're going to go through it. Kind of. Bingos are mechanically extremely complicated. and they dwarf the pinballs when it comes to complexity. It's not even close. So there's kind of two parallel tracks at the moment, right? There's the flipper games that are being created now that are like kind of games of skill or fun and amusement. And then down the other path, we've got bingos. And bingos are more kind of math-oriented, gambling, payout, hybrid machines. I've included the Beginner's Guide to Bingo Pinball from Nick Baldridge, and this is an article in This Week in Pinball. Nick Baldridge is the host of For Amusement Only, EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast, and is probably the ultimate expert in all things bingo. Nick Baldridge knows his stuff. He's created, like, his own, you know, brand-new modern bingo machine. This guy goes nuts for bingos. I guess if we do a bingos episode, like, I'll just get Nick Baldridge to do it. I had a collector's house I was at who also had a bunch of bingos, and just listening to him describe the rule set, it sounded like a modern stern or something. It was so complicated. I don't get it. And maybe it's because I haven't played enough of it, or maybe it's that I don't have the quick mental capacity to deal with those things because my brain has been destroyed by modern video games and toys and mechs and things. But the idea of a bingo is that it's got the play field. It has a bunch of holes. All those holes have numbers on them, and you plunge a ball, and you kind of nudge it around, and it falls in the holes, and then you've got, like, bingo cards on the back box that you're trying to match up certain numbers and get certain scores and matches and things in a row. It's really, really complicated. We'll get to that in a second. The big problem with bingos was the Johnson Act of 1951, which I've included in the show notes. What was the Johnson Act of 1951? Well, in 1951, Congress enacted the Transportation of Gambling Devices Act. The act, more commonly known as the Johnson Act, has been amended several times during the intervening years. Most notably, the act makes it unlawful to knowingly transport a gambling device to a state where such a device is prohibited by law. One-ball machines, which we talked about earlier, were now illegal because they were now deemed as gambling devices. Bally was the first to switch gears and find ways around the new legislation. So Lynn Durant, who is sort of the genius that we had mentioned before that worked with Harry Williams, well, he worked for United Manufacturing Company, and he came up with the concept of the bingo. His original design didn't really catch on because the play field created a style that was too random, and it was too difficult to actually create scoring. It was Don Hooker, who was a genius engineer, who spent all of his time at Bally in the engineering department. He came up with the bingo machine that we sort of know today. The playfield had spring steel, it had hidden lamps, and it had position posts where the ball would bounce around. And it also had 25 trap holes for the ball to fall into. Now, those holes on the play field match the bingo card on the back glass on 5x5 grids. Nick Baldrige says, The first game from Bally called Bright Lights had six cards. Each card could be bought in order for one nickel. The game proved extremely popular and got around the primary issue with the one balls. On the new bingo pinball, a player could win with only three of five balls played properly. You only had to line up three numbers on the card to win a small amount of replays. Four in a row earned about four times the amount for three, and five in a row earned 100 replays. So a lot of the time, these replays, you'd build these replays up, and then you would cash them out at the bartender or the owner of the drugstore or whatever. So it wasn't quite gambling because you were getting replays. You weren't buying a payout, but there was like an unwritten sort of rule. So to get around this Johnson act about gambling devices, they had to create a new skilled-based sort of replay bingo machine. United and Durant would, after three games, change their design to almost mirror that of Bally's. If you can't beat them, join them. And the bingo's rising complexity, you know, they had some of the bingo cards in the back of the back boxes. They would rotate so they could rotate, and it would change the numbers that you needed for the ball to fall in on the play field. There were buy-in options. There were player-controlled kickouts where you'd hit a button, and it would kick it out to maybe, oh, I didn't want to land in that one. I've got to land in something else. What's so attractive about bingos, though, Ron? Again, I don't really get it. I think they're for smarter people. I think they are for, hey. Yeah, you need some brain power. Like I said, when I heard someone explaining the rules to one of these to somebody, I'm like, oh my God, I'm already lost. Well, here's what Nick Baldridge says is the appeal of bingos. He says there are several aspects of playing a bingo pinball machine that really attract players. The risk-reward of how many coins to play in the betting phase. The constantly changing goals. And reaching a point in the game where you have two sets, two sets of two rows, with a single number in between. With only one number needed, you have to make the shot in that specific hole. Otherwise, you get nothing. Wow, Ron, that sounds great. It's so complicated. I don't know. I don't get it. And I know Nick Baldridge is probably freaking out here and other people that get bingos, and I know I'm going to get a bunch of hate mail. It's going to happen. I think they're cool. I think they're fun. I understand where they fit within the realm of the history of pinball. It's just not for me. Hate mail can be sent to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But I figure if you can fix a bingo machine, you could probably fix any EM device. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. Could you ever? One of the, I think, coolest innovations that really helped is the mechanical score reel. So before, you have a back glass with art, and then behind the art was a light bulb. and when you would get to 100 points, the 100-point light bulb would turn on. If you got to 1,000 points, the 1,000 would light up. 1,200, it would be the 1,000 and the 200, right? It would just light up. Well, the mechanical score reel was in Army Navy. Made in 1953 by Williams Manufacturing Corporation. Designed by, guess who? Harry Williams. Art by George Moulton. Unknown number sold. Yeah, so Army Navy. I don't know what this is, but apparently this is like a big deal football thing in the States. Yeah, the Army-Navy football game. Yeah, so that's what the theme is. It's got three active pop bumpers in the middle. I totally forgot you were Canadian there for a second. I was just like, how do you not know that? It's like, oh, oh, yeah. Yes, it's not the winter classic hockey game. We all know what that is. Or do you have like a Canadian football game between like the, I don't know, the Royal Mounted Police and some other police thing? No, no, we don't. No, no, no. Back years ago in the Canadian Football League, we used to have the Ottawa Rough Riders versus the Saskatchewan Rough Riders. Really? They had the same team name? Yeah, and there was only like five teams in the league. Wow. That's pretty bad. So we got score reels now. Yes. So this is the first game in the back. It has a window that's got like a million, you know, points that you can score, and it's got art in the back where the advertisements, you know, where you'd think the advertisements were, the images. And it's particularly neat. So they rotate, right? They click and make dings, and the numbers come up. So you know when you usually put money in an EM and everybody can hear the reels all resetting, right? The click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, ding, right? That's the beginning of this. What does the flyer say? How are they promoting this wonderful new feature? I notice it's seven digits, but I wouldn't be surprised if three of them don't move at all. Oh, yeah, totally. Like a million. It's supposed to be super fancy. First five ball with 3D scoring. Wow. So that's what they call it. It's 3D scoring. How cool is that? Big, bold, illuminated score indicator. Let's play or see his score at a glance. Okay. That's cool. It has three thumper bumpers. See, they didn't call them Jets yet, even Williams. Interesting. So I am corrected. They weren't always Jets, I guess. You kick out pockets, automatic rubber kickers, special rollovers, and they are called flippers at this point. Beautiful art on here. Very sort of post-war, you know, fancy football guys, cheerleaders on there. You know, very, very, you know, American nostalgia on here for sure. Post-war. Very green. Very green. It's got the actual field. Yeah, the grid. Yeah. Gridiron, isn't that what they call that? Gridiron, that's what it's called. I only know that because there's like a movie. What was that? Who was in that? I have no idea.
    86:00
    If you know what movie that was, Gridiron, who was in that movie? Silverballchroniclesgmail.com. Well, the first multiplayer game, Super Jumbo, 1954. So same year. This is Dee Gottlieb and company. Wayne Nyans, Roy Parker on art. It only sold 500 units. Ron, when you think pinball, you think multiplayer.
    86:22
    You think playing with your friends in a bar, playing with your family at home or your buddies. You couldn't do that yet. You couldn't do that yet until 1954. Dollar games. Super Jumbo was the first production multiplayer EM flipper pinball machine and the first game from Gottlieb to use the score reels. Operators were not a big fan of this game, Ron, because it cost more. However, it was obviously expensive for all of those extra scoring units, and they were f***ing heavy. Wayne Nyans says, distributors came in and looked at it, and of course they all cried so much money and all that. We sold a few, and then they kept crying about the money. So we went to two players. Four players seems like a great idea, though, doesn't it, right? Like all the buddies hanging around playing the game? Well, Wayne Nyans also says, my thought was, if you could get four guys playing the game, one of them would win a free play. And if one of them won a free play, the other three couldn't walk away and leave without joining in, so they put more nickels in. He says, I metered the play on that game for a long period of time, and I found out the majority of the time one player played and the amount of time four were playing was a very, very small percentage of the time. I was shocked. That's crazy. So they're using data. Wayne Nines is using data to back this up. He had a hunch. You get four players, four people are showing up, more money's going in, they're bantering back and forth and harassing each other. Nope, turns out it was just one person lonely playing by themselves. Yeah, just in reality. That's interesting. Isn't that cool? Mm-hmm. Well, what was another major innovation? When you think of pinball, what do you think of? We've got flippers, we've got pop-uppers, we've got real scoring, we've got multiple players now. What do we have? Multi-ball. Ah, multi-ball balls. I thought that was invented in, like, the 80s. No. I remember when I first started in this hobby, that's what I heard all the time. Firepower, the first game with multi-ball. Yep. Steve Ritchie invented multi-ball. No, it's not. There's lots of games with multi-ball before that one. Yeah. Balls are popping. One of the most hilarious names for a pinball machine. I love this game. 1956. This is manufactured by Bally Manufacturing Company, but there's no designer credit. It's interesting to think Bally wasn't really doing a lot of pinballs in this era. They would pick it up later, but in this era, this was one of their few games, pinball machines they had. Yeah, at this time they were kind of off doing the novelty thing, right? Actually, I don't know what they were doing, but I know Centaur is based on this. Ah. The rules to Centaur pay homage to this game, which is basically you build up a count of, In this game, it's called, I think, wild ball count. You build up a wild ball count, and then you hit a saucer in the center of the game. All the balls come out. And I mean all the balls come out. This sells 750 units. That doesn't seem very good at all. It didn't make many of them. It was probably expensive. It's a wide body.
    89:32
    And it had another variant, too. There was two of these that valued it. Balls of Poppin', and then there was the second one, like the same year. I can't remember. I'd say Balls of Poppin' is the first one. We've got to preface it. There's an early, flipperless, electromechanical pinball machine that features multiball. It was manufactured by Dudley Clark Co.'s company in 1934 called Live Power. Or Live Power. So here's the flyer. Get your novelty spots back on a money-making basis with Balls of Poppin'. The new type of novelty game by Bally. It has six ball multiball. Like, they went all out. We're not just doing two balls. We're doing, and it's amazing. The balls come out from the left side. Like, when you hit it in the saucer, it'll just start firing balls out from the left side. And just to see a game this old with that many balls going at the same time is something. It's like an auto plunger on the left side. It literally is an auto plunger. It fires them out by itself. You don't do it. It's a wide body for that reason. They had to fit everything in there. And it's a two-player game. Yeah. But they just didn't sell a lot, which I find really, like, kind of a bummer. It doesn't have the reel scoring either. It's all just back box lighting. Yeah. So they're trying to find other ways to maybe save, you know, build a material. So instead of the, you know, the rotating mechanisms in the back box, they went back to the lights. Now, in 1963, Williams beat the clock, was the first multiball machine to have a ball lock mechanism, which is a little bit more like multiball as we know it today. My favorite innovation.
    91:14
    In my opinion, you can't really have pinball without pop bumper. You can't really have pinball without multiball. You can't have pinball without drop targets, Ron. Hmm. Williams Vagabond. 1962.
    91:29
    This is Williams Manufacturing Company. Steve Kordick on design. It sells 600 units. Not really great. It's kind of a bummer. Oswalt Steel is the first to have a drop target, as we know drop targets. See if they advertise. They do. And they call it a drop target in the flyer.
    91:51
    Drop target incorporated for the first time in Williams Vagabond. How about this cool art? It's like a dude on a cart. Interesting. They are now calling them jet bumpers. So at some point, Williams decided bumper, bumper, not what we want. We want jet bumpers now. Yeah, because jets were fancy in the post-war world. So now we're up here into the 1960s, right? Okay, so Vagabond was the first pinball machine to have a drop target, the familiar type that we would know today, where the ball would strike the target, and the target that the ball would hit would fall below the playfield. Now, in 1951, there's a game called Minstrel Man, sells 1,800 units. This is designed by Harry Mabbs, and it would actually have a target which you would hit. Then behind that stand-up target, a target would drop. So it's not quite a drop target, although it is a target that you would hit. Also a game with blackface Yikes What about this one Ron This would be my favorite innovation This is your innovation Wilder than flippers Oh well yeah that goes without saying Hey Pinheads I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not making cheesy jokes to make Ron laugh, I'm David, the financial advice guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take seriously. A valuable financial advisor doesn't just provide investment and insurance advice. That's because an advisor takes the time to gather intimate knowledge about their primary client, understand their personal preferences, recognize their fears and hopes, and gain knowledge about their client's errors before providing financial advice. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensed in most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online meetings to engage with clients who need advice but don't necessarily want to wear pants or leave their house. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. The first spinner or spinning target. The game was Swing Along from 1963. I think it's funny that from D. Gottlieb and Company, Wayne Nyhan's design, art by Roy Parker.
    94:32
    I think it's funny because at one point, Gottlieb had some of the worst spinners when they had their plastic spinners. Yeah. And Williams has the game with the first drop target, yet Gottlieb was like the kings of the drop target, had the best drop target. So just because you invent it doesn't mean you're the best at it. Yeah, Canadians very much remember Blackberry, right? We were all, oh, my God, we invented the smartphone. Canadians invented the smartphone. And then it just went off a cliff. It's not who invents it, it's who perfects it. Exactly. Now, this sells 4,710 units in 1963.
    95:06
    That's a lot of units, considering that some of these other previous innovation games are like 600, 700 units. So what does the flyer say to promote this new feature? I love this one. Love it. I love it because the marketing's got to promote this brand new thing. What do they say? Man, it's not – it should have been bigger. It's not a big thing. It's not a huge thing. They did take a picture of it to show it. Novel swinging targets give a brand-new hi-fi sound to scoring. So they're advertising it more like the clicking it's going to make when you hit it than the actual spinning target itself. There's something about spinners, Ron, and you know it. When you hit it and you see the thing flip and it's dinging the points, Especially in the EM. It's like, oh, it's so good. Biggers are the best. You know, this game has a double-sized cash box. I guess to get all those earnings. Big time. Two-player game.
    96:01
    It's like a dance hall theme, right? It's like a lady in a dress kind of dancing. Mm-hmm. Do-do-do-do-do. But look at this down here on the bottom left. New hard coat finish extends playboard life to an all-time high. Oh, diamond coat. Yeah, no, it's probably just lacquer. But it also has a diamond on it. That's true. It actually has a diamond on it. Look at that, eh? Wow. See, again, you thought diamond coat was invented by Williams? No. It was invented in the 60s by Gottlieb. They just didn't call it that. Yeah. They had a diamond. Literally, it shows a diamond on it. This is a really neat machine, not because of the theme or what it is, but the marketing in general, the invention of the spinning target. So it's got a drum on one side, a saxophone on the other. No, no, they're all different. It's got multiple spinners, and they're different instruments, a trumpet, a drum, and a saxophone. So there's these three targets in the middle. As they rotate, then you go up into the pop bumpers above them. As we look at this, we're getting more and more like pinball as we kind of know it today. The flippers are in the usual spot. I mean, we don't have in lanes. We just have out lanes. Yeah. We have spinners. We got bumpers. We got targets. You know, by the 1960s, we're kind of, we figured we're perfecting it here, right? It's coming together. By the 1970s, we invent the solid state pinball machine. And Bally was the first one out of the gate with a solid state prototype pinball machine in 1974, Bow and Arrow. Also, one prototype of Flickr and one prototype of Boomerang from Bally. Doug McDonald, he was the Bally engineer in the 1970s, and he did a lot of work on the boards and the design of the solid-state thing. In fact, his initials, D and B, are etched into all of those original solid-state machines. If you look on them, it's printed on there. Bally was actually beat to the punch by the first actual solid state pinball machine. It was like Micro something or other. Yeah. So it's Spirit of 76, not the Spirit of 76 from Gottlieb. This is a totally different one. And it is by Micro Games Incorporated from Phoenix, Arizona, the pinball capital of the world. And I've got a link of this in the show notes. It was the first microprocessor-based pinball table. It was from July the 4th, 1975.
    98:41
    It's probably why it was called the Spirit of 76. Yeah, because it's getting ready for the next year. And it's July the 4th, which is, you know, your America birthday, right? Yep, it is. It's a very, very America pinball machine, this one. The play field is very unattractive. It looks terrible. and it's probably why so few were actually sold. So what you're saying is they had the right idea technology-wise, but the play field might not have been the best. Yeah, just in general. Small company, middle of nowhere, didn't get the units out. They didn't quite get it right. But we're giving them their due here now, right? So it had debuted 1975, the Music Operators of America Exposition, MOA, held in Chicago on October 17th and 19th of 1975. Remember, it's not who invents it, it's who perfects it. So it was October of 76 when Bally launched Fireball, which sold 10,000 units, and it was their first non-commercial home model game. So it wasn't actually a production. It wasn't the 1970, what is, one or two Fireball. This was the home model. So they're wading in kind of on the home model thing. They also made an Evel Knievel, a Captain Fantastic, and a Galaxy Ranger home model. So it was like they kind of test in the waters of this before they went whole haul into production. And then they tried to trademark it, patent it, so no one else could use it, meaning no one else could make a solid-state game except them. Didn't work. No, that went to court, and the judge said no. That would have been interesting if they had won that case because then everyone would have had to have used their system. if they wanted to make solid-state games. Or had to pay them a cut. Can you imagine? Yeah. That'd be terrible. Well, that's what Stern Electronics did, but that was another story. That was a whole other thing. You can check that out in our Stern Electronics episode back in the archives. You can check that out on your podcatcher or at silverballchronicles.com if you want to check out the archive. It wasn't until December of 77 where the actual first commercial pinball machine was released. It was 1,500 units of Bally's Freedom, which is a previous EM design. So they were very careful not to really screw anything up.
    101:03
    The first major production, the first game that had, like, a lot of units that made was Knight Rider, which was by Bally, and it was a truckin' theme with orbit spinners. The thing I could never understand is the original Freedom, their first production one they did, it does the stern thing where if you tilt before any switches are activated, it doesn't count as a tilt. So you can't do tilt-throughs. Yeah. Which is cool. And they only did it in that game.
    101:31
    I wonder why. I have no idea. I remember you mentioned that previously, and I'm like, that's a really good idea. If anyone listening knows, I would love to hear from an engineer why they – Capacity on the chips or something? It's literally just code. Like the first switch activated can't be tilted. Maybe they wanted it to tilt through because then you screw your buddy over and they get more coins. I guess so. Maybe that's it. So that had 7,000 units that were sold, which is a big deal. That was followed up by Evel Knievel, which sold 14,000 units. Then you've got 1977 in February. They released 8-Ball, which was the highest seller until Addams Family, with 20,230. Oh, that was in June. This was all in our We Had a Solid State episode, didn't we? Oh, yeah. It's in that one. Yeah, back in, I think, Gottlieb System 1 episode. We go into really in-depth of all of this stuff, which is kind of why we're glazing over it now. What about the next thing?
    102:32
    Continuous background sound or digital sound. Yep. The first game is Flash 1978 from Williams Electronics Incorporated, designed by Steve Ritchie, art by Constantino and Janine Mitchell. programming by Randy Pfeiffer. It sold 19,505. Another huge seller. Yeah, it's one of those confusing ones that it says 1978. All the play fields say 1978, but I think it started coming out at the beginning of 79. Now, this Flash is one of the original games where I played when I kind of got into pinball, and I'm like, oh, this is a cool game. Very, very cool game. We go into great details of Flash in our pilot episode. By the way, that episode, kind of rough. It's not that greatest. But check that out in the archives as well. What does Steve Ritchie say about background sound? Who invented background sound? Well, Steve says he did. That was humble. I invented background sound at Atari, but management wouldn't have it. So I asked Randy Pfeiffer to create a continuously cycling complex sound that increased in pitch and speed of cycling, and he did both. That changing background added attention and excitement that was never present in earlier games. That sound also broadcasted how well the player was doing. If you heard the only game that made a background sound in an arcade at a high pitch in a fast cycle, all eyes were on you, sometimes gathering a small crowd in those days. Very cool, right? We're getting into something there. Well, then the next major intervention, where are we going to now, Ron? Well, the game's got to start talking, don't they? Yes! What's the first talking game? Everybody knows this. Gor Gar.
    104:06
    1979 from Williams. Designed by Barry Ousler. Art by Constantino Mitchell. Probably maybe the best artwork of any Williams game of that era. The sound is by Eugene Jarvis. He's the genius. He is the genius. They would use his sound set for the next four or five years at Williams on their games. And it sold 14,000 units. Do you remember? And it only said seven words. Do you know what they are? Gorgar. No, that's one word. Oh, is it? Yes. Gorgar. Okay, Gorgar. eat you me. There's no eat. He doesn't eat anyone. Let's see if I get it right. It's Gorgar speaks me got you Oh, got. Hurt. It says me hurt.
    104:57
    And whatever the seventh one is. I fail. There you go. Eugene did all the effects, but not the programming. The programming itself was done by Paul DeSault or DeSault. I guess if you want to say it that way. Steve was actually waiting to finish the firepower layout because the other programmers wouldn't work with Steve. He was waiting for Eugene. That's why. So that would sort of be why it got stuck on Gorgar ahead of the time. One of my favorite quotes ever is from Barry Osler. He says at the AMOA show, it was so loud that Sam Stern came over to tell us to turn it down because no one could hear his games. Back in November of 78, can you imagine, like, angry Sam Stern coming over? You whippersnappers, turn that down. Nobody can hear my pinball machine. No, but I can think about it in November of 79 because that's when it happened. Whatever. Ah, come on. It's history. You've got to get the years right, man. It's a brief history of pinball. It's not the definitive history of pinball. You know what Sam Stern should have done? He should have just cranked Meteor up to full volume. That background sound.
    106:04
    That would have been louder than the speech from Gorger. It totally, totally would have been. It would have been awesome. What do you want to say? Like, the next big thing is dot matrix DMDs? Yeah, I guess so. Well, we could have said alphanumeric displays, and then we'd have to talk about Aftor. Because it's the first time it let you put your initials into a game as a high score. You couldn't do that before. You can't do that without letters. Yeah, before it was just numbers. Numbers. And I think Aftor was one of the first. I'm sure someone will say there's one earlier. But Aftor was in 84, 83, 84. Yeah, and Aftor is not by a popular manufacturer. Well, no. They are popular. Wico. They were popular for parts. They made tons of replacement parts for years and years and years. But this was their one game, Wico. It's got a metal back box. It's very interesting. But it has alphanumerics display. But then someone will say, well, Bally experimented with it, which they did with 8-Ball Deluxe. They had like 10 prototypes that used alphanumeric displays, which I've seen two of them. Doesn't count. Wasn't production. The only thing they really did with them, though, is they just say, play 8-Ball Deluxe or something.
    107:17
    Go play 8-Ball Deluxe. Like, good use. Gorgar, hurt. It counts as talk, I guess. You beat me. Oh, beat. Beat might be the one I forgot, yeah. Yeah, there you go. Me got you. So Checkpoint was the first DMD game back in February of 1991 by Data East. Yeah, they beat everyone else. They got the small little guy. The big, innovative, always amazing Data East pinball. The designer of this game was Joe Kamenkow. Art by Paul Ferris. The programming was Riemann Merchant. And it sells 3,500 units. I hesitate to say this is actually the first DMD machine, even though it is, unquestionably is. But the DMD was very small, and they basically just did alphanumeric stuff on it. They didn't go and push the envelope and really teach. It's still a DMD, yeah. I know. I totally agree. But it's a bit of an asterisk. Well, Joe Kamikow told the Internet Pinball Database that the previous game, Data East, the Simpsons was to be their first game to have a DMD. However, President and CEO Joe Keenan worried that development of the DMD might not be ready in time for that game, and problems occurring had they rushed it into production could put the company out of business. Yeah, so they wanted to be very careful with the Simpsons license, as they probably paid a good penny for. Yeah, you don't screw that up. And this was 1990 Simpsons. They were the hottest thing. It's been around so long now, people don't realize. When that came out, 1990, that was the hottest stuff out there. Now, the first large-size DMD was in May of 1991, shortly thereafter. Or say, normal size, what we're used to. Yeah, what you would expect. And that was at Midway Manufacturing, or as it was actually part of Williams. It was Williams, yeah. It was designed by Ward Pemberton and Dan Langlois. What game?
    109:16
    Oh, I'm sorry, Gilligan's Island. Gilligan's Island, yes, folks. That was the first one actually released. Yep. Mike Boone, Dan Lee sells 4,100 units somehow. Hey, it's a good play field. I still think that's a good play field. What a cool toy. It was the first DMD.matrix, which was done by Williams Bally Midway. When most people think DMD, they think Terminator 2 Judgment Day, right, by Steve Ritchie? They always think that's the first, and they're partially right. It was the first game designed to use the DMD, but the production, the design cycle was much longer. Yeah, it was the standard sort of dot matrix display that we would expect, which was what, like four inches by six inches or something? It was the dimensions they always give, like 128 by whatever the pixels are. I can't remember what it is. It was also the first game to feature a video mode. The video mode, yeah. So they're pushing the D&D, you know, dots of having images and pictures and things, not just sort of information or letters. There's something more to it, which is, again, why I sort of asterisked the checkpoint one, because there's no dot art in that until they change to the larger D&D at Data East. And then we had these super D&Ds, the big ones that... At Sega. Yeah, Sega used. So it's like Hook. I think Hook had one of the... Not Hook. Baywatch.
    110:40
    Maverick. I think Maverick was the first one. Yep. Now, the next sort of huge leap in pinball, Pinball 2000, Attack from Mars. No, Revenge from Mars. I'm sorry, Revenge from Mars, where the projection screen goes down onto the glass. You've got images on the back, designed in 1999 by Midway Manufacturing, or as part of the apparent company, WMS, designed by George Gomez. Art and animation was done by Adam Rimes, Scott Shlomany, Jack Lidden, Lyddon, Scott Sanders, and Dave Muller. Programming by Lyman Sheets, Dwight Sullivan, Graham West, and Keith P. Johnson. Sells 6,878 units. We did a whole Pinball 2000 episode, but the reason I put that in here is because that is a big sort of watershed moment, even though it basically killed Williams. And they didn't really pursue it. So in 2021, the Pinball Network had the Pinball Industry Awards, and one of the machines that we put into the Pinball Machine Hall of Fame, as voted by the public, was Wizard of Oz by Jersey Jack Pinball. In April of 2013, Jersey Jack Pinball Incorporated launched probably one of the biggest leap forwards in pinball. Not necessarily gameplay, but when it comes to the wow factor and design changes, Wizard of Oz is a watershed pinball machine. Because it has an LCD. A huge LCD screen. And this might be the longest period between innovations when you think about it. Yeah. Things are getting further. How long were they using DMDs from 1991 to here? That's 22 years to put an LCD screen in there, to change the DMD at all. Crazy. Mm-hmm. This is also the first pinball machine to feature RGB color-changing LED inserts, which was a huge wow factor.
    112:44
    Yep, and it almost bankrupted the company. It almost bankrupted the company. Because it sold for, what was it originally, $6,500, which was way more than anything else would have cost at the time, but it was still probably underpriced for what they put into it. Because they had to develop everything. Completely new board set, new everything. But it is quite impressive when you look at it. What was it like when you first saw Wizard of Oz? It was what I thought it would be because Jack Winery just kept saying how they were. This is for a high-end pinball machine that's going to have tons of crap in it. I mean, he said that from the earliest part. So when you look at this thing, one playfield? Nah, we got three of them. We got three playfields in this thing. Playfield and too many playfields on top. We got RGB lighting. We got a huge LCD screen. Don't forget the crystal ball, the little holographic stuff in there. Yes, with the LCD screen under it that projects into the ball. It looks like there's something in the ball. The crazy pop bumper below everything, which I believe that was a Dennis Nordman contribution. Yeah. And then my favorite part of it, honestly, is the rotating house hitting the loop shot because I love loop shots. So you stop looping it and the whole house starts spinning around. It's a wonderful, wonderful machine. We'll do a deep dive into Wizard of Oz when we do our Jersey Jack episode. I'm just waiting for Jersey Jack to release more pinball machines so I can pad that out a little more. That is true. There's only so long we can talk about each game. Right. I can't fill like 45 minutes with the Jersey Jack episode. So I got to come up with some unique way to talk about that. But this watershed moment of the Wizard of Oz has led us to what would eventually be Stern's Batman 66 with their first LCD screen. Now, the first actual production LCD screen at Stern was Aerosmith. So there's a lot of really crazy innovation that changed with Jersey Jack. And you've got to tip your hat. I would say it's not who invented it, who perfected it. You could argue they perfected it, too, because they certainly did. When you look at Jean-Paul DeWitt. Yeah, Jean-Paul DeWitt, he wins the award for best animations, like, every year for whatever Jersey Jack game is out. Every year. Yep. It's like a zombie yeti on ours every year. Big, big time. I actually prefer the smaller one that Stern uses just because I like... You like more art. I like the art. I like the Translight, the back glass. I totally agree. Well, Ron, that was a brief history of pinball. Well, let me ask you a question. What do you think the next innovation is going to be? Oh, man.
    115:16
    Well, I mean, online connectivity is probably... Yeah, we're in the middle of that right now. So you've got Scorbit, who is an independent contractor who's working with Jersey Jack and some of the other more independent firms. You've got Stern with their insider connected with online connectivity. I mean, yes, granted, we're quite a few years late when it comes to online connectivity. I mean, are we talking like DLC to downloadable content? Is that the next innovation? Is there any more innovations for the play field? Is there any more? I mean, we're going to put smoke machines in them. Are we going to? I mean, what's next there? You hear people all the time say there's only so much you can do in the play field. I mean, have we come up with – Floating pinball, that was a big thing. Yeah, have we come up with every possible thing you can put on there? I don't think so. Oh, I agree. The thing is it's got to be cheap enough to be mass produced and not, like, bankrupt the company. It comes up with the idea. Yeah, which is, I think, why online connectivity has taken so long to come along. The price for that.
    116:12
    I mean, do you want, like, surface-mounted LED boards, right? I mean, maybe that was a big innovation we didn't talk about. I mean, you could go through each manufacturer's board set and the history of that and, you know. God, that sounds terrible.
    116:28
    For the average person, for a techie, would love that. But things like the current systems they're on, like Stern has Spike. Well, Spike 2, I'm sorry, that they're currently on. And they're always innovating in ways you don't see.
    116:43
    Let's put it that way. Very neat. I mean, code nowadays, the innovation in code, the complexity of code. You know, toppers now with LCD screens in them like the Mandalorian topper, which I think is just something else. Makes me want to buy a Mandalorian. Way better light shows.
    117:04
    Pinball innovation is still going along. And I guess if we sat down, you know, 10 years from now and pinball is still around, we could probably come up with another really cool couple of additions. At least one thing. I mean, it took LCDs forever to come around. That's the longest one. That's kind of crazy it took that long. Absolutely nuts. So you thought you think spinners are your favorite one of the episode here? Well, forgiving, flippers. I mean, you've got to have flippers. Flippers is number one. Without flippers, and I don't mind playing the early, like the pre-war stuff, because you can nudge the stuff into pockets and stuff. There is some, believe it or not, level of skill involved, as long as there's actually a tilt on there, of trying to nudge the thing where you want it to go without tilting. That is the skill. And how far back you plunge on a lot of these things, like which pockets you want to get into and stuff. But, I mean, obviously, once the flippers come in, that changes everything. So my favorite thing after that would have to be spinners. I just love spinners. Absolutely. I mean, we didn't talk about ramps. I mean, I guess we could have talked about ramps. Yeah, first games. And a lot of those, like, people think, well, the first game with a ramp, was it like Firepower 2? Was it like, you know, like, no, it was probably some game made in the 40s that had a ramp. Guaranteed. There was probably a game in the 30s that had a ramp. Over on Patreon.com, Scott E. said that he would love to hear about Very Targets. Where was its first appearance and who invented that? Well, you know what? I did a bunch of research trying to find information on Very Targets. couldn't find anything. Really? And I love Very Targets. Very Targets are pretty great. I believe Gottlieb did patent that, too. Yeah, but I don't know who invented it. I don't know any of that information. So sorry there, Scotty. Patreon.com slash Silverball Chronicles. I don't have that information. That also said, we haven't seen a Very Target for a while. Last one I saw was on, what was it called? Was it Monopoly? No. Not Monopoly. No. Right, Designer. His other one after that. Ripley's. Yeah. Which would tell me the patent ran out because of her. So, I mean, I didn't go. The other one was Roto Targets. I didn't really find any info on Roto Targets either. Right. I mean, nobody's used a Roto Target since like the 60s. It's. Which was kind of cool. But, I mean, we can't go through everything. What I did is we went through. I made sure we chose all of the big sort of high points and where I could get some primary resources. The coolest thing I think we found was the bell story, the tilt story, directly from the mouth of Harry Williams. Very, very cool. I'm trying to think of, out of all those ones that we didn't talk about, or ones that were used in an era and not really haven't been used in years, would you like to see any of them return? Like a roto target. Yeah. I'd love to see a very target. I really would. Speak easy. It's got the flaps. The flip-up targets? The flip-up targets, yeah. Like something like that. It's like a reverse drop target. Yeah. I don't know. There's stuff you could bring back. You didn't talk about multimorphic and whatever they're doing? Mm-hmm. Right? I mean, that's kind of innovative. It's not for me. That's 100% innovative. They basically track the ball so they can tell where the ball is at all times and have the screen that it's rolling on react to it. And they also have some innovations with things like stuck balls if you open the coin. It remembers skate and things like that, like game skate, where you could just pause games and then come back later. Stuff like that's super cool. That was just a brief history of pinball. It wasn't the definitive pinball history podcast, but it was a brief history. We went all the way from lawn games to today's LCD-connected online machines. Thank you, New Jersey and Cincinnati, Ohio.
    121:03
    He's asking if he has to say all the Patreon stuff again. No. Okay. No, you don't. I was just going to ask you for more money, but okay. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages and we read every one. Even though we don't answer every one, obviously. Mr. Very Target, do your job. You should get his Patreon money back. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcatcher. Turn on automatic downloads so you don't miss this single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review. That way more people can find us. And join us on Patreon to support the show. Patreon.com slash Silver Ball Chronicles. Everyone wants to be a friend.
    122:05
    He says, I invented background sound in a Tory, but management, a Tory. I got to try that again. Why was Harry Williams such a big deal, Ron?
    122:32
    Just make up some stuff. Not just me. 1956 Williams Electronic Manufacturing Corporation. So the name has changed. That's not right. Really? There's no way. Balls a-popping is a ballet game. I am almost positive. Oh, it is? Yes. And I don't think it's Steve Kordick either. No, that's a copy-paste thing. That's a copy-paste. That's a copy-paster. I saved you. I saved you some pain.
    123:01
    I noticed your little calculator there only goes back to 1914. Does that mean there was no money before 1914? There's no data. Because it measures the consumer price index from 1914. So they changed the calculation around that time.
    123:15
    This is also a Canadian inflation calculator. Oh, all that doesn't mean anything then. How many beaver pelts in 1914?
    123:27
    So the pins, right? This is the problem. The problem was the pins took too long to reset, right? You'd knock the pins down. Hold on. Just to help you with your editing, your P's are very hard right now.
    123:43
    Yeah, a little bit. You may be a little closer to the mic. I don't know. Just because you'll be in editing training later. So how's that better? Pins? Playfield? That's better.
    123:57
    You can read that one if you want. If I can say the name. Hold on. Montague Redgrave. It is Montague. I had that... Okay.