Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Yet for all of their variety, mechanical pin games didn’t change a whole lot in the early ’30s. Sure, some had clever gadgets and gimmicks, but for the most part they were all variations on plunger, holes, and pins. Even flippers were a decade and a half in the future, and players had to keep their own score—a process I found perplexing when I played a vintage Jig-Saw (1933) pinball machine for a penny at a Pittsburgh-area museum called Pinball Perfection. (Unhelpfully, Jig-Saw’s marquee cards displayed a complicated scoring rubric that includes instructions like “INCOMPLETED JIGSAW w/o DOUBLE SCORE with two blocks open . . . . . . . . . 5 pts.” How patrons tallied their own scores a few beers into the afternoon, I’ll never know.)

  Amid the tiny mechanical arms race, the man to credit with moving pinball to its next plateau was none other than Harry Williams again. Pin games at the time had no lights, no sounds, and no autonomous moving parts. Why not, Williams wondered, add electricity?

  He started simple. Williams attached a solenoid to a 1933 game called Contact. A solenoid is a metal rod with a wire coiled around it; when electricity runs through the wire, the rod punches out the end of the coil.

  In Contact, if a ball fell into a hole, it stayed there until a second ball could be shot into another hole, completing a circuit that ejected the first ball. “This spelled the end for the gravity-controlled machines,” says the narrator of the documentary Pleasure Machines, observing that pinballs could now travel up as well as down a playfield—at least a little bit.

  Like most “first of its kind” stories, this one may be somewhat apocryphal. Harry Williams invented the first pin game to use electricity in the same way that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone: the credit and the glory, along with the patent, may belong to Bell, but to this day many argue that Italian inventor Antonio Meucci’s telettrofono scooped Bell by more than a decade and a half. Similarly, some older bagatelle machines did use electricity, but Williams’s Contact popularized the possibility for pinball.

  The door was now open for electrical gimmicks. Williams rigged up a ringing bell—initially, he later told Sharpe, to prank his business partner Fred McClellan, who would leave the game to go answer the phone every time it rang. The bell was deemed a keeper, as were a handful of other gizmos. That electricity came from batteries until 1935, when games were developed that could be plugged into wall sockets.9

  Bumpers,10 those squat knobs that rocket the ball around, would come in 1937, thanks to a Bally employee named Nick Nelson. Some early, nonelectrified versions were fairly gentle but still gave the ball’s trajectory a nice jolt of unpredictability. Illuminated scoreboards would follow in 1938, and the gimmicks became as bright as pinball’s future as a source of amusement.

  So let’s see. With electricity, pin games could now make sounds, light up, and shoot balls in various directions. What else could they do that players might appreciate?

  Hey, dispense money.

  What could go wrong?

  2

  A Vicious Form of

  Amusement

  * * *

  I DON’T WANT TO DRAW UNFAIR CONCLUSIONS, but based on everything I’ve read, at least as far as pinball is concerned, Fiorello La Guardia was kind of a douche. I say that not only as a pinball fan who cringes at press photos of a New York mayor smashing pinball machines with a sledgehammer but also as a concerned citizen who feels that unease is not an overreaction any time a politician publicly smashes things he dislikes with a sledgehammer.

  A complicated figure with an occasional penchant for authoritarianism, New York’s ninety-ninth mayor helped the city recover from the Great Depression, but he also imposed his own fundamentalist sensibilities on industries that offended him. Pinball offended him.

  La Guardia’s anti-pinball crusade was, at least nominally, part of his pre–World War II crackdown on organized crime, but he had no compunction about expanding that crackdown to suppress any activity he deemed evil: pinball, roulette wheels, jukeboxes, pool tables, burlesque houses, and—see if you can guess—artichokes. (La Guardia’s artichoke embargo had more to do with accusations of Mob-driven price-fixing than with any animosity toward artichokes in particular, but I’ll grant him that if there is such a thing as an evil vegetable, it’s an artichoke. I can’t eat you unless I steam you? Get over yourself.) The Mob had a stranglehold on his city, controlling more than a lot of people were comfortable with, and La Guardia was determined to save New York’s soul. But . . . pinball?

  Before 1934, the New York City Police Department had a huge job on its hands: slot machines were proliferating throughout the city, and unless officers could absolutely prove that they were being used for gambling—a more difficult task than it sounds—they could do nothing. Meanwhile, according to police commissioner Lewis J. Valentine, the slots bred worse vices, and the primary obstacle to eliminating them was political will. In the first couple of months of 1934, La Guardia mustered that political will, and about two thousand slot machines were seized, half owned by Mob boss Frank Costello, effectively wiping the city clean of the offending one-armed bandits. Pin games rushed in to fill the void, flourishing in all of the corners previously occupied by slots.

  “Let’s drive the bums out of town,” La Guardia famously declared in a radio address, broadly—and problematically—implicating nonspecific bums.

  Mob connections aside, to the casual observer, it’s easy to assume pinball was banned simply because it was a game—a frivolous amusement, a time and money waster for a serious generation that could spare neither. But the reality was a lot messier.

  Pinball manufacturers had begun blurring the line between pinball machines and gambling devices. For example, even though games like Contact easily took in pennies and nickels in exchange for a fun few minutes, their true competition for patrons’ coins—slot machines—offered automatic payouts for lucky pulls. So Bally debuted Rocket (1933), a handsome, art deco pinball table that paid players for high scores, making it essentially a slot machine plus physics. The advertising flyer boasted that it could “OPERATE IN ‘OPEN’ OR ‘CLOSED’ TERRITORY,” meaning that the payout door was lockable, converting it back when necessary to what they called a “novelty” game, one played purely for enjoyment.

  It didn’t help that many of the machines set to give cash payouts were the type known as “one-balls,” games that consisted of launching a single ball, seeing what happened, then either collecting or not collecting coins. What’s the difference, really, between pulling a slot machine lever and watching reels randomly spin and pulling a pinball machine plunger and watching a ball randomly drift into one hole or another?

  Indeed, one difference, pointed out by “dad, programmer, amateur astronomer, [and] geek” Jim West on his WestWorld Pinball web page, was that players may have perceived the physics of a pinball machine as a much fairer way of assigning a payout than the slots—which many people thought were rigged.

  The pinball boom scared La Guardia, who watched the public’s growing addiction to pin games with concern. Store owners, he learned, were lowering the price of pinball from a nickel to a penny during school hours, presumably in order to attract students on their lunch breaks—and, as some claimed, to encourage truancy.

  To those who opposed pinball, the assertion that skill played a role in the game must have sounded ridiculously unlikely. “The final results obtainable from these games depend entirely upon the force of gravity, over which the operator has no absolute control,” wrote assistant engineer of the New York City Police Department John T. Gibala. “The operator of the machine can and does have limited control over the decelerated velocity with which the ball ascends up the inclined plane through the runway, but all further control and guidance of the ball on its journey towards the completion of its cycle is automatically removed from him the moment the ball passes through the one-way exit gate at the upper end of the runway.” In other words, after the initial spring-loaded release of the ball, since flippers still hadn’t been invented, pinball w
as essentially a dice roll.

  On July 4, 1935, the New York Times reported on a high-court decision regarding “the legality of the game of bagatelle, or the pin game.” The court case arose when city commissioner of licenses Paul Moss refused to issue a license for “a Brooklyn amusement place.” The dispute, as it remained until a dramatic event in 1976, was over whether the pin game was a pin game of skill or a pin game of chance.

  The Times subheadlines are unambiguous, declaring in all caps “SKILL RULED NO FACTOR” and quoting the judge’s decision that the “device relies on ‘Innate Gambling Spirit.’”

  To be fair, the machines in question made only a token effort (literally) to distinguish themselves from gambling devices, dispensing tokens rather than actual money—tokens that, Moss argued, a proprietor could arrange to exchange for prizes or cash. Still, it’s quite a gray area. If you find yourself agreeing that a machine giving out jackpots of tokens is essentially gambling, you should probably ask whether the awarding of prize tickets at Chuck E. Cheese’s or Dave and Buster’s is truly any different.1

  Using pinball as a gambling device was kind of like downloading MP3 files on Napster in that it was a vice so universally practiced at the time that no one gave a second thought to its legality—until the authorities started issuing fines to random users and shut it down.

  The unlucky individuals in the crosshairs were nineteen-year-old Sidney Turner and thirty-eight-year-old Sadie Billet, both of whom violated their city-issued pinball licenses by offering payouts to lucky patrons. As with any legal decision, the conviction of Turner and Billet—each of whom had to pay a fine of fifty dollars or earn its equivalent in what the New York Times called a “ten-day work house”—did more than punish the defendants. It provided the legal precedent that would send pinball into back rooms for the next four decades.

  “The licenses issued by the city for these machines stipulate they are to be used merely for purposes of amusement,” said assistant district attorney Maurice Spalter. “This clear-cut conviction should mean that all similar places in this city ought to be closed up by the police.”

  Jacob Mirowsky, the proprietor of a stationery and candy store in the Bronx, found himself in court in 1935, accused of running an illegal gambling room. Mirowsky’s defense included a logical but risky proposition: bring in three skilled bagatelle players, and if they consistently score higher than an amateur, bagatelle must be a game of skill. If not, it’s a game of luck and therefore a gambling device.

  Think about that. Think about how confident Mirowsky must have felt that his experts would play the chancy bagatelle machines well enough to outscore a beginner. Think of the pressure on the three players, and imagine if a similar challenge had been issued to, say, golf. “Tiger Woods,” a judge would say, “if you can sink this next putt, golf must be a game of skill. If you miss, well, clearly it’s a game of luck.” If it was really Tiger Woods on the green, he might well have sunk the putt—but he could just as easily have choked.

  That, unfortunately for the pin game, is exactly what happened. “The youths, known to their friends as successful shooters of the little balls in the pin game, had been called by the defense in an effort to show that bagatelle is a game of skill,” reported the New York Times. “For a long time the little balls rattled around and fell into the holes on the board, and bells rang as lucky shots were made. But it all came to nothing. None of the youths made a score better than 11,500, the lowest winning figure, and they could not place the balls where the justices told them to, as a test of their control.” To add insult to injury, a detective with no apparent bagatelle skill stepped up to play, and he scored about the same as the so-called experts.

  This outcome could not have been too surprising. According to the Brooklyn Public Library’s blog, in a post beautifully titled “Pinball Gets Blackballed,” a New York University professor in 1936 sought to test the skill question with brute-force academic rigor. His students tallied their scores during a whopping 67,800 unskilled plays on pinball machines, sometimes playing blindly, with the machines obscured, plus another 30,000 games played by department assistants assigned to develop their skills. The skilled players did demonstrate an improved chance at winning—but only between 2 percent and 9 percent of the time.

  Certainly assistant engineer Gibala hadn’t seen any evidence of skill influencing pinball. He wrote, “My reasons for believing that the pin game referred to is one in which chance predominates or in which the outcome is unpredictable by even the most skillful in the art—phantomly so—is because no one skilled has yet been produced, viz., one who can consistently obtain, let us say, the same most profitable combination in 4 out of 5 plays, like a gunner hitting a bullseye or a bowler getting a strike or even a golfer consistently scoring below or even par.”

  Even in modern times, with flippers and other skill-related additions to the game, pinball would not necessarily stand up to such a challenge. If you put a champion-level player in front of a pinball machine, he or she would probably trounce an opponent who knew little about pinball—or maybe not. Even the experts ultimately end up losing every ball, and sometimes they lose that ball early.

  I’m reminded of a moment during my bachelor party, most of which I spent playing pinball with a few friends. (I’m serious about that. Pinball, bowling, and steak. The only scantily clad women were the ones on the pinball backglasses.) My friend Mike, who had paid my way into pinball league a few years before, suddenly declared that the next game of Funhouse (1990) would be for bragging rights. I’d been a league player for years at that point, exercising my flipper fingers for hours a week, and Mike was basically an amateur—yet he beat me by a significant margin. Mike was insufferable for the rest of the weekend.

  For his part, La Guardia relished the appellate court’s verdict, classifying bagatelle and pinball as the “big brothers of the slot machine” and calling the decision “highly gratifying to me.” Practically overnight, pinball became verboten. Possession of even one illegal machine at an establishment was an egregious enough violation for Commissioner Moss to refuse licenses for its neighboring legal machines. That policy took effect when Moss announced that on January 13, 1936, he was suspending licenses for what might today be considered arcades, including places with names like Sportsland and Playland, where pin games were just one of many attractions. The Times even reported that, in addition to the ignominy of being shut down, arcade owners had to deal with a sudden rush of thousands of winners who had been saving their coupons for “silk stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise [who] have been besieging the establishments demanding that their coupons be liquidated.” It wasn’t quite Chuck E. Cheese’s—I don’t know many kids who express interest in exchanging their Skee-Ball tickets for silk stockings—but it wasn’t exactly high-stakes baccarat, either.

  The Times Amusement Corporation, which owned arcades from Faber’s Sportland on Broadway to the Gramad Amusement Corporation in Brooklyn, fought back, appealing the New York State Supreme Court’s decision and taking Moss to court for revoking their license. The commissioner’s office, which had issued licenses on a per-machine basis, now found itself having to defend the shuttering of an entire corporation, when they could simply have outlawed certain machines and permitted others. To the beleaguered arcade owners, Moss’s actions were blatantly a backdoor means of shutting down any venue, bagatelle based or otherwise, that offered prizes for games of chance.

  Moss, who Time magazine described in 1937 as “a big, grey-haired Jew . . . as notable for his integrity as for his dapper dress,” was a perfect sidekick for La Guardia. In addition to cracking down on pinball, he hit unscrupulous ice sellers, smutty magazines, and burlesque houses with the full weight of the city’s licensing office. That may not sound like a lot of weight, but as Time noted, “the power to license is the power to reform.” Anything Moss didn’t like was either denied a license or had its license revoked. On May 1, 1937, he made headlines by opting not to renew the licenses for any o
f the city’s fourteen burlesque houses, immediately putting more than two thousand people out of work in what La Guardia called “the beginning of the end of incorporated filth.”

  Max Schaffer, president of the Amusement Men’s Association, who represented the Times Amusement Corporation, not to mention around fifty Sportland owners, felt blindsided by Moss’s confiscation of his businesses’ licenses. In his affidavit, he described the suddenness of Moss’s actions, especially considering that awarding prizes in arcades had been, until that moment, perfectly legal. “These business enterprises were built up gradually,” he wrote, “and so built with the knowledge and encouragement of the Government of the City of New York—particularly the Department of Licenses.”

  Moss had his counterargument ready: “I have heretofore issued licenses for amusement centers in the belief, induced by the representations of amusement center operators and their attorneys, that the pin ball games submitted to my department for approval are games of skill and did not violate any provisions of the Penal Law because of the award of prizes.” In other words, it was those sleazy arcade operators who had bamboozled Moss, and he was shocked—shocked—to find that gambling was going on in there.

  Bagatelle and pin games weren’t the only ones on the chopping block, and when it came to the distinction between illicit gambling and harmless amusement, Moss was a “know it when I see it” kind of guy. “I also warned them,” said Moss, “that I would not countenance the use in any amusement center of the so-called ‘crane claw and digger machine.’2 This machine has never been licensed by my department because I am convinced that it is inherently a gambling device, dishonest and corrupt.” Consider that the next time your child maneuvers the joystick to try to grab a stuffed Scooby-Doo.