A Brief History of Pinball & Gambling
From Prohibition-era bans to flippers and a 1976 courtroom win — explore pinball's wild fight to be recognized as a game of skill.
Visitors to our museum are often surprised to learn that pinball was illegal in many places for much of the 20th century. Some have heard of Roger Sharpe famously demonstrating pinball as a game of skill in front of the NY City Council in 1976, or the tales of Fiorello LaGuardia crusading against pinball during the Great Depression. Today pinball is mostly regarded as harmless entertainment or a pastime that ruled gamerooms before the rise of video games, but the story of how communities came to view pinball as a dangerous threat and the first step toward a life of gambling and vice stretches back to the birth of the game.
THE BIRTH OF PINBALL
Pinball has evolved in many ways over the course of its history. Most pinball historians tie the birth of pinball with the 1871 patent for "Improvement in Bagatelle" secured by Montague Redgrave. Though that game was a condensed tabletop version of an earlier table game played with cue sticks and scoring pockets, Redgrave's game possessed the shape and key elements of a pinball machine - most importantly the spring-loaded plunger that launches a ball into an inclined field of obstacles. Redgrave secured a patent for his game design and would release numerous versions of the game in a range of sizes and styles. The game proved very popular, and soon competitors would issue their own versions of it, adding adjustments and features to capitalize on the craze. Demand for the small tabletop bagatelle would eventually wane over the next few decades, but its popularity would explode again in the 1930s thanks to another amusement machine.
Slot machines began to take off in popularity in the late 1800s. Combining the thrill of gambling with the ease of coin-operation and automatic payouts, the machines quickly appeared in bars and saloons across the country. By 1910 however, public opposition to slot machines emerged and campaigns against them led to bans soon after. The rise of prohibition in 1920 further hurt the slot industry in 2 ways; first by closing down the bars that most were operated in, and second by their frequent presence in illegal speakeasies that associated them with lawlessness and organized crime. Faced with declining sales and few places to operate them, slot machine manufacturers began exploring other types of coin operated amusements to fill the gap.
In the early years of the Great Depression, a pinball boom hit. Manufacturers turned to skill games as alternatives to slot machines, reviving the bagatelle format among others. Several independent makers would enter the field and find great success, including future industry kingpins David Gottlieb, Harry Williams, and Bally’s Ray Moloney. With relatively simple construction and low costs, manufacturers could easily build and sell the games to operators, who in turn could earn a profit on this form of cheap entertainment. With the Depression underway, consumers were seeking affordable entertainment and could find pinball just about anywhere they went.
PAYOUT GAMES
Competition in the burgeoning pinball industry escalated quickly, and some makers would take every opportunity to get an edge, up to and including outright copying of existing games. Beyond the patent infringements, industrious makers were dreaming up new features and promptly returned to cash payouts as a hook for their games. Despite their popularity (or perhaps due to it), these games would attract the same negative attention that damaged the slot machine industry a few decades before.
Though not all early pinball machines were gambling devices, the similarity between payout games and the slot machines that preceded them burnished an increasingly bad reputation in the public eye. Characterizing them as games of chance involving little or no skill, public officials and critics claimed pinball machines were operated under the
influence of organized crime syndicates and would lead to widespread gambling addictions and lives of crime. As bad press and public outcry gained momentum, pinball’s most famous opponent waged a public campaign to rid his city of the “insidious nickel-stealers” for good.