Who can resist the feel of a good pair of flippers at their fingertips, in effect copping a mecha-feel of a pinball machine as though it were a spring action loaded pinball shooting Pia Zadora! The game itself is sexy. You shoot the ball with a spring loaded "trigger" and watch it hit bumper after bumper, clanging and banging and bouncing around like a nyphomaniac conducting a mechanical symphony while the Pinball Philharmonic Orchestra tries to rack up points for a free game. She scores..higher and higher...the balls are alive...faster and faster they carve a course up and down the board...then finally...finally..after she is satisfied...she seeks the escape hole and manages to evade the flippin' flippers and slip past silently into the safety of the inner sanctum of the pinball machine...the machine has achieved it's version of orgasm. Want more..can't get enough..then penetrate her one more time with a coin and she's ready to rock and roll in the mechanical sack as the spring loader gets it's erection once again and launches her into ecstasy. One thing about a pinball machine...she is sexy and she has balls!!!!
Pinball, or at least it's early incarnations as a table game has been around since the 1600's in Europe. Mainly billiards and billiard knock offs where you shoot balls in pockets with a pool cue on a flat surface level to the ground. The birth of the pinball era was on the horizon and ready to make it's debut in the French Royal Court. In 1777 a variation of billiards was introduced. The "pool" table was slender not fat. An analogy would be the difference between Kate Smith and Twiggy and we'd all rather play balls with Twiggy than Ms. "God Bless America" any day of the week. The table was also on an upward slant so you had to shoot the balls uphill with a cue into holes in order to score. It was called Bagatelle and took France by storming the game world Bastille. Once again...the French had launched a revolution.
Across the ocean another revolution was brewing like a hot tempest in a veritable tea cup as the British Empire fought to keep control of her unruly colonists who had shed their Wally Cleaver persona and had now been transformed into Eddie Haskell! The French saw an opportunity to "help" the fledgling Americans win their battle royale and in the process gain an ally in her fight with England at the same time and to expand her own interests in the North American Continent to beat the Brits at their own games of expansionism.
The French soliders brought bagatelle with them and introduced it to the colonies...it was an instant hit. Brigitte Bardot, another French import was over a hundred years away...but bagatelle was here now and she held court in pubs across the emerging nation. It was French however but by 1871 in Cincinnati, Ohio an inventor, British by the way, introduced the Pinball Declaration of Independence and bagatelle was about to shed her French brassiere and go topless with the addition of a steel spring to launch the balls...the cue stick went back to pool tables while the ball shooter was the toast of the town. She was more slender than the old bagatelle games and fit nicely on the tables and bars in saloons and pubs and other drinking establishments. They weren't coin operated yet, ("No taxation without representation!") so gamers paid the saloon owner per game. There were no FREE games yet as the ball launcher games as they were originally called were pure and simple Capitalism at work...only later when the game offered FREE games for earned high scores did Pinball Socialism march proudly through the game world streets! Power to the Pinball People.
Coin operated games made their debut in 1930 right after the stock market crash with the introduction of two games..Ballyhoo and Whiffle Board. The Depression Era brought with it the great Dustbowl and Okie Migration westward to the new land of Milk and Honey...California. The crash of Wall Street brought breadlines and the WPA. It also introduced the era of cheap entertainment to help relieve the "depressed" masses from the day to day troubles facing them. This resulted in the rise of the Amusement Parks and rollercoasters, as well as the Golden Age of Hollywood where escapism was the coin of the realm in both venues. It was also the pinnacle of pre-war pinball prosperity as there were over 100 manufactures of pinball machines in the country. (Bumpers were introduced in 1938, and flippers in 1947) By the end of the 1930's a dozen remained standing.
Pinball machines were also regarded as the devils own pinball playground similar to Bugsy Siegels Flamingo Vegas slot machines and yes, there was a pinball temperance movement afoot in the land. Players found that you could shake the machine to cheat and effect the outcome and free games started blossoming like an opium field in Afghanistan. At that time you could trade your free game in for cash, so many cities tried to exterminate the beast before it could run rampant and destroy American families through mechanical debauchery!!! Enter the Tilt Mechanism in 1934...some Mother Teresa type inventor developed the mechanism to defeat the cheat...and it worked. Electric machines were introduced at the same time.
The other fly in the pinball ointment was Adolph Hitler. He counted on Fascism fanatacism to become fashionable and decided in his paranoid deranged way to begin gobbling up Europe as though he was high scorer and Poland and Czechoslovakia were free games. He didn't count on American intervention down the road adding our own Military Tilt Mechanism to his desire for world conquest. During the war, the pinball manufacutures, like the auto plants turned their attention to products more conducive to the Arsenal of Democracy to wage war against the Asshole of Narcissistic Nazism. If they had produced more games during this era...imagine the propaganda collectibles there would be today and in fact don't be surprised if there had been a Rosie the Riveter game complete with Union sleeves rolled up, rock and roll blue collar breasts and ready to kick Axis!
After the atomic big boom that ended the war, there was another big boom..this time in pinball mania. They'reeeee baaaaaackkkkk! The Federal government has always been a pain in the American Ass...Whiskey Tax (Thank you George Washington! No Taxation eh? No wonder you're only on a one dollar bill!) Prohibition (which gave rise to organized crime and a bootleggers philandering son in the White House; and todays battle for Marijuana Rights both medical and recreational...smoke it anyway..some laws are meant to be broken..especially Federal ones and now the 2nd Amendment is coming under fire and in the cross hairs of Washington) In 1950 the Feds passed the Johnson Act where players could only use one ball per game to prevent gambling which leads to the decline of the declining American empire into third rate status) However, the manufacturers being smarter than any Federal employee could ever hope to be or hope to score high enought on an aptitude or IQ test came up with mechanical ways to beat the system!)
Today, like Jerry Lee Lewis, the last rock and roll man standing from the true rock era...there is one company left who makes pinball machines..the real ones not those computerized versions...Stern...is the last pinball machine man standing. These machines today from the past are highly collectible and considered Royal Retro Royalty. They can still be found and when the are discovered it's Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail in some old barn covered in dust. No scrolls..but high scores! Those who can afford them take the old girls and have them refurbished and retrofitted to take their place of honor in dens, offices and bars sitting regally with lights blazing and the sounds of the ghost of bumpers and bells from the past ringing gently somewhere in the past of nostalgia.
The Feds have other problems these days...pinball didn't get us involved in Vietnam....pinball didn't bring down the Twin Towers...pinball didn't set off a bomb in Boston...so it was inevitable that a prophet would emerge from the desert of history, deaf, dumb and blind and announce to Pinball Pharoh.."Let My Pinball People Go!" Damn..he does play a mean pinball afterall...