Citation Needed - Coin Operated Machines

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

A vending machine is an automated machine that dispenses items such as snacks, beverages, cigarettes, and lottery tickets to consumers after cash, a credit card, or other forms of payment are inserted into the machine or payment is otherwise made.[1] The first modern vending machines were developed in England in the early 1880s and dispensed postcards. Vending machines exist in many countries and, in more recent times, specialized vending machines that provide less common products compared to traditional vending machine items have been created. An arcade game, or coin-op game, is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games or merchandisers.[1]

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Is this the internet? That's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be the first quarter in the jukebox tonight, but I'll need some jump change to help keep the rhythm going. Tom, Cecil, and Noah. I think I've proven this chump Wlcham. That's fair.

And Heath isn't here tonight, so I guess I'll have to be the quarter that awkwardly plays the same song that just played because he didn't realize it was already in the queue. Oh, yeah, you hate that. You hate that. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, thanks to the thick, rusty nickels you press into our slots, the gears of this old goofs machine that keep on a turnin.

So tell us, Noah, what person plays thing, concept, Funana. Sometimes it's a poem. It doesn't always have a poem. Okay. Yeah. It's in the blood. Yeah. Thank you. So tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? We'll we be talking about today. So, yeah, so I figured after my last controversial essay about the exploits of Queen

Nzinga, it would be good to stick with a safe topic that everybody can agree is deeply interesting and weaves a natural narrative, the history of coin-operated machines. Oh, my God. If we want people to stop listening, we can just make the show my blog. It's a time-tested strategy. So tell us... Yeah, there's no episodes. On hiatus. So tell us, Noah, why this particular flavor of old man perversion tonight? Okay, I can't help it. I have a deep fascination with all the technology that dies in my lifetime.

Also, this was one of those weeks where I was like super busy and I had to just talk about something I already knew about. All right. So, I mean, this feels weird to ask, but what are coin operated machines? There are machines that you operate with coins, you dumbass? Damn. I was to say, my kids have no idea. Right, right, right.

Exactly. Yeah. I was speaking to Gen Z here. So the first known coin operated machine dates all the way back to the first century, possibly the year six, seven, we don't know, when Hero of Alexandria devised a machine that would dispense a predetermined amount of holy water when a coin was inserted. Because apparently taken more than your fair share of holy water was such a big problem. They had to bring in the engineers about it.

The machine was pretty simple. You would drop a coin in. It would hit a pan. And then the weight of the coin would tip the pan, which would open a valve. And then that would stay open until the coin slides off, which seems like a really easy system to abuse. Yeah, I mean, you use a wood nickel and the coin comes back out the holy water slot. It's perfect. It's perfect crime.

What do they think? Like, stupid, I'm nipotting God, I'll trick it. Yeah, right. I'll take all the holy water. Basically, you're twice the blessing for the cost of money. Now, there were a few other uses of technology the coin-operated technology back in the mud times. There were coin-operated tobacco dispensers in English taverns as early as 1615. This bizarre sentence also appears in the wiki article about the history of vending machines.

quote, an English bookseller, Richard Carlyle, devised a newspaper dispensing machine for the dissemination of banned works in 1822, end quote. And I just, I feel like you could use it to dispense any kind of works. But I can't find a copy of the design. So who the fuck knows? I don't know, maybe there was something. Officer, officer, I wasn't selling these nudie mags.

I locked them up safe here in this glass fronted safe. Yeah, right. So no one could get them. Yeah, I wasn't jerking off to him, officer. I was disseminating. But the whole concept of coin-operative machines really got going in the late 19th century. In 1867, a dude named Simon Denham was awarded British patent number 706. So, fucking pretty early to the patenting game.

And his patent was for a coin-operated stamp dispenser that the Wiki identifies as the first truly automatic vending machine. Meaning, I would imagine the first one where you don't, you know, you don't have to have like a do- watching to see if the motherfucker was just sticking rocks through the coin slot. Yeah, that seems really stupid until you see all the employees running the self-checkout. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, the first modern thing, it's nice.

So now the first modern vending machine, whatever the fuck, that means, didn't make its debut until the 1880s in London. That's thanks to a fellow with the very British name of Percival Everett. Jesus Christ. You're right? Yeah, so he invented a coin-operated postcard dispenser in 1883. pretty soon they were mainstays at every post office. And in addition to postcards, they were selling envelopes, notepad, stamps, and all manners of stationary. By 1887, coin-op machines were at least ubiquitous enough that there was a company founded just to install and maintain them. What do you mean? I have to pay someone every time I want to send a text message. That's highway rights.

Now, another interesting early use that seems like kind of a huge fuck you today was the installation of coin-operated reading lights on trains. It seems like a small convenience now, but in the 1880s, electric light was still seen as a bit of a luxury. In case you're curious, you got 30 minutes of light for one penny. That's a pre-decimal penny, by the way. So that's one, 240th of a pound rather than a hundredth. The inventor, Ryan Reginald Air, Senior. Now, of course, the technology quickly broke free of its postcard and electricity bounds, and soon pretty much everything was finding its way into vending machines.

bubble gum, candy, toiletries, newspapers, cigarettes, etc. But some enterprising folks took a look at this whole operation and they realized that the weak point was the part where the coin operated machine gave you something back. Right. That was a total fucking money loser. So in 1885, a clever entrepreneur patented the first coin operated strength tester and the era of the Vendlis machine was born. Okay, it feels like a criticism from the guy who spent an entire college tuition on arcade game. continues to spend an entire

exactly. Spoiler for a future episode but as a connoisseur of racist magic ephemera I was almost the owner of a wrestle the engine there words not mine strength tester machine

which I could have gotten for the unbeatable price of I don't want it to be here anymore if a certain wife hadn't forbidden me. Oh my, we don't need to name here.

Yeah, right, right. Now no one can wrestle the in. Jesus Christ. perhaps that's for the best. Another novel use for the coin-operated concept popped up in Berlin in 1895 when a restaurant called Quisessana pioneered the concept of the automat. That is a restaurant where all the food is served through vending machines.

Now, there are a couple of variations on this theme, but the one most familiar to our listeners, assuming any is familiar to any of our listeners, would be the type that popped up in the U.S. around the turn of the century. No, not that one, the one before that. So imagine a wall covered in coin operated windows, kind of like a wall of post office boxes with microwave oven faces, except for you can see through them easier. Super relatable.

Yeah, no, exactly. Everybody's with you. So imagine you're at a mimeograph and you're saying to telegram. People still have post offices. So other side of it, they do, though. They do. There's one in my town. We killed it with our podcast ads.

Yeah, but you live in the past, Noah. That doesn't count. Okay, no, that's right. Your counsel has wildfires. California has wildfires are cutting edge. Okay, so, okay, so you got this wall full of see-through post office boxes. Other side of the wall, there's a short order cook, pop in sandwiches and slices of pie and shit into the various boxes. Customers drop in however many nickels to open the door, grab the food, cook refills the window, more nickels open at Ritz repeat.

Their popularity peaked in America in the 1930s and 40s, but then they stuck around for another 30 years out of nostalgia. And then there was this weird and mostly failed effort to bring them back during COVID. So it's actually still possible to stumble across an automat in some northern cities today. Oh, some Gen Z person is going to market this as an introvert restaurant and it's going to make a fortune. Well, that's exactly how they're marketed. Dude, that's exactly how they're marketed. It was the original hub for Grub, if you were. Were they not? Of course, it'll surprise nobody who knows me to learn that the end of this business that I really find interesting is coin operative.

operated entertainment devices. See, these guys existed at the nexus of two societal forces that were at work in early 1900s America. The first, obviously, is the rise of the middle class, right? You go much further back than the late 1800s in very few parts of the globe. And the idea that you're going to go out with your free time is crazy if you're not an aristocrat. If a working class person with a family is going out before that, that means dad's abandoning

the family to go to a bar. Yeah, what are they supposed to do, Noah, tolerate their families. sober? Do you even hear yourself right now? Have you seen a poor person in public? It's gross. Now, around the turn of the century, you get this novel class of people who actually have a little money to burn at the end of the week because of the rise of labor unions and literally nothing else people. Jesus Christ, don't let that memory slip. But anyway, these people couldn't afford to do the fancy shit that rich people did, but they still wanted a taste of it, right? They

wanted like a simulacrum of wealth, like a bunch of fucking proto-influencers. So maybe they couldn't afford to go to a fancy restaurant, but they could stick a few nickels in it in an automat. That feels like a euphemism. Well, sometimes. So maybe they couldn't afford to go to a concert hall, but they could put a dime in a jukebox. They couldn't afford to see a Broadway show, but they could watch a short on a coin-operated kinetoscope. Now, the other trend, the second trend was the rise in what I call pre-consumer technology. So in the early 1920s, you had the first hints of a lot of the consumer entertainment technology that we have today, but it was way too expensive for anybody but the ultra wealthy to actually have in their homes. And so you had this cycle that kept up until very recently, actually, where the first consumer interaction with all these new technologies was in a coin operated machine.

Yeah, okay. And now everything has a fucking subscription service instead. So this artificial heart will beat 60 times a minute for the $19 a month here. But if you want to get excited or climb a flight of stairs, you'll need to upgrade. You'd rather just die? No, okay. That's a common response. If you get a very common response.

If you change your mind, you can just hold your phone over your chest and it will Apple pay it. Right there. Right, right, exactly. And if you get a friend to sign up, you actually get a discount for the next three months. So, okay. No, you can't share hearts between different houses. You've got to send yourself an email. I can share your friends.

if you're going to go somewhere else. Their own heart, sorry. So, okay, so a couple of examples here. So when Edison was first trying to figure out what the fuck to do with recorded sound, and by the way, it took him way too long to think of music. They tried coin-operated listening. So the first nickel in the slot phonograph,

again, sounds like a euphemism, it's not. The first nickel in the slot phonograph showed up in the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco in 1889. And because this motherfucker didn't have electronic amplification of any kind, you had to listen to it basically through a stethoscope. You would put in your nickel and then you'd put in your little earbuds and you would hear a wax cylinder recording of a brass band or classical music or a snippet of stand-up comedy for about two minutes.

And this apparently seemed like a great fucking deal back in the day because the first one installed earned $1,000 in its first six months, which is like $35,000 today. Okay. Well, as someone who forced my coworkers to take about 400 Waymoes at the San Francisco live show, I would like to say, Absolutely. So, the wheel turned by itself. It was pretty cool, yeah. It was weird that they wouldn't let us sit in the driver's seat.

That seems like a waste of a fucking seat. I pretended to jerk it off, though. That was fun. Okay. I reached over. That was a good bit. Yeah, yeah. No, give Johnny Cab a little handy.

That's nice. So another obvious example here is the pay phone. Well, I guess it's not as obvious for people from this century, but that used to be a thing. the first coin operated phone bank popped up in Hartford, Connecticut in 1889, and they continued to be a thing until cell phones made a novelty of them like a decade or two ago. But they used to be super popular. They used to be so popular they had their own little houses on the street corner, which, by the way, we're entirely see-through on all sides. So it would be really easy to tell if somebody was changing their clothes in one, Clark.

You might as well just be changing your fucking shit in the street. Yeah, kids, just so you know, sexting was kind of a group project back then. Exactly, yes. But I would say the quintessential example here is the moving picture. Before we had the ability to project film on those screens for like rooms full of people, there were devices like Edison's kinetoscope. Now, these devices allowed a viewer to look through a peephole and see like a 50-foot reel of film that was illuminated by an electric lamp.

That showed up in 1894, and then a year later, a much cheaper and simpler device called the mutoscope came out that used a flipbook on a big, like, Rolodex wheel, instead of of a film reel. Now, those wheels could hold about 850 frames, which made for a one-minute video. The kinetoscopes could theoretically play a full minute, but most of their reels were about 20 to 30 seconds. And since they required electricity, they were much more expensive to operate. Needless to say, the mutoscope quickly became the dominant force on the market. Yeah, and 130 years later, Instagram figured out that people would become both the creators and consumers of their own reels, freeing up the company to invest in protecting sex predators full-time.

So yeah, that's good. Yeah, no, that's capitalism working as intended. So, and by the way, I should note that the whole looking through a people aspect of the mutoscope got a lot of people thinking dirty right away. Many of the reels were things like vaudeville acts, circus acts, or dramatic reenactments of famous historical scenes or whatever, but the most popular all had really lascivious titles like

a dip in the raw. If you had a wife like this and the delightful quadruple entendre Will I lean back ever bend over? Makes no fucking sense if you don't read it. Yeah, right. No sense. I know we're making porn, but I don't like that title. It's not.

It was all like pretend porn. It was fake porn. It was like a porn pump fake. But there were also a few titles that I at least, but there were at least a few titles that I at least hope didn't sound as salacious back then. Like, for example, how Tommy got a poll on his grandpa. Oh, no.

Fun fact. To tell you how everything old is new again, the Kinetoscope came out in April of 1894. The first actually pornographic one was confiscated just three months later.

Oh, amazing. But enough about Tom's grandpa. Let's take a quick break. There's some apropos of nothing. Say, mister. Mr. Yeah? You're looking for a pleasure?

Hey, wrong tree there, buddy. No, no, not me. Not me. I'm talking about, uh, this. The, uh, pleasure barrel. The pleasure barrel. That's right. Just a dollar and you step into this alley and stick your member inside and let the Lacey soft mechanics inside do their work.

You know what I mean? Lacey Soft? Lacey Soft, my friend Lacey and soft. I don't know. How do I know it ain't some sort of trick. there to rob me, huh? Look, I ain't trying to rob you. I just... God damn it, Elmore. Dude, you have to pitch faster. I am dying in there. There's a hole in the barrel. One hole, Greg. I'm not a spider in a jar. I'm gonna go. Oh, come on, Mr. Don't go. Don't go. Don't go.

Also, you got to stop with the lacy soft thing, man. You're overselling. Maybe you should have saved a little more, huh? I have sensitive skin. This message is sponsored by Raycon. Hey podcast listener. As No Illusions ascends the spiral staircase towards death, he's acquired many new old guy habits, an appreciation for broccoli, a resting stance with his hands on his lower back.

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I sure have old timer. Raycon sent us a pair to try when they first became a sponsor. They're really light and the ear hook part rotates so they actually stay in. I've worn them at the gym on walks and doing stuff around the house. They don't fall out and they don't get uncomfortable. The essential open earbuds are the perfect addition to your everyday routine. Go to buy raycon.com slash citation. open to get 15% off. And Raycon, thanks for sponsoring.

All right, Eli, thanks. Even though you made all that old guy's stuff up. Yeah? Do you want to get up from your chair right now without making any noises? No, I'm actually too busy doing work. Sure. Young work. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libson ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libson ads. Email Bob at Libson.com to learn more.

That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. And we're back. When we left off, the slots were getting filled. What happened next? Okay, so this is the part where I admit that the real reason that we're talking about coin-operated machines is that I wanted an excuse to do a thing about the history of pinball. But if I devoted a full episode of that, I'd have to get even deeper in the weeds than we already are.

And I feel like if I ever take you guys that deep into the weeds, you're just going to leave me there. Yeah, no, you lure us in with the cheesecake windows. And now we are trapping. Well, that's what I figure. Yeah, the good stuff. Yeah. Okay, so before we dive into this,

I want you to picture this bizarre scene from our actual history. The year is 1942. There's a bitter January, chill in New York City when New York mayor Fiorillo LaGuardia finally gets the city council approval that he's been begging for. So, armed with a sledgehammer, he joins with a special task force to finally raid the bastards that were threatening to corrupt the city's youth. So they headed straight for the candy stores and the amusement parks to smash the ever-loven fuck out of pinball machines. What? and throw their shattered mechanical corpses into the Hudson River where they still lie today.

Tom totally would have helped. Absolutely, yes. Okay, Eli, if you think I even care about the why anymore, you severely underestimate my love of sledgehammers and shattered corpses. That's what is Valentine to Haley said this name? So, yeah, so for a mind-numbing 34 years from 1942, in 1976, the Big Apple maintained a strict ban on

pinball machines, and they were hardly alone. Between the 40s and the 70s, hundreds of American cities would ban pinball, and it would take one of the most bizarre court performances in the history of American jurisprudence to finally reverse that ban. But we'll get there in a minute. First, we need to back up

and take a look at the birth of pinball. Yeah, pinball was born. It was a very cute baby centibite and would grow up to be the dreaded pinhead. So it's a whole thing. So we're just just going to talk about the happy years. All right. So pinball arises out of several different games,

depending on who you ask, but the earliest realistic start for this history is in 1871 when Montaug Redgrave patented the first spring plunger. And he came up with this game where you launch a ball from the right side of a playfield full of pins. The table, of course, is inclined a little bit.

And depending on how the ball bounces, it might drop into a target that was worth points. Or it might not, in which case you could go, fuck yourself. Now, the player really didn't have any control of where the fuck it landed, except for like you could nudge it a little bit this way and that. And that was the whole game. That was the game.

Yeah. Now, to be clear, that game actually already existed. It was a French game called Bagotel, and all Redgrave was doing was adding this spring-loaded plunger instead of a queue. But despite the patent being half a century old at that point, the first Red Grave Bagotel wasn't produced

until 1927. Was it because it took 50 years for someone to think that sounded fun. It actually was. No, it was, though. It was. Yeah, I know how many years until enough people tried it four times and then just wandered off to throw rocks off the overpass

instead? And pinball died its inevitable death. Oh, you would think, but no, no. So, okay, so for technical reasons that are boring, even to me, the Red Grave Baggettel doesn't actually count. Imagine everybody what those reasons would have to be for just a minute.

I need you to read the Patreon comments, Noah. Every time you say that, some nerd is like, Oh, so we're just ignoring the remark. Right, right. So, but the honor of the first pinball, that would go to 1931's Whiffle. You'll far more often, though, here, David Gottlieb's baffle ball listed as the first pinball machine,

mostly because David Gottlieb worked really fucking hard to make everybody think that. Jewish. But regardless of what came first, everyone can agree that Baffleball was the first hit pinball game. It was the pong of pinball. And at its peak, Gottlieb was knocking out 400 baffle ball tables a day. Soon after Baffleball got big, one of Gottlieb's distributors, a guy by the name of Raymond DeMalone, he got frustrated by how hard it was to fill the demand for Baffleball units.

So he started his own company making an upgraded version with more prizes and a larger playfield. And then he named his company Ballyhoo after a popular magazine of the day. but he would later shorten it to just Bally. Did you call your pinball machine company Bally dude? Because that's lazy. That's fucking lazy. It's different, different.

It's the inflection that makes it everybody. That's just how it's spelled. That's just how it's spelled. You shut up. Now, the tables back then were significantly smaller than pinball machines today. They also still lacked any way to manipulate the ball other than nudging the sides as the ball fell.

And because people were just started whacking the shit out of them. Manifegers quickly learned that they needed to add some sort of like tilt warning of like this is how much you're allowed to bounce it. At first, by the way, this was just a ball that would like sit precariously on a rod and if you nudged it too hard, that ball would fall off

and then the machine was shut down and you'd lose. But that sucked because then somebody would have to unlock the cabinet and then physically replace the little ball before it could be played again. But by 1935, a more sophisticated system for tilt warnings was developed. Yeah, it was a lady with a mom voice who would yell, What are you kids doing in there? We're waiting for someone to invent fun, Ma.

Until then, this is all we got. I just want everybody, podcast lists and I just want everybody to imagine Tom with one of these machines. Because he was nudging. Nudging it instantly. Tom broke our studio door when it didn't open fast enough. Should have opened. He tore it open. Like it literally tore it open.

Like it didn't work afterwards. It worked better in the first place and opened like I wanted it to. When Tom was visiting the house in which he now lives, they had a fake door on one of the walls. And he pulled it off its hinges because he thought it was, his words not mine, tricky. They had a, they had a, it was actually a door not. but yeah, the doorknob. It was supposed to turn. Doorknob should turn.

That's a... No, that is what they're for. It does now. Well, I'll tell you what. Now it floats in space. You know, don't you dare put a non-turning doorknob in front of me. I'll make it turn. That's, every doornaub is a turning one to Tom.

That's right. So, now, so, okay, so there were early attempts to add some player influence to the whole thing other than the Tom stuff. There was a proto-flipper on a game as early as 1932. and then there was another 1932 game called Juggle Ball that had a little rod that the player could not manipulate the ball with. But the double flipper system that we associate with pinball today wouldn't show up until 1947.

So for better than a decade and a half, pinball survived as a game of sure hope I get points this time. I mean, for many of us, it still holds that place of honor. That's true. That's true. I'm just pushing buttons and waiting to die. a proto-flipper turning into a full-blown flipper and then double-flipper in 15 years is the conversation creationists do not want to have. That's all I'm saying. Now, of course, that whole like, sure hope I get points to, that's only surprising because we're comparing it to modern pinball. So up to this point in our discussion of coin-operated machines, you may have noticed a sort of glaring omission in the form of coin-operated gambling machines.

Right. But they showed up early on in coin-up history as well. the oldest is, of course, the familiar three-real slot machine, which first showed up in San Francisco in 1895. An early pinball more neatly slotted into the category of gambling game than video game's older cousin who smokes, right, which is the category that it lives in today. Now, much at the vertical form of the game, Pachinko, thank you. And this is pretty much the same as the vertical form of this game, Pichinko, right, which was popular in Japan about the same time that PIN ball was coming of age in the U.S. Pinball was born as a gambling game. Fun fact, Japan still has incredibly strict gambling laws. So in order to get around this, when you win at a Pachinko parlor,

you can actually only trade the balls in for stuffed animals like little bears. However, there is a totally unrelated place across the street that buys bears just like the one you're holding for money. Somehow they make it work. Yeah, no, symbiotic relationship. It's like how in D.C. It's illegal to sell weed. So, but you can, like, offer free weed with the purchase of an overpriced sticker.

What? So, yeah, no, that's how it works at D.C. So, okay, so, but, so with the addition of flippers, pinball slowly started to morph into a game of skill, which made it terrible for gambling. So what you've now got is this incredibly fun game. Wait, where? It has to, this selectively incredibly fun game that has to. that has to sort of transition out of the category of gambling device and into the one marked thing it's okay for your kid to do.

A lot of folks took issue with that, most notably, Fiorillo LaGuardia. So all over the country, pinball machines were banned by parents' groups that insisted they were teaching children to gamble and addicting them to games of chance. Oh, no, the kids will gamble away all there. No, wait, kids don't have any fucking money. Who gives a shit? Yes, yes. This is nothing.

So over the years, most places managed to get that stick out of their own asses naturally, but not New York City. In order for them to lift their fucking ban, a pinball wizard named Roger Sharp had to go to court, where lawyers for the amusement and music operators association had set up a couple of pinball machines. And then the dude had to- dumb and blind. No, no, he was. He was thinking of a different guy. But yeah, yeah, similar profession. So, but he's, he had to play the shit out of these games, these pinball games, and explain,

what he was doing the whole time to a judge and a jury to convince him it wasn't a chance game that it was a skill game. So he's like calling his shots the whole time going, okay, now I've got the red and the yellow and the green targets. I'm going to shoot the upper left here where the blue target is. This has been compared in pinball circles to Babe Ruth calling his home run in the 1932 World Series, mostly by Roger Sharpe. Judges like Mr. Sharp, I'm afraid the pussies in this room are too wet.

It's a threat of public safety. Taste dismissed. You need a bucket in a month. So weirdly enough, by the way, Chicago wouldn't lift its ban on pinball machines until the following year, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of pinball machines have always been manufactured in Chicago since the birth of the goddamn device. Now, of course, for the same reason, their ban was never really enforced. So overturning it was sort of a box checking moment when they finally did. Yeah, they had to wait for a really.

chunky guy on the south side with a pinky ring, get no neck to nod very subtly. That's cool, Tom. You never told me you did that. That's a fun. It's ridiculous, Eli. I've never done anything very subtly. No, that's fair. That's fair. You guys hear about the door

at the studio? But of course, I'm only spending this much time on pinball because that's the coin operated machine that I like the most. The granddaddy of coin operated machines through this whole post-war period, though, was the juke box. Now, technically, those stethoscope phonograph things that Edison put out are considered

the first jukeboxes, but it wasn't until 1928 that anybody made one that could be heard without headphones. That came about when a player piano manufacturer with the amazing name of Justice P. Seberg added a loud speaker and a bulky record player to the mix. You know there was one ASMR pervert who heard this and was like, no, dude, this is way worse. Trust you. Yeah, right. Right. There was like the early pro-hipsters that were like, no, no, you've got to hear this on wax cylinder. Dude, it was so much better on Stethysko.

So the jukebox really reached its heyday, though, in the 1940s, and it came to damn near defying the decade of the 50s. And in a lot of ways, we can thank jukeboxes for all the coin-operated games that would go on to define the 80s. The infrastructure of coin-op businesses that they had created left everybody always scrimmed. to find a way to make the next cutting edge technology into a coin-operated distraction. Yeah, meanwhile, all over Europe, they figure out how to monetize taking a shit, and they're laughing at us while doing the pee-p-dance and fishing on in their pockets for exact change for a number two. Wait, why would you do the pee-p-dance if you needed to do a number?

Well, you always have. So, you got a one. Different dances. It's a different dance. It's a same dance. I have two dances. I have very distinct dances. I'm like a B, all right, when it comes to my defecatory dancing. Now, of course, the era of the coin operator machine is pretty much at its end. This has come about from the combination of the fact that people don't carry physical money as much anymore.

And fewer things can actually be purchased with any but a sort of obscene amount of coins. We still have stuff like pinball machines and vending machines, but they far more often now are operated by credit cards or phone taps rather than, you know, putting coins into a slot anywhere. more. And somehow my brain tells me that something is lost in that, even though my brain knows good and fucking well, that that's just weird, nostalgic old guy shit. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? I'm a weird, nostalgic old guy. Yes, you are no emotions. All right. And are you ready for the quiz? Of course I am. Okay, Noah, I know we rarely do an actual quiz on this part of the show, but I know you're going love this one. So no Googling.

What is the best selling pinball machine of all time because of a surprising technicality. Okay. Oh yeah. Oh, no, yeah. I don't need a... You didn't need multiple choices. No, go ahead. Go ahead with your...

A. Go to your stupid choices. I already know. Idiot. B. Star Trek. C. Flash. Or D. The Kiss.

pinball machine. All right. So I know the answer, but I don't know what the surprising technicality is. It is A, the Adams family pinball machine,

and I think the technicality is the thousand gold edition ones that they sold, but it was already the best selling even before that thousand. It is the thousand gold edition. So I didn't know if you would know this, but yes,

they were up there, but then they released the gold edition. And of course, the rush for them became huge, especially in the like, collectors market and it's still to this day is one of the hardest pinball machines it is it's oh Eli

this is so much of a nerd I am about this shit somebody can Google me but I'm pretty sure that it's 21,320 units sold I'm pretty sure that's the same that's with a thousand gold edition I'm gonna fucking go this I didn't even know my wife's birthday I'm probably wrong by that but I probably not wrong by very much

so I think I've got a pretty good head count on the kids. That's 21,2. Like, I'm like with him plus or minus two. I was off by 50. I was okay. I was off by 50. I'll take fucking.

Take his pinball patch away. Tommy would be very disappointed. Who even are you? Oh, amazing. Okay. All right. An entire episode on vending machines and not a single mention of coin operated unmentionable dispensers.

Shame on you. Shame. You're right. Which of the below are real things available for machine vend right now? A, bags of freshly popped popcorn in Japan. That sounds amazing. B, live crabs in China. Not as amazing. C, gold. Just gold in Florida.

Yeah. B, live bait in New Jersey. That makes sense. E. Bullets in Texas. Really? F. Sharkootery, including wine in a surprising

number of places. Outstanding. G, this is for real. CPR lessons in some airports. Hold on! This dollar bill isn't straight. Give me a second. I'm rubbing it on a side.

Hold on. No, just have them. Hold on. H. Grave lanterns candles at many cemeteries. And finally, I blocks of cheese in Switzerland,

which is why Heath is not on his separate. Yeah, once he right now, we're never getting back. I also think Jay, like, because there's car vending machines in some places as well. They're our car vending machines. Yeah, yeah. Carvana ones.

Those are cool. K, all the fucking above somehow. Indeed. Indeed. All right, Noah. We know the best pinball game of all time, but what's the worst one? A, the Grand Wizard. B.

The extra ball cancer. C. Scott Adams family. Or D. Cicel. D. Cilidamide Fliper. Cicel.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Cicel. Something Italian. I would buy that. All right. Well, Philidamide Fliper is easily the worst thing that you've ever fucking written. I was a man,

I was sold on Scott Adams family. That's so bad. It's got to be D. It is. Steve. We're not going to say it anymore because I'm probably going to beep it anyway. No, no, no. I quit the fucking show if you want to beep it.

I won't beep it. Well, maybe I will. We'll see. Noah wins. Does anyone win today? Does anyone really win? All of us win. All right.

Well, I would like Eli to do an essay next time. Interesting. All right. well for Tom, Noah and Cecil. I'm Eli Bosnick. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then. I will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to our other podcasts and the other podcast places.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave this a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes. Connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. Nine-year-olds should make their own lunch. I'm just saying nine is very old. Nine is very old.

That's crazy. That's such crazy. Dude. Jesus Christ. Plenty old enough to make their own fucking lunch. Jesus Christ. Bologna goddamn sandwich. They should make a fucking bashamel.

What are you kidding? Nine years old. Should have a fucking job. By nine, you should be changing the oil in the song. Jesus. Christ. Yeah, we all turned out great. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada.

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