The Surprising Origin of Pinball

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, and that includes your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. Jeremy Saussure is the assistant vice president for interpretation and electronic games, and he's also the editor of the American Journal of Play at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Today, he gives us the exciting history of an American icon, an American original, the pinball machine. I would say pinball is an American icon. It traces its roots back to a French parlor table game called bagatelle. Sometimes it would be in a form that looks similar to a pool table. The player would get to hit a ball, often with something that resembled a cue stick that we would use today in pool.

Initially, the idea was to avoid pins. There'd be these little wooden pins and a lot of different versions of the game, and eventually that evolved into where you actually had fixed pins and scoring holes. That kind of link, if you were to say missing link, between bagatelle and pinball happens in the late 19th century with an English immigrant to America, Montague Redgrave. He patents in 1871 what he called improvements in bagatelle, and that introduced the spring-loaded ball shooter, what today we would refer to as the plunger, the idea of also adding sound effects or sound to the game by putting bells on the play field. The first pinball machines made this type of game into a coin-operated machine. It took that play field and it essentially monetized it.

It placed it in a wooden case. It put a piece of glass over the play field to separate the player from the game. As you think of ramps and flippers and all those things, that's starting in the 40s and 50s. The first game that introduces the idea of really like let's have flippers to actually control and to bat the balls around is 1947.

This game Humpty Dumpty had six flippers and they were on each side of the play field. This changes pinball, right? It makes it much more interactive and that becomes particularly important to the kind of public debates that are going to happen about pinball. The best example of this in the early 1940s is in New York City, Mayor LaGuardia bans pinball, actually does prohibition-style raids to kind of root out pinball. They had been associated and in some cases used in gambling and essentially money laundering.

I mean, you have these bans in Los Angeles, you have them in Ohio and they're all over the country. There's all these associations and all these anxieties around what are children doing with their time. The stories about kids stealing, you know, lunch money or stealing money from their parents to go to play pinball and it being a gateway to organized crime. There's a pinball moral panic, but you start to see that kind of breakup in the 1970s. There's an important event that happens with the New York City Council in 1976 with a major pinball player at the time, Roger Sharp. In 1976, Sharp and a number of folks who are really in support of overturning that ban go before the New York City Council and in this sort of dramatic, you know, Babe Ruth calling the shot moment, he plays a pinball game in a way that shows the counselors that pinball is actually a game of skill. He can tell them, hey, this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to show you this is how you can play pinball and affect what's happening on the play field.

It was overturned with a vote of about 30 to six, 30 to five, 30 to six. It's probably also worth mentioning that in the 1970s, pinball was extremely popular. New York City also saw the fact that, hey, this is going to be a revenue generator because we can license and register all these machines and make money off of that. But what's also happening is the introduction of video games. Video games were making a tremendous amount of money, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s when there was an arcade craze. And so there was a tremendous amount of effort being made by the burgeoning video game industry to kind of inject respectability into the coin op industry as a whole. And so they helped to legitimize pinball, but they're also seeing that pinball is in some ways pushed out of the arcade.

A lot of what it becomes, I think, has to do with the influence of video games. You see video game themed pinball games going into arcades. There's a defender pinball machine. There's a Space Invaders pinball machine. What you also see is them trying to incorporate the form and some of the conventions of video games into pinball games.

There's a game called Hyperball that took sort of mini pinballs. You had a trigger and you're just firing balls at these targets on the play field. It was difficult to understand. You were spelling out words. You were also trying to stop these bolts of lightning from coming down and hitting your base.

And it just didn't work. You had that level of influence where it was really directly affecting the games. And then the other piece, I think, is that you now have these development teams that are led by designers, but you've got engineers, animators. It's a completely multi-sensory experience. It's really bringing people into these immersive spaces in this really beautiful marriage of technology, of art, of storytelling, and play that really comes together and, I think, kind of immerses you in what today is pinball. And a great job by Chrissy, our intrepid intern, and a special thanks to Jeremy Saucier, who is the Assistant Vice President for Interpretation and Electronic Games and editor of the American Journal of Play at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Again, the story of the pinball here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more. Geico asks, how would you love a chance to save some money on insurance? Of course you would. And when it comes to great rates on insurance, Geico can help, like with insurance for your car, truck, motorcycle, boat, and RV. Even help with homeowners or renters coverage. Plus add an easy to use mobile app, available 24 hour roadside assistance, and more. And Geico is an easy choice. Switch today and see all the ways you could save. It's easy. Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today. And we return to our American stories and up next, a story about drinking or rather the story behind drinking in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Here's Monty. Louisiana is a state that exists in a lot. The people of New Orleans are a lot to take in. The state holds the world record for the biggest survey of gumbo. And the great residents of Louisiana also boiled a world record number of crawfish in 2012.

But there is another thing they do a lot of. Here's Liz Williams of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum with more on that. Well, we drink a lot. One of the things that's important is coffee and chicory. We drink a lot of coffee, but we drink it often with chicory in it. That came from the French. The French came over with that idea because chicory grows wild in France. And so people used it as a way to stretch their coffee. And so even though they brought this practice over here, and even though nowadays chicory actually is more expensive than coffee, we still drink it.

So it's no longer used as a stretcher. It's just a taste that we've developed. I think of it more like a mocha or something.

It's just a different flavor. What else do we drink? A lot of alcohol. The Germans brought their beer making traditions here.

And so we had beer on very, very early. We also, because we were growing sugarcane, had a lot of rum. And you won't find that there was like this big distillery here or anything like that. What you find is that everybody made their own rum. So it's not like you can say, oh, this distillery has been around for all these years and it's been manufacturing rum forever. No, everybody just made their own rum on their own plantation or whatever. And so earlier, people used to think, well, there was no rum.

It's like, no, everybody just made their own. We also drank a lot of bourbon. Because we were a port city, we were really, really busy. And there were lots of visitors here all the time doing business. And so let's say that you lived up the river, say in St. Louis or something like that. You come down the river, but you're waiting for the goods to come down.

And what do you do? You just sit around in the bar in the hotel and talk to the other people who are doing the same thing you are. And everybody's drinking. Because of that, we drank more bourbon than the rest of the country put together. But it was because of our drinking culture that the development of aged bourbon happened. Because before that, everybody just drank bourbon right out of the still. And when it came down here, the barrels were used just because the orders were so big.

And that's how they kind of learned that it changes and gets better in the barrel. You know, in the most recent times, Kentucky has been able to own bourbon by law. And if you make it in Tennessee, it's Tennessee whiskey. It's not bourbon, even if you make it in the same method or whatever. But the story of this really has to do with the Scotch-Irish, you know, who were distillers making scotch and they came here to America.

And the grain that was the most available to them was corn. So this became a corn whiskey that they made. And it doesn't have the smoky flavor of scotch.

It's really quite different. And they used to just drink it right out of the still. And they began to barrel it and send it mostly to New Orleans. And that's how they discovered that the aging process gave it the vanilla tones from the oak and the in and out from the barrel.

The charcoal on the inside of the barrel took out a lot of the impurities and made it a lot smoother. So it's, you know, become the American whiskey. And not just because us normal people do it, but so have our leaders. So George Washington, of course, he was a gentleman farmer and he was very English in his attitude that that's what you should do is you should farm, that that was the way to live. But that was the lifestyle.

You don't really make money as a farmer. And so he had a distillery on his farm and he and a number of other of our presidents were very involved in distillation. And everybody was a drinker during Prohibition. For example, the White House stocked up on alcohol before Prohibition went into effect so that they had enough that they still hadn't run out by the end of Prohibition. So if you lived in the White House, you always could drink. Among the presidents to consider whiskey their favorite drink. Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Martin Van Buren and William McKinley, who had a drink named after him called McKinley's Delight, which contains one dash of a very potent spirit that has unique foreign roots and was brought to New Orleans.

Absence. So New Orleans remained a French speaking place until World War One in the 1880s, well after we were a state for over 50 years. Edgar Degas, the painter, came to New Orleans and he said, oh, I didn't even have to bother to learn to speak English to go visit my brother. His brother lived here because everybody still spoke French. So because of that French connection, because Absence was popular in Paris, it was popular here.

This is the way Absence is generally served. So you have a saucer that you put it on. There would always be a number on the saucer. So sometimes there were also colors on the saucers for people who couldn't read.

They would know that this is two francs or one franc or whatever. So anyway, these saucers are like coasters and you see it keeps the condensation from dripping off the bottom. So then you have a glass. So Absence glasses are almost always made with these kinds of distinctions where the decoration changes. So you don't have to measure.

You don't have to have any kind of instrument. You just look at the glass and the glass gives you the cues. Then you have this trowel-like thing, which we call an Absence spoon. It's pierced so that water can go through it.

And usually there's a crimp on it, which makes it seem stable on the glass's edge. This is a sugar cube. So today our sugar cubes are made of pressed granulated sugar and they dissolve quickly.

But in those days, cubes were just one big crystal that you broke off of this big thing. And so it was solid and it didn't dissolve that easily because it wasn't already granulated. So you would take this thing and you would put it under the faucet and let it drip, drip, drip. Not poured, but drip. It could take 10 or 15 minutes, one drip at a time, until it came as high as you wanted in terms of water. By that time, because you made sure that the drip went onto the cube so it would dissolve.

And then you would let it go into your glass and you would then use the spoon to break up any little bit that was left and stir it all up and then you would drink it. So this became its own ritual. And because the proof was like 180 proof, I mean it was really a high proof. People were always drunk. And they, have you ever heard of people talking about seeing pink elephants? That's because when you have a lot to drink, you hallucinate. And so they say, oh, you're seeing pink elephants. Well the French didn't say that. The French, because the chlorophyll in the herbs that they would macerate in the alcohol made it turn a little green, they said you were being visited by the green fairy. Which is why everything associated with absinthe is always tinted kind of green because they say the green fairy is going to visit you. Maybe more interesting than pink elephants, although I think pink elephants are very interesting.

I see that he's far more interested in pink elephants. A special thanks to Monty for his work and a special thanks to Liz Williams, the story of our favorite beverages here on Our American Stories. Can we return to Our American Stories? Up next, a story you won't forget from deep in the Ozarks about the time honored tradition of guitar making and a man who made it his mission, not for monetary gain or any sort of fame.

Let's get into the story. Some people really resonate with Ed's work and some don't get it. It's interesting when I show this to other musicians, these instruments, some musicians just embrace it and think it's the neatest thing they've ever seen in their whole life. You can hardly get it out of their hands once they've got it.

Other musicians play it and think this is not a very good guitar. Why are you so interested in this? They just don't get it.

They just flat out don't get it. So my name is Kelly Mulholland and this is my wife Donna. Hi. And this Ed Stille thing has been very much something we did together and it kind of is parallel with our own relationship. I think we met 26 years ago and soon became a folk band called Still on the Hill after that. And actually we are talking from our Ozark Instrument Museum.

That's right. Right now we're surrounded by instruments made by people from the Ozarks but primarily one whole wall is nothing but instruments made by a man named Ed Stille. She's the one that discovered Ed Stille. Yeah, a friend of mine was giving me a massage and I was over at her house and on her mantle there was Ed Stille guitar and I was like, what is that? And she said, oh I used to live in Hogscald Holler next to this man named Ed Stille that made just hundreds of these strange instruments. And I said, oh my gosh, Kelly has got to meet him.

And so she took us. We got escorted to Ed's place down in Hogscald Holler which is just all by itself. It's a very isolated community in the Ozarks and it's just like you walk back in time.

It looks like it's 1930. This shacks and all these, you know, just basically what you might think of as a hillbilly existence and they do have electricity now but only recently have they added those sorts of things. They still were drinking water that was just coming down the hill in a creek into the, called the Hogscalds.

The Hogscald is a limestone formation right by the house where they would scald hogs in the little limestone pools. That's kind of a whole other story but when we get there, there are dozens and dozens of instruments being underway and they're all just fantastic folk art and we're thinking this can't be, you know, it's just too good to be true. And so we developed a relationship with Ed.

He's very, very welcoming to us right away and we start visiting regularly and we just go over there and see what he was doing. But ironically, Ed does not consider his instrument making art. It is just his mission to tell about God. This was a very devotional mission for him and the reason for it all, we found out very early when we asked him a very simple question.

We said, Ed, how did you get doing this in the first place? And his answer was kind of unexpected. He said, well, I was plowing my field like I always do with my mule and he must have had a heart attack and there was nobody there to help him and so he was laying on the ground and wondering what his fate would be. And at this moment, he had a vision that he was a tortoise, a giant tortoise swimming in a raging river.

These are his words, I'll never forget. His five children were little tortoises hanging onto the shell and he knew that he had to get the family to the other side of this raging river and if he did, the Lord was going to tell him what his purpose was and what he was to do with the rest of his life. And so when he got to the other side of the river, what he heard was kind of unexpected.

He was told to make musical instruments and give them to children. That Ozark sun was beating down, dropped my plow to the rocky ground and the world turned black in a heart attack and a vision passed before my eyes. Was I dead or alive? I pray the Lord take me to the other side. I became a great tortoise swimming like hell, my five little children clinging to my shell and from a raging river deep and wide. That day I heard the Lord confide, shed your vanity, shed your pride and I'll see you make it to the other side. And I knew that moment my fate was sealed when the Lord told me he'd make me a deal. I'd deliver my children to that shore. He'd show me what these hands were for, build guitars in his name.

That's what I'll do until my dying day. So we love that story that he told us about the tortoise and the river and we turned that into a song that we eventually called Take Me to the Other Side and we've played it for countless people over the years and it's just become an anchor in our world. Back to having to make musical instruments, see, Ed had never made a musical instrument. Ed had made barns and chicken coops and fences and gardens, you know, everything you need to do in the Ozarks to keep a family fed, but Ed had never made a musical instrument. He had an old guitar, he had a Sears and Roebuck, no, a Silvertone guitar that he received way back in like 1940 and he used that to preach. So he was a remedial guitar player and an exceptionally good preacher-singer. Knew every single hymn and all 30 verses of every single hymn.

A living encyclopedia of hymns. The old ship of Zion still sailing today And a gathering pilgrim the long and last way She's landed a million and still landing more O'er the state of all ages on some far shore The old ship of Zion and faith So he's told to make musical instruments and has no idea how to do it. He also has no resources to ask. He doesn't know anybody that's going to tell him how to do it. And he doesn't have any books that show him how to do it. So he just figures it out one instrument at a time. And that's what I think is most interesting about Ed's story is that he basically reinvented the wheel. And what a story you're hearing. Ed has a heart attack laying on the ground and has this vision. And Americans have visions and we talk about them.

And we're not embarrassed to. God told him to make musical instruments and give them to children. And then we hear this beautiful song about that experience. Shed your vanity.

Shed your pride. Take me to the other side. He had never made a guitar but God told him to. And he just figured it out. And in the end reinvented the instrument. When we come back, more of Ed Stilley's story here on Our American Stories.

And we're back with Our American Stories and with Kelly and Donna Mulholland. They're telling the story of Ed Stilley, a poor farmer in the Ozarks who they befriended after learning about his unique guitars. Guitars he made for a rather divine purpose. Let's get back to the story. You know there's a great tradition in guitar making.

And people learn from each other. But Ed just started from scratch. And so his first instruments were really strange and crude and the fret placement had nothing to do with the proper fret placement. So they couldn't really play music.

They were just experiments. But he just kept trying. And eventually he learned how to put the frets in kind of the right place. And he used his old silver tone as a model.

So he eventually figured out how to make a playable instrument. We're sitting here looking at this array of Ed Stilley instruments while we're talking. And the shapes are all over the map. There's one here that's rectangular like a box. There's this giant butterfly shaped one. There's one that's oval. They're all different shapes. There's a real good reason for that. He was not trying to be clever or funny or whimsical in his shapes even though they look like that.

They look kind of cartoonish. But the fact is we found out right away that the shape is really a result of his weird process. His unorthodox process that he used to build. He started with bending the sides. So he had this old piece of wood with pegs in it and he would boil the wood that was going to be the sides. In a hog trough overnight.

Yep. They're all a crazy quilt of Ozark wood. There was somebody over at the sawmill that was giving him run offs. They call it cut offs or slab wood. It's kind of the waste product from a sawmill.

It's the last piece cut. He'd say, their trash is my treasure. And once it became supple, he said he'd just bend them until they were about to pop and he could start to hear them crack. He'd just bend it randomly as far as the wood would allow.

And then once it was dry in the morning, he'd take it off the pegboard and it would kind of stay bent. And then whatever that shape was, that was going to be the guitar. So he would piece these little curved pieces together and then he'd build a top to fit. Opposite of real guitar making. But before he put the top on, he would start this strange process of adding metallic components.

And the metallic objects were basically to compensate. He didn't have any power tools when he first started. So it was impossible for him to make the wood thin. A real modern guitar, well not me, any guitar is made very, very thin and lightweight.

And that's why it works. His were the opposite. It was frustrating because they didn't ring and sing out. You know, the instruments were so heavy. Almost a quarter inch thick wood. So he started turning to metallic objects. Something that you could flick with your finger and it would make a ringing sound. Pot lids and saw blades and springs and stuff. Glass jars, chainsaw sprockets, tin cans, wind chimes. You know, I'm sure I'm forgetting some other objects.

We've had all these, by the way, we took them all and had them x-rayed. And it's really fascinating to look at it and kind of figure out why he did what he did. And you say, Ed, why do you put all this in there? He said, to better speak the voice of the Lord. That was his pat answer.

You can hardly argue with that. But it was interesting. He never heard the word reverb. He did not know what reverb was. And in creating reverb, like in amplifiers and stuff, they have plate reverb and spring reverb. And Ed was creating reverb in his instruments just by osmosis without even knowing that that's what he was doing. He accidentally reinvented spring reverb and plate reverb without knowing about either technology or the word. So if you give a strum on one of his instruments, you can just really hear the reverb ringing. It's amazing. It's a very magical thing.

The reason they're this red color is he used barn paint, barn red, barn paint because it's very, very cheap. And then a really sweet thing is like every instrument in recent times has true faith, true light, have faith in God carved on the top. And for years Ed wanted to get a router so that he could just route the letters and stuff. And he's prayed and prayed and prayed and finally his family just said, they just broke down and they brought him a router and he said, my prayers have been answered.

And it's so cute. But they all say that on them, true faith, true light, have faith in God. Really, that's all Ed was interested in. He had one purpose in doing this and that is for you to read those words. That was no small thing to Ed. He wanted people to see that.

And this is probably a good time to mention his connection to the family Bible. It was really interesting because we had been out in his workshop and there was a Bible sitting out there that had been, it had been weathered, some rain had fallen on it and some mice had gotten to it and stuff. And I thought I wanted that as just kind of archival, maybe use it as an art project or something.

I just thought that would be really cool. So I asked Eliza, I said, Eliza, can we have this, this old Bible? And she was embarrassed that it had been weathered and not treated well.

So she said, no, not that one. And so she took me into the extra bedroom and there was a bureau, a dresser drawer with six drawers in it. And she opened the drawers up and every drawer was filled with Bibles that he had read. He would wear out a Bible in a couple of years and there would be his writing all over the margins.

He would write in every little underlying things and he would totally wear it out within two years. And they were all in little plastic sacks and everything. And so she gave us one that is just one of our treasures. I love to show people this Bible because it's astounding. It looks like it's being it's composting in real time. I mean, it's just literally falling apart. But if you flip through the Tinder pages, there's no section of it untouched.

And then you realize that that's a three year use. And then he just went on to the next one. You think that's the Bible, but it's not. It's one of many Bibles.

But the really profound part of that is that's really key to understanding why it is such a time capsule, a living time capsule. Because when he was a young man, he decided that his devotion was really his priority and that he would, for the rest of his life, never read anything except the Bible. That's all he needed. He didn't feel deprived. So he never read a book, a magazine, a newspaper, never listened to the radio, never listened to the television. It was only the Bible. And for that reason, the fact that he was in an isolated little community without any technology, he didn't basically notice that the 20th century happened.

He lived his life the way he lived when he was a young man for the rest of his life. And it's just astounding. It's almost as if you have found a pure time capsule where you can actually visit early America, you know, in a way that I can't imagine finding.

So it's very valuable in that way. Oh, you know, our relationship, it's been so wonderful over the years. You know, I know you all can't tell on the radio, but I have very long hair and some people might see me and think I'm a hippie. So you would think such a traditional person might have a judgment about that. But there was never a judgment about that at all from the very beginning. We showed up on the doorstep and they both welcomed us in with open arms. I think we were some of the few people outside of their immediate family and their immediate circle, kind of more of the worldly people that were part of their life. And that felt like a huge, huge honor. And when Ed was crossing over, he was in hospice. They wanted us to come and sing to him.

And we spent days at the hospice. You know, one thing I think that really is important about what Ed did is artistically, back to where we started, is the very idea that he didn't even know this was art. He wasn't craving recognition. That was not part of what he needed. Per Ed, it was 100% devotional. That was the motivation.

That's the intent there. But artistically, it is art, whether he likes it or not. And that's what's interesting to me is that very, very rarely can you find an artist that does not suffer from the burden of their own ego. You can't just decide to be an Ed Stilly.

No matter how hard you try, you can't be Ed Stilly. When Donna and I make art, we're constantly self-analyzing and second-guessing ourselves. Is anybody going to like this? Is this going to be good for our concert?

Is this good? You know, we're constantly doing that to ourselves. And that's our ego. And we can't seem to escape it.

I don't think anybody can. But Ed did. And we've been listening to Kelly and Donna Mulholland tell the story of their friend Ed Stilly. You can go to stillonthehill.com if you add instruments and some neat x-rays of them. And a special thanks to Katrina Hine for collecting this story and Monty Montgomery for audio pre- and post-production. He did it with leftover wood from a local sawmill. Their trash is my treasure on every guitar. True faith, true light, have faith in God. Ed Stilly's story, here on Our American Stories.